Dharmesh Shah’s (Hubspot CTO) Playbook for the AI Search Era
A practical guide to AEO, getting cited by LLMs, avoiding “AI slop” reputation damage, and using agents as teammates (plus where the “AI App Store” is heading).
Right before Christmas Dharesh Shah’s (Billionaire founder of Hubspot) gave us a big present: all his learnings about how to position your startup in LLMs.
So I decided to break it down into actionable steps every founder can use to start capitalizing the AI Search Engines.
Other resources to learn AEO: The LLM Visibility Playbook, 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐭 𝐋𝐋𝐌 𝐒𝐄𝐎 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤
What it includes:
1) The shift: from SEO pages → AI answers
2) AEO: “SEO for the AI era”
3) How to structure content so AI cites you
4) The hidden risk: low-quality AI content can hurt you
5) Your AEO operating system (what to do first)
6) Using AI agents as teammates (not magic)
7) The coming “AI App Store” for agents
8) A 14-day implementation sprint (do this exactly)
Let’s go 🔥
1) The shift: from SEO pages → AI answers
Dharmesh’s core framing is simple: you’re moving from an SEO mindset (optimize for Google’s index + humans clicking links) to an LLM mindset (optimize for systems that consume content, synthesize, and cite).
Two consequences he highlights repeatedly:
Organic traffic is dropping in many categories because people ask ChatGPT/Perplexity/Claude instead of clicking “10 blue links.”
AI answers create a binary outcome: you’re either in the answer (and get disproportionate visibility) or you’re basically invisible.
Conversion rates appear to be higher in AI searches
2) AEO: “SEO for the AI era”
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) = optimizing your content so AI answer engines can find it, extract it, and cite it in responses.
Dharmesh’s “first-principles” rule didn’t change:
In SEO: “The best way to rank is to be rank-worthy.”
In AEO: be cite-worthy: don’t try to game the model; earn the citation by being the best source.
