Executive Summary: Uzair Dada on Webflow’s “FlowTV”

Let’s be honest. You don’t always have time for a podcast or webinar. And while you could feed a transcript to your favorite AI, sometimes it’s just nice to know that the content you’re catching up on is 100% free from hallucinations. Executive Summary is Iron Horse’s look at what our team has been up to while they’re out-and-about in the marketing world, filtered by our content team to go down smooth. Today’s summarizer: Senior Content Strategist Alex Jonathan Brown

The Content: Our friends over at Webflow hosted a session powered by AEO practitioners, the folks who are actually working on the problem of getting discovered as traffic starts to migrate away from traditional search. Iron Horse Founder and CEO Uzair Dada joined the panel for episode three of the larger series, alongside team members from Jasper, Oyster, Webflow, and Edgar Allen.

The Question: You might think you’re ready for AEO. How do you know you’re right?

The Plug: Iron Horse CEO Uzair Dada on FlowTV Episode 3: The AEO Edition

The Recap: 

What does it actually mean to be ready for AEO? 

This is the question that probably draws viewers into the session (and readers into a fun little summary?) but the answer is … cloudy. That’s not the fault of the panel. The truth really is just that no one’s sure yet.
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“It's undefined, and it's undefined by so many different players. Whether it's OpenAI, whether it's Google, whether it's Perplexity, whether it's Claude, everyone is sort of thinking about it differently. So it's very difficult. It's daunting and it's daunting all the way from the leadership team to the practitioner saying ‘what should I do?’”

‍ - Uzair Dada

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Still, the panel offered some suggestions on how to move forward amidst that uncertainty. Josh Jacobs from Jasper made the case that someone has to own AEO explicitly. You aren’t going to solve this by having it be something someone works on between other projects. It has to be a defined role, with real metrics. And Uzair brought it back to something we talk a lot about at Iron Horse: it’s ultimately about your audience. You have to get ready for the ways your audience is going to use these tools, not just the tools in general. Start with your ICP, understand what they’re actually trying to answer, and work backwards from there.

Related conversation: AEO for demand gen teams: What actually works

You’ve maybe never been good at talking about your brand. 

If you’ve been working in a marketing-adjacent space for long enough, you’ve probably run into some version of an age-old problem: how do you explain your job to your dad? The shift to AEO represents its own version of that problem. After years of gearing everything toward the dark-arts algorithms of SEO, AEO is forcing a shift from optimizing for keywords to optimizing for the way actual people actually think.
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“What it’s illuminating for a lot of brands is that our positions were maybe never great. We didn’t actually know how to tell our story. And when someone’s just asking an LLM a question about ‘what should I buy for this’ or ‘what solutions exist for this problem?’ ... is the way that [we’re] showing up in that answer unique against our competitors, or does it just sound like everyone else?”

- Alexander Diner, Director, Brand & Web Design, Webflow

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Uzair focused in on the problem a little more. The real goal with any marketing effort is to get discovered and then get chosen. The SEO model made it easy to focus on the first half of that equation, but the shift to AEO is highlighting that “getting chosen” has really been an afterthought. Edgar Allen’s Mason Poe described it as a shift from a “page metaphor” to a “conversation metaphor.” Buyers are asking AI questions the way they’d ask a trusted colleague. The companies that get chosen are going to be the ones that empower AI to answer like that colleague.

Related reading: The AEO Divide

How are B2B buyers using ChatGPT to research vendors?

According to a Gartner survey, 45% of B2B buyers now use AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity in their research process. Early numbers indicate that AI-influenced traffic converts at a higher rate than organic search traffic. That’s great news, but it brings a problem of its own. Getting real attribution for the clients and customers that found you through AI is a pain. In GA, it’s likely showing up as direct traffic, so … you’re gonna have to talk to someone. (Or have your sales team do it.)

Josephine described a Gong integration her team built that scrapes call recordings weekly, analyzing which questions prospects ask, which competitors come up, and how buyers heard about the company. That last piece has become their source of truth for pipeline attribution. Uzair reinforced the point: before jumping to metrics, understand what conversations are actually happening in call logs, customer success, and the field. The measurement becomes meaningful only after you’ve identified what matters.

Proving that AI is driving good leads is one thing. Knowing why AI is driving those leads is more important. Once you’ve got a handle on that, then you can start building toward a real sense of AEO-readiness.

Additional reading: The Demand Gen Guide Volume 2: Early-stage content and account coverage