When your site ranks well for keywords, but LLMs still don’t cite your brand, you’ve got an answer engine optimization strategy (AEO) readiness problem.
In the webinar How IMB Bank is building for AEO success at scale, Jason Lima, Online Marketing Manager at IMB Bank, and Gaia Arutyunyan, Lead Front-End Web Developer at IMB Bank, shared how they used an AEO maturity assessment to educate stakeholders, reposition AEO as a brand discoverability channel, and prioritize structural changes that increased their site’s visibility in LLM citations. Their approach offers a practical road map for teams working toward AEO certification readiness — without requiring immediate ROI validation.
Here are three insights from their experience that you can apply to your own AEO strategy.
Position AEO as brand discoverability
Reframe AEO’s role in your marketing mix to accelerate internal alignment
Stakeholder buy-in accelerated when the IMB Bank team positioned AEO as a brand discoverability channel rather than a direct-response tactic. By comparing AEO’s role to TV or radio — where audiences often encounter brands for the first time — Jason helped leadership understand why structural readiness for citations mattered.
“We started challenging the role it plays within the marketing mix [...], and we started talking about AEO and its impact on brand discoverability,” Jason explained.
This reframing made AEO intuitive for non-SEO stakeholders. Instead of presenting it as another optimization tactic, the team presented AEO as a way for potential customers to encounter the brand during their research — before ever visiting the website.
How to apply this:
- Frame AEO conversations around brand presence in AI-generated answers, not click-through rates
- Compare AEO to awareness channels your leadership already understands (TV, radio, billboards)
- Connect structural readiness to the practical outcome of being cited by LLMs
- Use your AEO check results to show where competitors appear in the prompts you’re missing
Use maturity assessments to create urgency
Expose structural gaps that strong keyword rankings can hide
The AEO maturity assessment created urgency by revealing that IMB Bank’s site was structurally unprepared for LLM citations — even though traditional SEO performance was strong.
“One of the biggest callouts that came from the AEO maturity assessment was how structurally unprepared our site was,” Jason noted. “We were doing really well across the keywords that mattered to us, we were ranking well, we were getting traffic, but it highlighted there were a lot of areas of improvements.”
The assessment provided a concrete backlog of quick wins — including schema markup and LLMS.txt implementation — that the team could prioritize without debating AEO’s value.
How to apply this:
- Run an AEO maturity assessment to identify gaps between SEO performance and AEO readiness
- Present assessment findings as a prioritized list of clear wins rather than an abstract strategy
- Focus on structural improvements that don’t require content rewrites: schema markup, structured data, predictable page templates
- Track which prompts your competitors rank for that you don’t — this creates competitive urgency
Key metrics IMB Bank tracked:
- Citations grew from six million to 12 million in three months
- One page ranks for 250+ traditional keywords and 50+ AI overview keywords
- 90%+ of organic traffic to key pages comes from non-branded searches
Shift from marketing-first to answer-first content
Ground your content strategy in real customer questions
AEO’s maturity progression began with a content philosophy shift: from marketing first to answering first, driven by actual customer questions. Jason’s team mined 24 months of web chat transcripts and synthesized contact center questions to identify gaps in their content.
“Our website had traditionally been marketing first, written for the product. We started to talk a lot about answering first, and one of the things that we did was we went through 24 months of web chat transcripts,” Jason said.
This approach aligned content work with how LLM conversations naturally evolve and included follow-up questions that users typically ask after getting an initial answer.
How to apply this:
- Audit your existing content against real questions from chat logs, support tickets, and contact center calls
- Plan content clusters that address primary questions and their natural follow-ups
- Partner with frontline teams (retail, support, contact centers) to surface questions you haven’t addressed
- Review Reddit forums and community discussions to understand how people talk about your topic
Content signals that support AEO readiness:
- FAQs structured around genuine customer concerns, not marketing messages
- Follow-up question coverage that mirrors how LLM conversations unfold
- Trust signals integrated into page content, such as customer reviews
- Author attribution for expertise-driven content
The technical foundation matters too. Gaia’s team at IBM Bank built 1,200 pages in four months with a single developer by creating a component-driven system in which a single update now propagates sitewide. This predictable structure supports both banking compliance requirements and AEO needs.
“So now we scale systems and not just web pages,” Gaia explained.
Build your AEO foundation with Webflow
IMB Bank’s experience shows that AEO maturity and stakeholder buy-in depend on three things: positioning AEO as brand discoverability, using assessments to create urgency around structural gaps, and shifting content strategy toward real customer questions. Teams that succeed treat AEO readiness as an ongoing process — supported by repeatable governance, cross-functional input, and measurement proxies that demonstrate progress even when direct ROI takes time to materialize.
With Webflow Enterprise, you can build the predictable structures and reusable components that support AEO at scale. Create schema-rich pages, manage content updates across hundreds of pages from a single source, and give your marketing and development teams the flexibility to iterate without rebuilding from scratch.
Check out the full webinar to discover how IMB Bank implemented their AEO strategy and get practical guidance for your own AEO certification readiness journey.
