Sydney Sloan:
And I would imagine that the ops people in the room have an appreciation for when things are nice and tidy. The other fun fact is that I’m a minimalist in all things, and I have two rules you can take with you before we get into the marketing stuff.

One of the things I do is, whenever I buy something, I get rid of something in my closet. So it makes an absolute decision. You know what’s coming off a hanger so I can put it in, and my closet is always tidy. The second rule is that I have no more than five things on a counter. I don’t know why, and it has to be odd. There’s probably some feng shui reason behind it. But those are my two fun facts unrelated to marketing.

Okay, I’ll try to go from both sides of the room, just because of the columns. I don’t know if everyone can see, but I know everyone can see the slides. I’m here today to talk about one of the major shifts happening right now. We just heard from Katie—everything’s changing—and you have two choices. You can resist it or you can embrace it. I think the better choice is to embrace it.

My bold statement is that it may actually be easier to start fresh than to try to change what you’ve already built, which is really hard. Going back to the house analogy: do you tear the whole thing down and start over, or do you renovate room by room? That’s a choice you have to make depending on your business. But I would encourage you to take big, bold bets as we all evolve through this shift together.

I’m going to talk specifically about more top-of-funnel activities and how that’s having a radical change on the buyer journey.

One of the cool things we get to do at G2 is run buyer behavior research. Usually, we publish annually, but because things are changing so quickly, we decided to do it every four months. We’ve gone from once a year to three times a year.

We first shared this data at SaaStr. Our research was done in April, and we released the first report in early May. We asked buyers how their search behavior was changing. Four out of five buyers said AI search has changed how they conduct research. That’s now nine out of ten buyers.

We also found that people are starting research with AI search rather than Google, and they do it for efficiency. Back in April, that number was 29%. In just four months, it jumped to 71%. So 71% of buyers now say the first thing they do when starting research is go to AI instead of Google.

I’m sure all of you as ops professionals are feeling and seeing that difference. This validates what you’re seeing—it’s happening to all of us. This has a dramatic impact. They’re not going to Google. We’ve built our entire strategy around SEO and PPC, and now we have to come up with a new way to capture those buyers at the beginning of their journey.

Another interesting stat: enterprises are actually leading the adoption of AI, not lagging behind. That’s because they’re stretched. They’re not getting incremental headcount, so they’re looking for new ways to find efficiency.

When we look holistically at what influences buyers and how they form their short lists, they’re absolutely relying on AI first. If you think about searches you’ve done in your personal or professional life, this replaces third-party, second-party, and first-party data sources.

We’ve built account-based strategies around keywords, which are third-party data. Then we look at second-party sources like review sites, and finally, first-party data from our own sites. But now buyers are starting in AI, so we have to figure out how to build our brands and understand what’s influencing the answer engines.

We asked which tools people were using. ChatGPT has a 3x lead on anyone else. That’s interesting because ChatGPT is its own platform—you have to buy it or your company has to purchase an enterprise license—whereas Gemini comes with Google Workspace and Copilot comes with Microsoft. So people are making an intentional choice to invest in ChatGPT.

What that means for you is that as you build out your strategies, you might want to start testing ChatGPT first, because that’s where most people are starting their searches.

Another major shift: short lists are shrinking. Five years ago, people might have started with seven vendors, narrowed to three, then done a bake-off of two. But now 45% used to have four to seven; now it’s two to three. And the number of people going straight to one vendor—the “single-shot snipers”—is growing.

People are trusting the answers coming from LLMs more than ever before. This is a radical change in buyer behavior. LLMs are now the new front door for your buyers.

So what do we do about it?

We know we have less traffic coming from SEO and PPC. I remember the day I noticed this when I was at Drata in the GRC space. We were booking 250 meetings a week, then one day my organic traffic dropped. I thought, “Huh, that Gemini answer thing is showing up there.” That was a year and a half ago.

Now PPC costs are skyrocketing, and we’re seeing less traffic because people are going elsewhere. AI is the new front door.

We’re also seeing a resurgence in the importance of reviews. LLMs use them to determine what to consider or not consider.

There’s a silver lining. While click-through rates are down, engagement rates are up. By the time buyers reach your site, they’re ready to talk. They’ve done all the research elsewhere. We built our websites to inform and teach, but now they come to talk. When someone visits your site, that’s a very strong signal—they’re much further through the process than they were two years ago.

In the past, we were all about winning the click—being above the fold on Google. But now there’s a new emerging term. How many of you use GEO as your word—Generative Engine Optimization? How many use AEO—Answer Engine Optimization?

At G2, we align with AEO. AEO is for “answer”—when someone asks a question, it gives an answer. GEO is for “generate”—make me something, like a slide or code. Seventy percent of traffic on LLMs is for answers, not generation.

That means as you evolve, you must understand the new paradigm: people are asking questions, not searching for keywords.

When we started talking about AEO and GEO in April, there were seven vendors in this category. In September, there were 67. Now, in October, there are over 100.

This is the rise of AI-first startups trying to solve visibility problems—helping brands understand how they show up in answer engines.

You want to think about your AEO strategy in two buckets:

1. How your brand shows up.
2. The sentiment around it.

The sites most cited by LLMs are user-generated content sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, peer review sites, and media sites.

You can even ask GPT which sites OpenAI is buying sources from—it’s now indexing Financial Times and others.

Consensus is critical. When you ask an LLM a question, it looks across sources for consensus. G2 syndicates reviews across AWS Marketplace, Azure, and others. When LLMs see the same answers in multiple trusted places, that builds confidence.

This means you must audit your content. If old content exists with outdated positioning, update it. Ensure answer engines find consistent messaging.

You also want to update your user-generated content—your reviews—so they reflect the answers you want.

Here are two insider tips:

First, use G2 discussions. You can seed a question and answer it yourself. This helps create the right content faster than waiting for reviews.

Second, use FAQs. Update your product pages so your positioning is consistent everywhere, including partner sites. Write in a natural, human tone—not marketing speak—and phrase content in question-and-answer form.

We recently partnered with Profound to show, by category, which questions and citations influence your brand on LLMs. You’ll see which LLMs are referencing you.

The AEO tools give you visibility into what’s influencing the answers, showing questions, citations, and reference trends.

So here’s the crawl-walk-run approach:

1. Optimize your persona content. Start with your ICP and personas. Build your content strategy around jobs to be done, not keywords.
2. Match content with your review strategy. Recency matters. Keep your reviews fresh and authentic.
3. Develop a prompt strategy. FAQ-style formats and listicles perform best.
4. Run your top-of-funnel strategy. Focus on signals.

Signals are the path forward. Look for high-quality buyer intent signals and connect them to agents—AI or human—to help buyers move further along before they even talk to sales.

Sales teams must focus on personalization and relevance. Buyers don’t want spam; they want contextual, expert guidance.

No playbook exists yet, but here’s what I’d do:

• Invest in AEO tools to monitor and optimize brand presence.
• Create answer-ready content in user voice.
• Update your review strategy.
• Clean up old content for consistency.
• Rebuild your systems around a signal-to-agent approach.

As marketers, we need to imagine what the customer journey will look like a year from now. If the journey starts with an answer engine, what experience do we want them to have next?

They don’t want to navigate your website—they want answers. When they talk to someone, they don’t want a pitch—they want a coach. Reimagine that experience and build for it.

You can access my slides via the QR code on screen or on my LinkedIn. If you have any questions, please reach out—I actually do answer DMs. Thank you very much, and enjoy the rest of OpsStars.