36 AEO Secrets CEOs Used to Get 1,000 Leads from ChatGPT

In this article, you will discover how top SaaS CEOs are leveraging Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) to capture high-intent users directly from search results, driving millions in revenue without massive ad spends. You will learn from the real-world playbooks of companies like Betterpic, who built free tools that generated thousands of daily users and scaled them to over $3.2 million in just 18 months, and G2, who used specific data structures to dominate search results and increase click-through rates. You’ll get the 5-part strategy to launch your own Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) campaign, complete with dozens of case studies you can use as inspiration. These examples were collected directly from CEOs with combined revenues in the billions when they keynoted Founderpath events.

The 5-Part Strategy for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is about creating specific, authoritative answers to questions your potential customers are asking search engines like Google. The goal is to have your website featured directly in answer formats like featured snippets, “People Also Ask” boxes, and rich results. This playbook breaks down how to systematically capture this high-intent traffic.

1. Step 1: Identify High-Intent User Questions. Instead of focusing on broad keywords, find the specific questions your ideal customers are typing into Google. Think “how to,” “what is,” and comparison keywords (“vs”). The team at Factors.ai starts this process by identifying the pain points of their buyer personas first, then creating topics and finding relevant keywords, rather than the other way around. This ensures the content is directly mapped to customer needs.
2. Step 2: Create Answer-Focused Assets. Develop assets that provide a direct, concise, and valuable answer to a specific question. This can be a highly-targeted blog post, an FAQ page, or, most powerfully, a free tool or calculator. Ricardo at Betterpic did this by researching the term “free AI headshot generator,” realizing the user intent, and building a free tool that directly serviced that need. The tool now captures 400-500 users every single day.
3. Step 3: Structure Your Content for Search Engines. Use clear headings, bullet points, numbered lists, and structured data (like FAQ schema) to make it easy for Google to understand and feature your content as an answer. Kevin Indig, G2’s former head of SEO, implemented FAQ schema on their category pages. This acted as an “appetizer” in the search results, giving users a taste of the content and actually increasing click-through rates.
4. Step 4: Build Topical and Domain Authority. Consistently publishing high-quality answers around a specific niche establishes your site as an authority. This increases the likelihood that Google will trust your content for featured snippets. Shiyam Sunder of TripleDart emphasized building authority by creating unique, expert-driven content, such as hiring journalists with deep fintech experience to write pillar pages for a fintech brand.
5. Step 5: Amplify with Backlinks and Promotion. While the content is the core, promoting your answer-focused assets helps them get discovered and builds backlinks, which are a critical ranking signal. Omnisend’s CEO, Rytis Lauris, grew his site to over 11,000 referring domains by creating valuable industry research and reports that journalists and other sites naturally wanted to link to, solidifying their position as an authority and driving traffic.

40+ Examples of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) in Action

Here are over 40 real-world examples from SaaS founders and CEOs who have successfully used AEO tactics to grow their companies, complete with their results.

• The team at Grammarly created hundreds of landing pages to answer common grammar questions, like “no one vs noone,” which allowed them to capture users in their moment of need and introduce them to their product, growing to a multi-billion dollar valuation.
• The CEO of ZenBusiness, Ross Buhrdorf, utilized programmatic SEO to create thousands of location-specific pages for terms like “LLC Florida” and “LLC California,” capturing massive long-tail search traffic and scaling the company rapidly.
• Shiyam Sunder of TripleDart explained how they built an “ESOP pool size calculator” for a client, which acquired 30 high-quality, free backlinks in under three months by providing a direct answer to a complex user need.
• Betterpic’s founder, Ricardo, drove explosive growth to $3.2 million in revenue by reverse-engineering search terms and building free tools like a profile picture maker and an AI headshot generator that directly answered user queries.
• At G2, Kevin Indig boosted organic traffic by using FAQ schema on review pages, which served as a content “appetizer” in search results and increased click-through rates.
• Security Scorecard’s CEO Alex Yampolskiy explained that their number one go-to-market channel was a free report tool, which allowed them to capture leads and scale to over $106 million in revenue.
• John Doherty of Credo generates a significant portion of his leads by creating highly specific listicles that answer user questions like “top 31 sas marketing agencies,” which has helped him generate over $250 million in leads.
• Lucjan Suski from Surfer SEO launched a free Chrome extension, Keyword Surfer, after seeing a competitor move to a paid model. This free tool answered a user need, grew to 500,000 active users, and became a massive source of brand awareness and traffic.
• Andrea Volpini of WordLift, which hit over $1 million in ARR, helps companies like ZoomInfo structure their website data into a knowledge graph, making it easier for Google to understand and feature their content in rich search results.
• Rytis Lauris at Omnisend, now at $50 million in ARR, created high-value industry research reports that naturally attracted backlinks from top-tier publications like Bloomberg and Forbes, establishing topical authority and driving organic growth.
• The founder of GetLatka built a database of SaaS company revenues, which ranks #1 for “[Company Name] + Revenue” searches, turning a simple data-driven answer into a major traffic source.
• Clickfunnels CEO Russell Brunson creates competitor-focused landing pages like “Clickfunnels vs. Leadpages” to capture high-intent users actively comparing solutions, a key tactic in scaling to over $100M in revenue.
• The KoalaRank team specifically optimizes their blog content for Google’s “questions schema” to appear in the “People also ask” box, a strategy that helped them rank for the term “is blogging dead.”
• Steve Benson from Verblio, a content marketplace doing over $12 million in ARR, focuses his team on creating high-quality, niche content that answers specific user questions to compete and win in SEO.
• Jurg Bender from Prepper scaled his company to over $6,000 in MRR by focusing on highly specific, research-driven SEO content like “best time to post on Instagram” to attract their target audience of social media managers.
• Stefan from Samples.com built a $40 million top-line business by creating a survey-based system that answers advertiser questions about user demographics (like “is this user diabetic?”), allowing them to sell targeted leads at a premium.
• Dave Bell’s company, Gummy Cube, which is doing north of $4.5 million in ARR, focuses on App Store Optimization by deeply understanding what users are searching for and optimizing app metadata to answer those queries directly within the app store.
• Armando Biondi from AdEspresso grew his site to over 750,000 monthly unique visitors by creating unique, data-driven content with a counter-intuitive perspective, establishing authority and attracting a massive audience before being acquired by Hootsuite.
• The team at Factors.ai, which grew 6x after a pivot, developed a free “LinkedIn Ad Advisor” tool that analyzes competitor ads, serving as a powerful lead magnet that answers a specific user pain point.
• The founder of Mention grew to over 600,000 users by providing “Google Alerts on steroids,” a tool that directly answers the question “what is being said about my brand online?”
• Kean Graham at MonetizeMore launched a free Chrome extension called PubGuru Ad Inspector that helps publishers debug their ad setups, acting as a valuable tool that answers technical questions and serves as a natural upsell to their core product.
• Oleg Campbell’s team at Reply.io, which hit $100k in MRR, uses their own tool to conduct hyper-targeted outreach, answering the implicit question of “how can I automate my sales outreach?” by demonstrating the product’s value directly.
• Srikrishna Swaminathan of Factors.ai leveraged LinkedIn Live to answer audience questions in real-time, a strategy that generated over 100 customers and nearly $800k in revenue by creating a direct line of communication and demonstrating expertise.
• The CEO of Jotform, which has over 10 million users, built their growth engine on an SEO strategy that revolves around answering every possible user query about online forms, from “how to create a contact form” to specific industry use cases.
• Steve Hart from Jotform revealed their marketing revolves around SEO by creating content and templates that solve specific customer challenges, which has scaled them past the $100 million ARR mark.
• Chris Dickey at Visably is building his entire platform around answering the question “where does my brand exist in search?”, providing intelligence on a brand’s entire search footprint, not just their own domain.
• Stanislav Dimitrov of NightEye, a browser extension for dark mode, grew to 100,000 users and 4,500 customers purely through an SEO strategy of creating articles that answered questions like “Facebook dark mode” and “Amazon dark mode.”
• Grant Deken at Unstack, now at $10k MRR, drives significant traffic by creating content that answers questions like “best SaaS websites,” a strategy that also helped them get 600 signups from a single Product Hunt launch.
• The founder of GoPBN grew to $70k in MRR in just over a year by creating highly detailed, educational content and guides that answered complex user questions around SEO and private blog networks.
• Ricky Robinson at Shorthand, a visual storytelling platform that hit a $1.5M run rate, gains customers through the “powered by” button on stories created with their tool, which implicitly answers the question “how was this beautiful story made?”
• Joy Chottery from Arum built a virtual assistant that acts as a personalized search engine for websites, directly answering user questions on-site and growing to $10k MRR.
• Vivek Khandelwal’s company, iZooto, provides a browser notification platform that helps publishers answer user needs for timely updates, growing to over $98k in MRR.
• Niraj Ranjan of Hiver, which hit a $1.4M run rate, grew by ranking for high-intent keywords like “shared inbox for Gmail,” directly answering the query of teams looking for a collaborative email solution.
• Sean Ellis of GrowthHackers.com built his brand and coined the term “growth hacking” by being the definitive source and answer for questions related to scalable, rapid growth tactics.
• Gary Tay at Get Data built his tool so that free users automatically create public, SEO-friendly pages based on the data they are scraping, answering obscure search queries and creating a user-generated content flywheel for growth.
• Mark Michael from RallyMind, which hit a $2M run rate, enables companies to launch thousands of hyper-specific landing pages at scale, such as port-specific pages for a cruise line, answering very long-tail user search queries.
• The founder of Tallyfy, Amit Kothari, uses an AppSumo deal to get rapid feedback, answering the question “what do users want?” by analyzing the behavior of thousands of early adopters.
• Paul Lynch of Assembla, growing at 60% YoY, targets customers by understanding their deep compliance needs (like GDPR and SOC 2), creating content and features that answer those complex enterprise questions.
• Vaibhav Kakkar of Rankwatch grew his SEO tool to $180k MRR by creating definitive content like infographics that interviewed top industry experts on “the future of SEO,” becoming an authoritative answer on the topic.
• The CEO of RocketReach, Amit Shanbhag, built his tool to over $2M in MRR by providing a self-serve tool that directly answers the question “what is this person’s contact information?”.
• Atul from Plobal Apps, now at over $54k MRR, became the top-rated app on the Shopify App Store by focusing on being the best answer for the search query “Shopify mobile app”.

Conclusion

You’ve just learned the 5-part playbook for Answer Engine Optimization and seen over 40 examples from top SaaS founders who have used these tactics to generate millions in revenue. By focusing on answering your users’ specific questions—through targeted content, free tools, and structured data—you can build a powerful, low-cost customer acquisition engine. To track your own progress and get free, real-time metrics for your SaaS business, connect your tools to Founderpath for free today.

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