NOTES

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SUMMARY

In this episode of The LinkedIn Ads Show, AJ Wilcox breaks down one of LinkedIn's most misunderstood campaign objectives: Website Conversions. While it sounds like the obvious choice for driving leads, AJ explains why the objective often underperforms unless your campaigns are generating significant conversion volume. You'll learn why LinkedIn recommends at least 50 conversions per week, why the objective typically costs $1–2 more per click than Website Visits, and when it's actually worth testing. AJ also shares a simple head-to-head testing framework to compare Website Conversions against Website Visits, plus practical insights into LinkedIn's bidding system and which clicks you're actually paying for.
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TRANSCRIPT

LinkedIn is playing a much bigger role with your brand's AEO than you thought, and you need to be part of the conversation. I'm making the case for you to get the credit you deserve on this week's episode of The LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to The LinkedIn Ad Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

AJ: Hey, hey, hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. As he said, I'm AJ Wilcox. I'm the host of the weekly podcast, The LinkedIn Ads Show. I'm thrilled to welcome you to the show for advanced B2B marketers in their evolution of mastering LinkedIn ads and achieving true pro status. I'm bringing on a guest today. This is Kevin Dietz, who's my LinkedIn rep and good friend.

Kevin's an agency lead at LinkedIn, and in a recent conversation he and I had while he was here in Utah with me, he said something that really stuck with me. "LinkedIn advertisers need to be in the room for their company's internal AEO and SEO conversations because the work that we're doing on this platform, both organic and paid, is having a real effect on whether a brand gets cited by AI answer engines.

If you're sitting on the sidelines of that conversation, you're gonna miss out on getting the credit that you've actually earned." Today, Kevin and I are digging into why that is and what you can do about it.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn ads experts.

AJ: That's right, B2Linked is the ad agency 100% dedicated to LinkedIn ads, and we have been since 2014. You know, back before it was cool. We build a custom strategy for every account we work with. You get to work directly with me and my local team, and you won't get cookie-cutter approaches or standard account templates from us.

Plus, we've developed strategies and our mastery of the platform that save our clients more than we charge, so it's kind of like getting the best in the biz for free. If you'd like to explore partnering with us for your LinkedIn ads management, schedule your free discovery call today at b2linked.com/discovery.

All right, first off, in the news, this is an interesting one just hot off the presses today as of recording. The LinkedIn Accelerate Program is no longer a separate option for creating campaigns. Hooray. So many of you have probably noticed when you went to go create a new ad set, LinkedIn would pop up and ask you what kind of ad set you wanted to create.

Was it Accelerate, which was the default option, and Classic? Classic was always the one that you should have been selecting, but Accelerate, because it was the default option, is the one that so many people who didn't know what they were doing ended up selecting, and it became a big point of conversation in audits and consultations I've been doing.

So I'm actually really excited to hear that this has now gone away. The functionality hasn't gone away, though. The functionality is still built right into the ad set creation right within Campaign Manager. You can still use it. You can still select it if you want, but I'm actually really glad this is no longer the default option, and especially it's not an option at all.

LinkedIn says it's really about everything being in one place and making it easier for marketers to use these new AI features when it makes sense for their campaigns. I think it's just less confusing altogether to just have one flow and then use the option if you want. Something else really exciting, one of our super fanatics in the community, Anthony Blattner, he's another LinkedIn ads expert out there.

He said: "Now in testing is the ability to personalize ads by persona." So this would be one ad set where you get to choose if it's being served to someone in IT, they see one message. If it's being served to someone in marketing, they see another. Operations, yet another. You get the idea. This is actually pretty exciting, I think.

The ability to personalize ads to them is really awesome, 'cause I think this is still in alpha. What I don't know is can we customize the URL parameters, like the UTMs, based off of which job function is seeing it? Maybe it's gonna let us break it out by levels of seniority or something too. If nothing changes in the [00:04:00] URL, if we're just sending them to, the same static page, I don't know that it's gonna be all that helpful to me.

But of course, I do love the idea of having one ad set playing multiple duties. All right. I wanna shout out a reviewer. This is Pop Junkie, who called this podcast Vital for Beginners. Five stars. They said, "If you're getting started with LinkedIn ads, AJ's content is like LinkedIn Ads for Dummies." And I'll add, LinkedIn Ads for Dummies by a dummy.

"Every question you have, there's a good chance AJ has done an episode on it. Just wish I had more time to watch more episodes." Pop Junkie, I don't know your identity, but thank you so much for leaving a review. Warms my heart, and I'm so glad you've had this experience with the show. All right, all of you out there, if you have a question, a review, or feedback for the show, please message me on LinkedIn.

You can also email us at podcast@b2linked.com. If you attach a link to a voice recording from you, I can actually play you right here live on the show, and of course, I'm always happy to either shout out your details or keep you anonymous. I would love to hear from you. With that being said, let's hit it.

Here's my interview with Kevin Deets.

All right, so Kevin, tell us about yourself.

Kevin: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, AJ. I'm Kevin Dietz. I've been with LinkedIn for a little over seven years now, and I've been in marketing since I started my career as a professional 11, 12 years ago. And I've been based out of the LinkedIn Detroit office. Over the last 10 months or so, I work in a role called agency development lead, where I partner with agency leaders and help them grow their client rosters, and find success on our platform.

Before that, I was a account team member at LinkedIn, representing the whole gamut really of customers, from large all the way down to small businesses. And yeah, before that, I worked for ABC News selling television commercials. Even before that, out of home selling billboards in Detroit. So yeah, that's a little bit about me and my career journey.

AJ Awesome. Well, I love having you as a, as an agency rep. We've had several conversations about LLMs, and you're kind of the leading voice at LinkedIn, in my mind, on LLMs, so we wanted to have this conversation. So my first question for you here is why should B2B buyers and B2B marketers care about LLMs right now?

Kevin: Yeah. I think they should care because their buyers are using them at a very high rate, I think is the simplest way to put that. Some of the data that we have here at LinkedIn shows that 94% of B2B buyers are leveraging LLMs to develop a shortlist essentially before they ever even discuss anything with the sales team.

And I think interestingly enough, that number was pulled in at the end of 2025, so I wouldn't be shocked if we're creeping up on the 100% number here. And lastly, I think B2B buyers are adopting AI and LLMs at a three times faster rate than the general consumer. So, to answer the question very simply, it's where your buyers are, so it's gotta be a focus area.

AJ: Love it. So the SEO industry is very mature. We've had search engine optimization strategies for a long, long time. How is optimizing for LLMs, how is it different?

Kevin: Yeah, it's a great question, right? It operates on the same four pillars, right? Experience, expertise, authority, and trust. I think the largest difference that I see between SEO and now AEO is this notion of a shift from brands trying to solve the question of, can I be found in the SEO days, to now can I be recommended, right?

And I think a future metric we'll be looking at will be share of recommendation versus share of voice. I think that's one of the biggest shifts that we're starting to see.

AJ So we've been hearing a lot about how trusted LinkedIn is for LLMs right now, where this can really become a driver of recommendations for your business.

Why is LinkedIn so trusted by LLMs?

Kevin: I think the first thing that comes to mind is the economic graph that LinkedIn represents, right? We have 1.3 billion members, but when you really break that number down, you'll see 130 million decision-makers, 14 million plus C-suite executives. It's really a platform that has authority, and I think, when you think about LLMs looking at expertise and experience, authority, et cetera, it's searching for someone who has the right to speak on a topic before it recommends that person or that brand.

And when you post on the LinkedIn platform, it comes with your job title, it comes with Your years of experience. It comes with the company that you're affiliated with, even the past companies you were affiliated with. So I think as far as trust and credibility go, LinkedIn is... It's going to be a part of your AEO strategy.

It's going to be a place where you're looking to build up your brand's credibility and reputation.

AJ: Yeah. And I think this is so much driven by the fact that on LinkedIn you have an identity. They know that your company is speaking authoritatively as itself. There are guardrails in place to make sure that some no-name can't go and create a page for IBM and speak as them.

We as individuals, our names are tied to companies, so the fact that LinkedIn is de-anonymized is really important for LLMs, 'cause they have to figure out, how do we find when multiple people are saying different things, who is the authoritative source? And LinkedIn just seems like an absolute no-brainer to go with that, 'cause it's not like Reddit, where you can hide behind a username, or like on Twitter or X.

You're not hiding behind a username.

Kevin: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. When you look at LinkedIn, it's one of the most trusted platforms, and it goes beyond just the poster's job title and their job experience, and it branches into creators, other thought leaders around it, really adding an element of almost a case study layer or a added credibility layer that speaks to the brand, speaks to the poster, and just elevates your positioning within LLMs.

AJ: So I've definitely seen the graphic being shared around that LinkedIn is the number one platform being cited by LLMs for professional queries. This is obviously super exciting to me. I would love to hear your take on it, being inside at LinkedIn.

Kevin: Yeah. And I think it's not a shocker to anyone that we're number one for professional queries.

We're also number two for all queries. And if we just take a step back, we talked about the fact that 94%-plus of B2B buyers are using LLMs to make decisions. I know the question that kind of kicked this off was like, "Why should businesses care about LLM strategy? Why should it be a focus?" We know that's where people are going to make their shortlist, and now we know that LinkedIn is the number one most cited for professional queries.

You have to ask yourself, "What is our AEO strategy for the number one platform in B2B LLM citation?" If that's not part of your dialogue, unfortunately you're falling behind in this new era of LLM discoverability. All right. I think right now everyone is talking about how important LLMs are, but now's where I actually want us to hit where the rubber hits the road.

What are the actual things that we can do as LinkedIn marketers, LinkedIn advertisers, to really supercharge our results in getting LLMs to refer traffic to us?

Yeah. It's a fair question. I think I get this one a lot. Everyone's like, " we get the hype around LLMs. We understand it's a focus, but please, give us more information on, how do we rank up?" "How do we really nail AEO?" I think there's a couple different ways you can break it down, but in the simplest form, I think just starting with where the content comes from, right? So we have some data at LinkedIn that suggests that 75% of our LLM citations come from individual posts, and 25% come from company pages.

So I think if you stop with that metric for a second and digest that, that kind of gives you a little bit of a framework of the who is posting, and then, the second layer of that is obviously the what. But yeah, I'd love to get your thoughts on that as well. Like, do you feel like you see that in your own LinkedIn approach and in some of your clients' approach?

AJ: I do. I think in general, marketers have figured out that if they share something from their personal profile or they share from their company page, the personal profile is going to get a lot more likes, a lot more views, a lot more interactions. So over time, I think people have been cheating more towards that side of I speak through a megaphone when I speak for my own personal self, or when we get our executives to do that.

So I wouldn't be too surprised to see that metric kind of move over. Yeah, I think that's how I see it.

Kevin: Yeah. No, and it's a good call-out, and I think the biggest thing that jumps out to me is you hear so often people say: "Well, that's not really my style to post," or, "Our company page has us covered," right?

And it's, it's just in this new wave of AI innovation and LLMs, it's simply, you know, not enough to only have posts coming from your company page, or vice versa, right? You can see that both are represented, but individual posts have such a strong representation on our platform. You have to have a POV, and you need to be posting on the platform.

And that goes for executive teams across the board.

AJ: And it is. It's representation right now. We're still early enough that we don't know what LLMs prefer and what they don't. All we know is this 75% of what they are citing seems to be personal content right now. So I think we lean into that now until we- Yeah

find later if they have a preference that we learn about.

Kevin: Yeah. The preference piece segues us perfectly into the next thing I wanted to bring up, right? Because we might not have a full POV into the preference of the what or the exact type of content, but we do have some insight into formats- Yeah, which I think is interesting, and to be honest, I found quite shocking a little bit. But, these are rough percentages across a few different LLMs, but if you look at the breakdown of citations, it's falling right now roughly at 60% articles 20% individual posts, 10% company page representation, and then 10% coming from other formats across the board.

So I guess I'll let you sit with that for a second and get your thoughts.

AJ: Well, this really blows me away because for the longest time I've been telling people, "If you want people to see it, post it as a post, not as an article." Articles are long-term, think of that, like, that's helpful for your SEO, but if you want just raw attention, posts are the best way to get that.

And now after seeing that LLMs are vastly over-represented in citing information from articles, now I'm swaying my recommendations. Now I'm gonna tell everyone, like, "Make sure everything makes it into an article ".

Kevin: Yeah, no, it's a great call-out, and I think it's a great opportunity for brands to create a POV, right?

Think about what your USP is in the market, what you wanna be known for, and really shape a POV through articles that can then be repurposed for individual posts and repurposed into company page posts. Like, we don't have to reinvent the wheel here. We just need to have content that has a strong POV solving a real customer problem or challenge across these different formats.

AJ: One of the discussions that we've been having for a long time is, like, is it even worth posting from your company versus individuals if your company page posts are not getting a whole lot of love? And what's so interesting to me is just from an LLM perspective what they have access to. They don't have access to people's posts very reliably.

They do have access to your company page posts because your company profile and the posts are all public, all visible. So I'm not too surprised to see that company page content is getting referenced a lot more than personal. Yeah, it makes sense. LLMs have access to this. I'd love to hear your thoughts on company pages, and are they worth focusing on investing into as a brand?

Kevin: Yeah, and I think if you're looking at the numbers, initially it's a question you might pose yourself. If 75% of citations are coming from individual posts and only 25% of company page posts, as you said, like, it feels like they're not getting the love, right? I think the thing that gets underappreciated on the company post side is so much of what we talked about so far is getting on the shortlist.

Like, what can you do for your AEO or your LLM strategy to make sure that your company's considered defensible on the list? But there's not a whole lot of conversation going on around what happens when you're on the list? What happens when you're already on the buyer's radar? If they put your company into an LLM and say, "Tell me why I should go with this agency," or, "Tell me why I should go with this customer," it's gonna be your company page that gets cited because it's asking direct questions about your company.

And so as much as your founder or your superstar salesperson would love to jump inside the LLM and take those questions, right? It doesn't work that way. So you need to have your superstar seller or your founder or executive who really shares a passion and a POV around what your company does and what it solves for in the marketplace.

That needs to be represented on the company page. And so many conversations I have with leaders of companies who say, "Oh, we haven't updated our company page in 10 years." And it's a real miss, and I think, you know, I'm here to tell you reprioritize it because once you're on the shortlist, it's a real bummer to fall off of it.

AJ: Yeah. Well, and if we put this into perspective, 75% of the content that LLMs are referencing is personal, so only 25% is company page. But if you actually scroll through your LinkedIn feed, you will not find that 25% of the content there is company content. It's probably actually less than 5%. So what that tells me is company page content is actually punching way above its weight inside of LLMs.

So even if you're looking at it like, "Oh, when I post from my company page, I get three likes, is this even worth it?" You're getting the value out of LLMs.

Kevin: It's such a great call-out, and we've done some internal LLM testing at LinkedIn as well, and it has definitively backed that point up, AJ, where you're seeing a, a significant increase in LLM citations when you're putting dollars behind your company page posts.

Yeah. So it's a good call-out.

AJ: And we will talk about the putting dollars behind it here in a minute, 'cause that's the most important conversation, I think, for our whole audience of LinkedIn advertisers.

Kevin: Yeah, right? It's one thing to crush this LLM strategy and be visible. I always say, if AI can't see you, it can't recommend you, and that's a huge piece of this.

But ultimately, your organic posts only reach a percentage of your ICP, and in many cases it can be a small percentage, right? And I think we'll get into this a little bit more later, but putting dollars behind your organic content on LinkedIn gives you a direct line to your target audience and your ICP.

It's something we can't really, in this day and age, afford to not be leveraging.

AJ: True. And I think I know why LLMs are getting access to posts when you're putting dollars behind them. I don't know for sure, I don't know if anyone does, but what we have is when an LLM crawls your LinkedIn profile, your profile is public, and one of the things that it sees are the last few posts that you've interacted with, maybe your comments, your likes, your own posts that you've published.

So you can imagine this. If you publish something organically, the only people you have a chance of hitting are really those in your network and those who seem to be interacting, and depending on what business you're in, that could be a very, very low percentage of people who are actually your ideal target audience.

Versus in paid, obviously when we're willing to pay money to LinkedIn to put our stuff in front of the exact right audiences, those are the audiences that we want to see our content. So I think probably what's happening is when you are boosting, these are thought leader ads, these are boosted company posts, what's happening is when LLMs go and visit their profiles, they're seeing the people who've liked and commented at a much higher rate than they're seeing just general content out there.

What do you think of that? Do you think that holds any water?

Kevin: Yeah, I do. I, like you said, there's so much still unknown and to be determined about how LLMs are making their specific citations or, what their process is for discovering. But I think that's a, a very fair assessment. I also love the point you raise about the ICP, right?

Like, I can't reiterate it enough. If you're a company and you are marketing to software engineers, and you have a Fantastic organic strategy coming from your executives, but only 15 to 20% of their connections make up software engineers. You're not really upping your query volume, right? You're not having more of these professionals go into LLMs and ask questions, because no matter how much that person you went to college with who works in a completely different industry likes your content, they're not reading that and then, looking to buy something that they don't leverage for their day-to-day work, right?

So it, it's a really good call-out, and I think on this kinda note of putting dollars behind things, I'd love to ask you, what are some of your favorite paid vehicles on LinkedIn to drive LLM outcomes?

AJ: I think this is both paid and organic. Like we talked about, the value of having something in an article.

So the way that newsletters on LinkedIn work, a newsletter is just a collection of articles. So whether you have a newsletter or you're just publishing articles, I would highly suggest take your content that you were publishing as posts and copy that over. Also, create articles. If it's coming from you personally, create a personal article from it.

If the post is coming from your organization's page, then copy that over to a company page article, and then all of these things can be boosted as a thought leader ad or a company page boost, and I think that's the best way I've been playing with it right now, trying to make sure the LLMs are seeing that.

What am I missing? Or do you have any additions?

Kevin: Yeah, those are great points. It all checks out. I think thought leader ads and boosting company page posts are the two lowest-hanging fruit, if you will, for LLM strategy. The other piece I would add is: don't be afraid to leverage a video inside of a thought leader post on our platform.

Video drives the most engagement on LinkedIn. Yeah. And so if you're using some of those citation frameworks of bulleted lists, et cetera, in your post, and then you also add a high-quality video in there, you're just driving max engagement, which ultimately drives reactions, comments, et cetera, and that's LLM favorability.

I think the bonus one I'd add that maybe doesn't come top of mind when we think LLMs is LinkedIn CTV. Ooh. And, when I say that, you might stop and say, "Well, how is CTV cited in an LLM," right? But I think it's a more of an assist layer or, like, a layer deeper than that, where, you know, some of our early stats around our CTV products show that when you leverage this, you're reaching about 24% more of your target ICP than you ever could have reached if you just stayed on LinkedIn. And that's 24% more people headed to LLMs in the future to ask questions about your brand or ask questions about the problem that your brand solves. So I just think we've made a lot of headway in the CTV space. We now are available through some select DSPs like Trade Desk, DV360, and Amazon DSP.

It's an underrated way to reach more of the right people, and ultimately that plays a role in your LLM strategy, too.

AJ: Yeah. That's 24% of people that you wouldn't even be able to reach through LinkedIn Ads 'cause they're just, they're not present on LinkedIn, but they are present on CTV, and I love that. If they happen to see a commercial, an ad in between shows, and then they go and query you on their favorite LLM, you would have no idea.

Like, this is all very blind to you, but now you're making it onto people's shortlists and they're asking questions, "Hey, I saw this brand. How does this compare to the brand that I know?" There could be a lot of power there.

Kevin: Yes, exactly, and it all plays hand-in-hand, right? You could grab that audience from CTV, but then if they come to LinkedIn or come to the LLM and, your executives aren't posting and there's no company page presence, then it's a, a lead that fell through the cracks, right?

So everything plays a role, right? And I think speaking of that point, AJ, when you're talking to your clients, how are you advising the leaders of those businesses on handling their LinkedIn profile, putting dollars behind their LinkedIn profile, and really starting to have a presence on our platform?

AJ: Yeah. It's one I've been really hitting on for probably the last two and a half years since Thought Leader Ads have come out. I know if an executive or even an individual says it, it's going to be half the cost and four times the engagement rate as if you tried to say it from the company. So I'm telling them, "Don't be afraid."

Let's say you don't have very many followers or connections, and so you're afraid of posting something. You're not very experienced and so you're afraid of your content making you look dumb, any of that kind of stuff. You don't have enough time. You're not sure. These are all things that are easily resolved, I think, by just making sure that you are coaching your executive team, you're helping them, providing support to help get them to actually post and publish because their voice is so much more powerful than if you post it from the company.

Kevin: Yeah. It's such a good point, and let me, throw a stat out there just because there's nothing better than handling an objection with a stat.

AJ: Yep.

Kevin: So many times I've heard executives say, "I don't wanna bother with posting on my profile. I don't really have a following. Who's it gonna go to anyway?"

And we've obviously addressed the piece of putting dollars behind these posts to get them in front of your ICP which totally addresses not feeling like you have that big following. But the other piece of this is when we say that 75% of cited LinkedIn posts come from individuals, when you break that number down- 40% of those individuals have 10,000 or more followers on our platform.

It's a very big and impressive moat. But 35% have less, and so there's really not an argument to be made for not having enough of a following to get started. Get started, share your POV, focus on something that you specialize in and do better than your competitors, and it'll pay dividends moving forward.

AJ: Yeah, I agree. And I also tell our clients, like, "Oh, you're worried 'cause you only have 300 connections and you haven't logged in the last 10 years?" I don't care about that at all because when we turn this into a boosted post or a thought leader ad, LinkedIn's not gonna show you how many followers they have.

Some people may click into the profile and look at history, but the vast majority are just going to see that person's picture, their name, maybe title, and then they're gonna see the post, and they're gonna get value out of it. They're gonna engage with it, and it's gonna be the exact right people that you wanna get ahead of.

So these are people that you are paying to get the post in front of in your absolute ideal target audience. Who cares if they have one follower or if they have, you know, 100,000? No big deal either way.

Kevin: Awesome. Yeah, and that's a great segue, I feel like, into the broader SEO to AEO transition. And so I'd love to ask you, whether it's LinkedIn or it's Reddit or YouTube, how are you looking at- AEO strategy across your client base, what platforms are you mixing in?

What tactics are you mixing in on the organic side?

AJ: Yeah, and I think this is all like one big conglomeration. I don't feel like any of these moves or platforms are a big stretch for any marketer. What I'm gonna recommend to you is not a, a heavy lift for a marketer. So here's what we've got. When you are posting content organically on LinkedIn, whether it's as an individual or as your company, cool, take that content, especially if it's thought leadership heavy, and also copy it over to an article.

It's total no-brainer. Same thing if it's personal content that you're publishing, and let's say you have multiple people in the organization who are all publishing content as well, that's great. Copy that over to company page content and vice versa. You really want both of those. You want personal and company content, and you want it as both posts and articles.

Then leaving LinkedIn, what I've told people for years is before you post it on LinkedIn as an article, post it on your blog as a blog post. Wait for Google to come and find it because the beginning of my career was in SEO, so I always have that in the back of my head. If you think about search engines, they care about who they saw the content from first.

They call that the canonical, and for me personally at B2Linked, I don't care if LinkedIn gets more benefit from SEO. I care that my site gets it. So I would post on the blog first, wait two or three days to make sure that Google has indexed it, and now we get to worry about LLMs indexing it as well. Then go and put that same content on LinkedIn as an article, and that seems to be a great way of making sure that all of this content is all speaking to both search engines and LLMs.

Then you add onto that a YouTube strategy. So the same video I'm going to upload to LinkedIn as a post I could of course put that in the article as well, so that video gets to live on LinkedIn alone. Well, if I go and post it on YouTube, now I can take that same video, embed it using the YouTube link onto the blog, and now my blog post, and you can actually see evidence of this if you just go to B2Linked's blog.

Go look at our blog posts. You'll see a lot of them are a video embedded from YouTube with the text that actually used to be a LinkedIn post or a LinkedIn article before. And if you combine all three of these channels in this way, in ways, like I said, it's not gonna add very much overhead to your work as a marketer.

It's really just copy and pasting. Now I feel like you've given LLMs and search engines a ton of content to work with.

Kevin: Awesome. Yeah, and I think, like, given all of that, do you think there's even a world anymore where AEO cannot be top of mind for a client?

AJ: For a long time, like I said, the beginning of my career was in SEO, and when we talked to enterprise brands, you'd talk about, let's say, two brands like Coke and Pepsi, where they're fighting tooth and nail.

They're spending millions of dollars every year to see who can, like, try to get a slight edge on their competitor. Those keywords are super, super competitive there. But in AEO, because every query that someone asks is totally unique, and it's unique to them and what the LLM knows about that person, there is a lot of opportunity for customization here and a, a lot of opportunity for you to get very quick market share taken away from a competitor, no matter how long they've been doing it, no matter how much money they've been putting into it.

Kevin: Yeah. That's a great point. So let me ask you this: When it comes to stack ranking platforms for SEO f- or an AEO focus, and specifically just who you feel like has to be in the mix, what are the platforms that you're bringing to your clients?

AJ: Yeah. Number one is LinkedIn. Obviously, we're a LinkedIn agency, so that's gonna be the focus no matter what.

But even if I weren't a homer for LinkedIn , like, just the platforms that I told you about, I told you about four different ways of using LinkedIn to market. I mentioned a little bit of a play for your blog, a little bit of a play for YouTube, and a little bit of a play for... What else did I mention?

Kevin: Reddit.

AJ: Oh, and then we didn't even talk about Reddit, but there's definitely a strong play there that we could focus on as well. But of all the things I mentioned, LinkedIn plays four of those roles. It's pretty incredible. Yeah, so obviously I'm all in on LinkedIn here, but because you work at LinkedIn and you have a lot of internal knowledge here, I would love to hear what are some of the reasons why LinkedIn is noteworthy and authoritative here as we talk about LLMs?

Kevin: Yeah. So I think the big thing here is, if you're asking yourself why trust LinkedIn here, we validated this, right? We put together an LLM playbook and strategy. We followed that strategy with the core goal of being the number one most cited platform for four USPs or, like, topic ownership categories, if you will.

So we focused really hard on B2B marketing as one, B2B lead generation as another, audience targeting as a third, and lastly, sponsored content. And after following the playbook that we've talked a lot about today, LinkedIn ranked one across all four of those. And it wasn't our data that said that, right?

It came from a partner in Profound. So I think initially, why should you trust us? Because we did this, and we think that if you use our POV on LLMs, it's really gonna help your brand ascend up the LLM stack rankings.

AJ: Yeah. So not only does LinkedIn has the data the LLMs care about, but then LinkedIn went and actually acted on it and approached it as a test to find out, how is this working?

And you validated that, yes, like, this playbook is working.

Kevin: Yep. And when I look at that test essentially that we ran, the thing that sticks out to me is obviously we wanted to be number one in four priority categories, but it makes me ask myself, and I think about this with my agency partners, I think about this for their clients, but if you boiled that down to one or two categories, you know, for your own agency or for your clients, one to two USPs, what are your biggest unique selling points?

I think the question I would have for everyone is: how confident are you that you would rank? How confident are you that you would rank number one? And if you are, where is the evidence of that across your articles, posts, company page, et cetera? I think it's a really healthy exercise to take a look at that and say, "Hey, what are the one to two things that we as a business have to own," right?

Unless you're the largest of the large, we've entered an era where it's really specialization over generalization. So if there were two things that you specialized in, what are they? And then, you know, if you look at your own strategy, how can you elevate those two categories across everything you do?

I think it's a quick exercise to get your organization organized as it relates to AEO and LLM strategy.

AJ: Yeah, and I don't think this is hard. I think if I were to actually go and look for B2Linked's brand, I would probably be a little bit humbled that I may not even be taking our own advice here. But yeah, this is super important.

I think a really easy exercise, just like Kevin outlines here, is think of, like, what is your unique sales proposition as an organization, and go look at your company page in the About section and see is it outlined in that way. And then I also wanna ask a question that I think is really crucial for us.

If you want your content picked up by LLMs, is there a different way that you write, a different way that you phrase things? What are you keeping in mind as you're writing this content?

Kevin: It's such a good question, and I think we're in a place now where we feel like we have enough data to have some level of a framework here at least.

Couple stats that really jump off the page to me is 100% of LLM citations reference a bulleted list or a numbered list. So somewhere in that post or in that article, there's a bullet or a numbered list , and I think that- that's amazing to me. Somewhat shocking, but something everyone should know, right? So I think that's one thing that jumps out, but I think a little more broader, there's a few things, right?

Lists. It loves lists, so best X list, et cetera. Secondarily, it loves comparisons. So if you take something side by side and compare that, it's gonna favor that. And I think the other thing that comes to mind is data. So if you have statistics, you're doing a thought leadership post, but you frame it around insights and analytics and actual numbers, it clings to that because numbers signal authority and credibility.

It's a citation in itself.

AJ: So those are some of the things we're seeing right now that really heighten your ability to be cited. Oh, I love it. So Kevin, I've gotta ask you, you have clients who are all agencies right now. What are you recommending to them right now?

Kevin: Yeah. I think to keep it short and sweet, I'm really sticking to walk the walk.

Practice what you preach, right? We're coming out LinkedIn and sharing with the marketplace that [00:34:00] AEO has to be top of mind right now, and LLM strategy has to be a piece of your B2B marketing. And so we're bringing that to our agency partners to make sure that they're aware of that and they have the right stats and tools in the market.

But at the end of the day, if you want a client to trust you with their AEO and trust you with their LLM strategy, you gotta walk the walk, right? So it starts with founders or agency leaders consistently posting on the platform, having a POV Going through the USP exercise we just talked about, if there were one to two things your agency had to be known for you to win in the market, what are those and are you showing up?

Same goes with leaning into articles, leaning into company page posts, keeping your company page updated. It's almost like I'm bringing this playbook to my agencies, in a way, so that they can crush this and, like, master this playbook, and then when they go to market to, to bring AEO to their clients they're a walking example of what LLM success looks like.

AJ: Yeah. We kind of referenced this a little bit earlier, but right now we're so early in this process of AEO, and LinkedIn plays such a major part in it. Anyone listening to this podcast, you are already light years ahead. If there's an 800-pound gorilla in your marketplace, this is your opportunity to jump right ahead of them.

All right, so let's say one of your clients, they are just wanting to dip their toe in the water, wanna figure out the AEO strategy and how it pertains to LinkedIn. What are the very next actions you're gonna tell them? Like, "Here is your step one, step two, step three to do."

Kevin: Yep. It's a really important question 'cause there's a lot of people that are in that position right now, right?

Where they just need to get started. So I think I would start by reiterating the point that if AI can't find you, it cannot recommend you, right? Yeah. So step one is start, right? Whatever that looks like. But I think if we wanna get more nuanced and specific, I would look at the leader of the organization or one of the leaders of the organization, whoever feels most comfortable being a spokesperson for the business, and I would make sure they're shaping a POV around the number one unique selling point that business has to offer.

Because if you don't win there, you're not gonna get on the shortlist, right? It's a great feeling to be able to do a lot of things or be the agency that goes across five different sectors, etc., etc., but you have to really own your one category first and then expand. So where I would start is, first I would say just get started.

Second, I would say take a consistent POV and spread it out. We saw the importance of articles, right? We saw the importance of individual posts. We talked about the importance of your company page being a salesperson for you when you're not in the room. I would have one person really tackle that at the company and go across all those mediums and just get started.

AJ: And also, I'll add my viewpoint as someone who, you know, I'm a founder-led organization. I've been in this now for 12 years, and it's so interesting to me that, SEO was something that I just, I didn't care about too much as an organization for lots and lots of years. And then all of a sudden, as LLM started to come onto the scene, we ask a question in our contact forms, "How did you hear about us?"

And all of a sudden, about a year ago, we started seeing people say ChatGPT every two, three, four forms that came in, and then it just kept getting more and more often until now it's actually a rarity, If we ever see someone come in and say something like, "I follow you on LinkedIn," or, " I've listened to the podcast," the vast majority of the time it's LLMs that are sending traffic.

And so because I have seen so much with my own business transform here, not that I was even out there trying to do it, it just was the way that I create content naturally was really good for LLMs. Now I'm a believer, and now I wanna chase this, and I wanna teach all of my clients how to make the most of it.

Kevin: Yeah. And I mean, all I can say is I can back up everything you shared there because I have looked for some of your own USPs in LLMs and some things around B2Linked, and, you definitely show up, you know? And it's not for a lack of effort, right? You've been consistent on the platform, posting, sharing a POV, and really having a presence.

So I think you're an example of walking that walk in the LLM space.

Awesome. I appreciate that.

And so AJ, speaking of being a pioneer for thought leadership on our platform and really leaning into that, like, founder-led LLM presence, I gotta ask you, and again, I know we're at a stage where it's anyone's best guess, but what do you think the next wave big AEO strategy will be?

Like, how do you see it changing or evolving?

AJ: Yeah. I'm not totally sure 'cause we're obviously so early here. But thinking about from my background in SEO, there was this thing, like, at the very beginning of SEO, it was like, okay, links from content, from any content are sharing that there's authority that this brand has.

But then over time, that became really easy to manipulate. And so what they did, Google especially started focusing really heavily on, all right, how do we make sure that the voice that is lending credibility to your site is a credible and authoritative voice? And so I see LLMs doing the same thing. I think we're starting out with they're getting whatever data they can possibly get, but over time, they wanna make sure that their recommendations are as strong as possible, and they're gonna wanna make sure that the voice that is telling them that is the most authoritative voice there is.

So I'm really bullish on LinkedIn because the content on LinkedIn is, like we've talked about, it's not anonymous. You can tie those individuals to companies. There is one chokeable throat, if something really bad happened, like you know that person is a real person at that organization.

You could contact them. So you know, looking at all of the other places that LLMs could get data, I mean, you think about X, you think about Reddit, you think about others where you're hidden behind a username and there's a little bit of anonymity there. LinkedIn doesn't have that, and I think that's just gonna make it a much stronger voice for LLMs to care about.

Kevin: Yeah. I think that's a really interesting POV. It's very much in line with this whole idea of, in this new age of LLM buyer journeys and discovery, like a really important piece for a brand is being defensible, right? Yeah. And I think that falls into that category. Things that are said, cited, sourced on LinkedIn are defensible because they trace back to a real person with a real job and a real tenure, and I think that's really important.

I think spinning off of what you shared and also calling out that I also have no idea of this, it's a very new and ever-changing landscape right now, but I think one bucket that I think will, and it's a little bit of a cheap-out answer because I feel like it's already going this way a little bit, but I think owning context more so than just owning content.

And I can elaborate on this a little bit, but I really think it's gonna be, you know, brands that own the solution to a specific problem. And I think if you think about that, right? For example, if someone said: "What's the best marketing agency to help me get leads?" That is not the most specific problem, right?

But if someone said, "What is the best marketing agency to help me get B2B SaaS leads over a 10-month sales cycle on a limited budget?" You have a real opportunity as an agency out there to position yourself as a leader in that space, and as someone who solves that problem. And I think, as LLMs continue to evolve and get more nuanced, we're gonna really see people master the solution of specific problems.

And I think that if you can start tackling that now, you're ahead of the curve, and you're early to owning your niche.

AJ: Yeah. And also think about the kind of content that LLMs are looking for, that they care about. They're not gonna care about the 15th time that you've posted, "Hey, we're here. Click here to get a demo."

Yeah. Like, they don't care about that content. It doesn't teach them anything. So it's really, really important that you get into and heavily invest in actual thought leadership, sharing stuff that your target audience really cares about, answer the questions that they're asking. I love what you said about comparisons, because LLMs are really good at comparing things. So give them comparisons. Tell them why you're better than someone else in a certain arena, and I think these are all fuel for LLMs that we're gonna see in the future just really take off.

Kevin: Yeah. No, and I love that you brought up the comparison piece, because it further supports owning a specific solution.

And, if an LLM is comparing you to somebody else, the LLM's gonna ask the prompter: "Well, what's your situation?" Right? "Tell me more about your problem." And the, the company that's gonna win is the one who carved out their moat around a, a specific solution, right? So it's a great call-out, and I think just overall it's a really exciting, fast-paced, changing landscape.

I think, innovation, at this speed is fun and exciting for brands, and I think there's plenty of content out there, trusted people on platform to ask questions to, but, if you're hesitant to start your AEO or your LLM strategy, reach out on platform and just remember the most important step to this is getting started and having a POV.

AJ: Kevin, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been so much fun. Of course. You're out here in Utah with me for a couple days, so really excited. There's gonna be a lot of other content that we're gonna create, so, follow the YouTube channel, watch both of us on LinkedIn. Kevin specifically, I know you're really heavily invested in the LLM conversation at LinkedIn.

I would encourage everyone, please come and follow Kevin Dietz. We'll link to him in the show notes and all that. Watch all of his posts, all of his content for everything about LLMs. This is just the beginning, and it's getting so exciting for you LinkedIn advertisers.

Kevin: Yeah. I just wanna say, AJ, thanks for having me. It's a blast to be out here in Utah, and I really appreciate the partnership. So yeah, thanks a lot.

AJ: Love it.

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