Sebastian Fung

Granola, a $1.5B company, increased monthly new users from AI search by 4,600% in JUST 7 months. here’s the genius AEO workflow behind it: 1. They started with buyer decisions, not keywords -> Granola mapped the questions people ask before choosing an AI meeting tool -> Then they turned those same decisions into both Google keywords and AI prompts so they could measure where the brand actually showed up 2. Every lost prompt got diagnosed before anything was created -> If Granola wasn’t showing up, they first asked why -> Was the right page missing? -> Did the page already exist but fail to answer the question properly? -> Was there a crawl/indexing problem? -> Or was AI getting the answer from third-party sources that barely mentioned Granola? 3 They separated “missing page” from “weak page” -> This sounds obvious, but it changes the entire content strategy -> If a relevant page already existed, they improved that page instead of publishing another article targeting the same question -> New pages were only created when there was actually a gap 4. They stopped treating every technical SEO issue like it mattered equally -> Crawlability, indexing and performance problems were prioritized based on whether they affected pages tied to real buyer demand -> A technical issue on a page connected to an important buying question came before cleaning up random site-wide warnings 5. They studied the exact third-party sources AI was already trusting -> For prompts Granola lost, they looked at the Reddit threads, review sites, articles, directories and other pages showing up instead -> The question wasn’t just “how do we get more backlinks?” -> It was “which sources are shaping this specific recommendation, and why are competitors represented there better than us?” 6. They used a simple framework for every important source: -> OWN: pages Granola controls directly -> CLAIM: profiles and listings they can take ownership of -> EARN: editorial mentions, reviews and community discussions they have to deserve -> CONTEST: outdated or incorrect information they need corrected -> Different source = different action 7. Reddit became part of the search strategy -> Instead of posting everywhere, they focused on communities much closer to the product and buyer -> The same buyer questions being tracked in AI search were used to decide which conversations were actually worth joining 8 They measured Google and AI separately -> A page could rank better on Google and still barely move in ChatGPT -> AI mentions could rise while organic traffic stayed flat -> So Granola tracked both systems independently instead of assuming SEO performance meant AEO performance 9. Then they reran the same questions and scaled what actually moved users -> measure the gap -> diagnose why it exists -> make one specific change -> rerun the prompts -> track whether visibility and activated users moved -> double down on what worked the result: -> monthly new active users from AI search increased 4,600% -> non-branded AI citation rate increased 558% -> non-branded mention rate increased 739% -> organic sessions increased 134% Granola didn’t win AI search by JUST publishing more blogs & content like every other company instead they built a system for figuring out exactly what they were missing, choosing the right fix, and measuring whether it actually brought in users. then after that just iterating and doubling down on what worked AI search is now one of their biggest acquisition channels. and it should be one of yours too! if you want us to run an audit for your company and make you rank #1 in AI search, reply “audit”