Aja Frost
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
8K followers
500+ connections
8K followers
500+ connections
About
I've spent the last decade at HubSpot building the growth engine — and for the last two…
Articles by Aja
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A Super Genuine Way to Form Stronger Connections
A Super Genuine Way to Form Stronger Connections
On January 1, I made an unusual resolution. I committed to sending one hand-written letter per week—and not to…
15 Comments -
The 20-Minute Weekly Project That's Turbo-Charging My Career
The 20-Minute Weekly Project That's Turbo-Charging My Career
About six weeks ago, I started my own weekly newsletter. To be honest, it felt like a crazy move—on top of two jobs…
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These 6 Techniques Guarantee Your Emails Will Be Opened
These 6 Techniques Guarantee Your Emails Will Be Opened
As a freelance writer, I’m constantly sending emails to strangers. Either I’m trying to convince someone to talk to me…
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The 7 Most Valuable Resources for Freelancers and Journalists
The 7 Most Valuable Resources for Freelancers and Journalists
When I first started freelance writing—all of 18 months ago—I had no idea what I was doing. I’d met lawyers…
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Why Friends Are Key to My Career Success
Why Friends Are Key to My Career Success
When I first heard of “horizontal mentoring,” I thought it was giving advice from your bed. Turns out it’s when you and…
3 Comments -
How to Get Published on Forbes by Age 20
How to Get Published on Forbes by Age 20
A couple days ago, a writer twice my age asked me how I’ve gotten to write for publications like Forbes, Inc. TIME, and…
6 Comments
Activity
8K followers
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Aja Frost posted thisThe most important debate happening right now isn’t between AEOs on LinkedIn. It’s between AEO and finance teams. You can show up in all the important ChatGPT answers, but if you can’t connect that visibility to pipeline, the typical CFO won’t care (nor should they). At HubSpot, we started our AEO program by asking: What do we need to prove to get buy-in? *Then* we built a measurement framework and playbook. Qualified leads from AI search grew 1,850%. Those leads convert at 3x the rate of other sources. On July 21, HubSpot’s Rory Hope is joining Guy Yalif from Webflow to walk through this framework and four plays that’ll take you from AEO visibility to pipeline. Link to register in the comments.
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Aja Frost shared thisIf your AEO strategy is publishing a bunch of “best X tools” and “top Y options” listicles… you’re doing AEO wrong. Because everyone’s writing the same listicles. Best case, you get referenced. Your brand is one of several on a list. But if you use the TOFU-with-a-twist strategy I talk about with Ross Hudgens on the latest Siege Media pod, you’ll be the only brand mentioned. And way earlier in the buyer’s journey — before a short-list even exists. Link to the full episode in the comments.
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Aja Frost reposted thisAja Frost reposted thisWas fun to get to review all the GTM10 Awards. Congrats to all the winners: Aja Frost (HubSpot), Amos Bar-Joseph (Swan AI), Angela Garinger Bennett (Outreach), Davide Grieco (Clay), Lauren Oliphant (OpenAI), Luke Harries (ElevenLabs), Patrick Spychalski (The Kiln), Ravish Agrawal (Gamma), Tom Orbach (Wiz), and Varun Puri (Yoodli) Shoutout Cello, Lightspeed, and Apify for making this happen.
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Aja Frost reposted thisAja Frost reposted thisHubSpot wrote the playbook on AEO. And the game is still evolving. Aja Frost, Senior Director of Global Growth at HubSpot, has been shaping how marketers win in AI search — and this carousel breaks down exactly where to start. The shift is real: AI doesn't send people to your website. It answers their question and moves on. So if you're still writing "ultimate guides," you're writing for an audience that will never arrive. Instead? Publish the exact answer to the exact question your buyer is typing into ChatGPT right now. Swipe for Aja's 7-point AEO page formula →then catch her LIVE at UNBOUND 26 this year. unbound.com
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Aja Frost shared thisYES! But don't do TOFU the same way you were before (super broad, long-form pages designed solely to educate so people will come from search, click your CTAs, and become a lead you can nurture.) Effective TOFU in 2026 looks like specific, well-written, shorter-form content designed primarily to influence humans via bots.Aja Frost shared thisBig news: TOFU content is back! If you search for product-led, truly top funnel topics, you will find company recommendations in AI results. The results come from the companies that have created this supporting top funnel content and are ranking for them, such as HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive in this example. Previously, I was of the mind that if AI was simply summarizing content like this, there was little value doing it if clicks had dropped preciptiously. But if it holds up that AI will also recommend us on the right, product-connected content, it opens up a new universe of content, and in a lot of ways re-opens the creation universe for marketers. The stress test our team is using: if it’s possible to achieve at least 50% brand visibility on these prompts, it’s a top funnel topic worth going after if the TOFU has significant search volume as a proxy of demand. As an example for HubSpot, I tested this “what is CRM” prompt for them and they achieved 83% visibility from a mention point of view. That’s not a top funnel topic wiping away our search universe – that’s exactly the kind of influence we want to have from content marketing. I could see re-indexing our search and topic universe as a pulse check to determine which keywords are actually returning brands. High visibility returns above 50% could indicate value beyond the click worth investing in. Kudos to Aja Frost for illuminating this reality, and to her team for their strong visibility in LLMs!
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Aja Frost shared thisHubSpot found more than half of citations for high-intent queries come from Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Those are the queries where buyers compare solutions before they buy. So what should brands post on these platforms to win citations? The same things that get owned content cited: clear writing, real structure, and a product focus. Here's what that looks like channel by channel. - Reddit and Quora: This post (https://lnkd.in/eyZ3Jbiv) is one of the top-cited URLs for the prompts we track. It reads like a blog post (bullets, a table, clear headers) and answers the exact questions a buyer asks when comparing HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Monday. - YouTube: Answer engines don't watch videos. They parse transcripts. So we focus on descriptive titles, time-stamped chapters, and scripts built around real product questions (you'll notice a theme). We also work with third-party creators on our most important topics. Audience size and engagement don't predict citations, so we lean toward smaller creators. - LinkedIn: Posts with data perform best. Same pattern as YouTube. Impressions and engagement don't predict citations. The easiest win is getting your own people (C-suite, sales, marketing) posting about your products. These plays live in the Amplify stage of HubSpot's Loop Marketing framework. Citations tell us whether the content we create or influence is shaping what LLMs recommend. How are you making the case internally for AEO spend when the return is influence, not clicks?
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Aja Frost shared thisBefore I'd ever heard of HubSpot, I was a college student interning in NYC. I used to schlep through Times Square every single day — usually sweaty, over-stimulated, and limping slightly from my too-big heels. I would've been shocked to learn that one day my face would be three stories high on a billboard there. I don't know how to play this cool… so I'm not even going to try. I'm super proud to be a GTM10 Award Winner in the Growth category. When ChatGPT first launched, I was convinced it would fundamentally change how people discovered HubSpot. But it wasn't clear at all what we could do about it. So we experimented. I asked two hyper-curious folks on our SEO team — 🤖Victor Pan and Bradley Sanders — to pause their normal work. We spent several months experimenting with every lever we could think of — from the obvious to the bananas — to increase AI visibility. We met every single morning to share results and learnings. And once we validated a play, we scaled it. As a result, qualified leads from AI search grew 1,850%. HubSpot became the #1 most visible CRM in AI engines. And I have a bonkers photo. (My husband happened to be in NYC when the billboard went live!) Thank you to Cello and Lightspeed for creating and championing this recognition, and to the awesome Growth jury — Colin Bentley, Maja Voje, Jenna (Zucker) MacDonald, and Wade Foster — for selecting me.
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Aja Frost shared thisEven if you're tracking all the right prompts, how do you know whether your strategy is responsible for the shifts you see — or the models are changing? Before, you couldn't. Now, you can go to AEO Sensor and immediately see how much traffic AI is sending to websites *and* how much AI answers over 1M+ prompts have changed each day for the last few weeks. It's incredibly valuable data, and it's completely unpaywalled.Aja Frost shared thisSomething I keep hearing from marketers right now: my brand's citations in AI search are down, what do I do? Sometimes the answer is your strategy needs work. But sometimes a model update reshuffles your whole industry and there's nothing specific to your brand happening at all. Those require completely different responses, and most people have no way to tell which situation they're in. We built something to help with that. AEO Sensor tracks how much citation and mention behavior is actually shifting across answer engines, by industry, in real time. Some real trends we’ve seen: IT and Services have seen big swings over the last five weeks. Financial Services and Healthcare have been pretty stable. That kind of context changes how you interpret your own numbers. The best part? It's free, no login, no form. Check it out! hubspot.com/aeo-sensorAEO Sensor | AI Visibility Trends, Data, and UpdatesAEO Sensor | AI Visibility Trends, Data, and Updates
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Aja Frost posted thisHas attribution ever been harder? For a long time, last-click attribution worked well (enough). People came to your site from organic search, social, or ads. But then dark traffic exploded — because customers are looking for answers in new places. They’re browsing Reddit, reading discussions in threads you don’t know exist. They’re watching YouTube videos from channels you don’t own. They’re asking AI. And when they finally decide to check a business out, they open a new tab, search the brand name, and click. Google gets the credit, even though it's only the final mile. Here’s how HubSpot solves the mystery of where people come from with Loop Marketing... - When we amplify in new channels and/or regions, we carefully track branded search spikes to understand the impact on brand awareness. - We analyze which pages are getting direct traffic from AI as well as the pages that bots are visiting. This data helps us understand what’s influencing AI so we can create even more content. - We run incrementality tests. We’ll go dark in specific markets and compare the incremental lift in conversions and pipeline. That helps us understand holistic impact. What signals are you using to reverse-engineer influence? Curious to hear what's working.
Aja Frost replied to a comment
15h
Chris Carolan Hmm, I don't think "everyone needs to change but the CFO" — Finance teams should be leaning into AI like everyone else — but that doesn't mean AEOs can simply sit back and tell their Finance or leadership teams to simply trust them.
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Aja Frost liked thisAja Frost liked thisThe next big marketing skill isn't prompting AI. It's getting AI to recommend your brand. When buyers ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for solutions, you need to make sure your brand makes the shortlist. HubSpot’s new AEO tool allows you to do exactly that, and our brand new certification teaches you how to build your strategy from the ground up. 👇 Link to get certified for free is in the comments! 🎬 P.S. Who spies the queen of AEO herself, Aja Frost, being interviewed by Academy professor Nick Decoulos as part of the certification? This part alone is worth the watch. #HubSpotAcademy #AEO #B2BMarketing #Career
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Aja Frost liked thisAja Frost liked thisWe don't sell speaker slots at Ahrefs Evolve. Neither do we book speakers just for a big logo. Every name on our San Diego lineup this October is someone I *personally* wanted to hear speak. Some I've followed and learned from for years. Others I've only just discovered, and I can't wait to hear what they've got. ...and I'm really hoping you share my taste in speakers. 😇 🔸 Ann Handley - Digital marketing & content expert. Wall Street Journal bestselling author. Keynote speaker. 🔸 Ross Simmonds - CEO @ Foundation & Distribution.ai 🔸 Rand Fishkin - Founder of SparkToro, Alertmouse, & Snackbar Studio. 🔸 Aleyda Solís - Founder of Orainti & SEOFOMO. Co-Founder of Finchling. 🔸 Austin Lau - Growth Marketing at Anthropic, Growth Advisor for Notion, Webflow, Canal, etc 🔸 Tara Robertson - CMO at Bitly (prev. Teamwork, Sprout Social, Hotjar) 🔸 Brianna Doe - Founder of Verbatim (influencer marketing agency), Writer & Host, Stop the Scroll. 🔸 Ethan Smith - CEO at Graphite.io, Partner at Reforge, Adjunct Professor at IE Business School. 🔸 Alina Vandenberghe 🌶️ - Co-founder & co-CEO at Chili Piper 🔸 Harry Dry - Founder of MarketingExamples.com, copywriting extraordinaire 🔸 James Brockbank - Managing Director at Digitaloft (digital PR and SEO agency) ^^ If that's your kind of speaker lineup, I'll see you in San Diego on October 12–13. 😉
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Aja Frost liked thisAja Frost liked thishello! quick updates from me. - i left Anthropic (who does that?!) - had a baby (i love her) - and am joining Cursor as Head of Design (eep!) it’s been a low-key dream of mine for a little while to help shape a team like this — one that values craft & quality, and is building the next generation of great tooling. i’m excited to nurture it, grow it, and scale it in the months to come. i’m still technically on parental leave for the next few weeks, but we *are* hiring for design engineers and designers → https://lnkd.in/gzM6gU-R or reach out to Jay Gu or Monica Jin
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Aja Frost liked thisAja Frost liked thisI'm excited to share that my book with Wiley, "Generative Engine Optimization: The Definitive Guide to AI SEO", now has a new, earlier release date! As we all know, things are moving fast in AI, so getting the book out quickly is of high importance. I'm glad that Wiley was able to work with me to make that happen, as they are equally aware of the pace of change in our industry. In good news, I'm encouraged about how the book is continuing to hold up a few months after writing it, and I anticipate that will continue to be the case into 2027 at very least. I'll be tying the release to BrightonSEO's September conference, where I'll have some advance copies for all "BFF" level ticket holders and those who attend my day one training on the same subject. You can preorder the book here: https://lnkd.in/eKDnmjK5 or at your online retailer of choice. Thanks in advance for the support!
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Education
Licenses & Certifications
Honors & Awards
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Marjorie Cass Scholarship
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
Awarded for academic merit
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President's List
Cal Poly President Jeffrey Armstrong
Awarded for being on the Dean's List every quarter
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University Honors College
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Only 60 students from a class of 4,000 accepted
Based on academic merit and extracurricular pursuits
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2 people have recommended Aja
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