Published June 21Edited June 22
AI has quickly disrupted the search landscape, and brands are having to adjust in real time.
Christine Rhea, senior director of acquisition marketing at Away, told The Current that the sudden urgency is born out in the data.
“And if you’re a marketer, you want to tackle that problem,” she said. “You’re excited to figure out how to adapt your strategy to drive the results you want to drive, but just in this new context.”
In an interview with Lee Singletary at the recent Tinuiti Live conference, Rhea also talked about the consumer journey in an LLM world and whether AI platforms will become the de facto point of purchase for consumers.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
As a growth marketing leader, how do you think about AEO (answer engine optimization)?
AEO for us is an emerging growth marketing channel. Any other channel that you’re trying to tackle, it’s very similar to that. A lot of the same tactics, approaches, channels are still the same players in the space; you’re just thinking about it from a completely different lens, which makes it exciting.
How do you rethink the customer journey in this new AI world?
Away products are highly considered products, so higher price point; you only buy luggage probably every 5-to-10 years, so we know how precious this purchase is and we see that in how people do their research.
Back in the day — “the day” being one year ago — we would expect someone to start their search on Google, perhaps read an article in an affiliate publication and then they’d make their way to our site to complete their research and make their purchase. Now we know that people are not even having our brand in mind, they’re just starting their research on an LLM (large language model) and then doing all of that consideration by just chatting with them. … They may never even need to come to our site, and then future state, I’m sure they’re just going to make their purchase right there.
How far out do you think AI platforms are from becoming the point of purchase? One year out, five years out?
I think it’s closer than you think, but not there by any means yet.
What changed recently that made AEO more urgent?
The adoption and seeing it in your data. You used to be able to track things super clearly; traffic from a platform was driven by [certain] questions and searches, and it was all very clean, and we were comfortable with how we approached it and measured it. People are digesting that information in a different way now. That’s why it’s urgent — you see it in the numbers. And if you’re a marketer, you want to tackle that problem. You’re excited to figure out how to adapt your strategy to drive the results you want to drive, but just in this new context.
You’ve described needing to rewrite the existing playbook on the “AI puzzle.” What’s the first rewrite that you’d make?
Rewriting is maybe a strong term, because there are a lot of foundational things already set. We’ve been using Reddit and YouTube for years as performance channels, and we’ve been finding good success. … Little did we know that years later this would be a huge advantage because those are even more important in the citation space. The fact that we already have a strong presence on these platforms and are deep in the channel strategy means that we can quickly adapt to this new world. It’s not rewriting so much as getting creative about how you adjust your current plans to then fit this new world of AEO.
What is the biggest opportunity in AEO for CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands?
Capturing the non-brand search opportunity. In traditional SEO, it’s very hard to rank for non-brand terms unless you have an extremely robust SEO program. Now, because it’s so early, you have the advantage of leaning in to these tactics that are working and claiming more of that space, whereas in the traditional Google lens it was much harder to make good progress there. I’m excited to see where that goes. If they can discover us through non-brand searches, that’s a huge opportunity…
