AEO maturity and buy-in: How IMB Bank built a scalable answer engine optimization strategy

IMB Bank's strategy for achieving AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) success involved using an AEO maturity assessment to better educate stakeholders and reposition AEO as a brand discoverability channel, thus enhancing site visibility in large language model (LLM) citations. Jason Lima and Gaia Arutyunyan led the effort to reframe AEO's role within their marketing mix, likening it to traditional awareness channels like TV and radio to gain internal alignment and stakeholder buy-in. This repositioning helped stakeholders see AEO as a tool for brand discovery rather than a direct-response tactic. The AEO maturity assessment revealed that despite strong SEO performance, IMB Bank's site was structurally unprepared for LLM citations, prompting the team to prioritize structural improvements such as schema markup and LLMS.txt implementation without needing to justify AEO's immediate ROI. As a result, the bank experienced significant growth in citations from six million to 12 million in three months and increased their page rankings for both traditional and AI overview keywords, with over 90% of organic traffic to key pages coming from non-branded searches.