5 Things to Include in your 2026 SaaS Budget for AEO and GEO
As you finalize your annual marketing and growth plans for 2026, it's critical to recognize that the strategies that drove organic growth in the past are being fundamentally reshaped by AI search engines and Large Language Models (LLMs). Success is no longer solely about keyword rankings; it's about building a verifiable, authoritative brand that AI models trust and recommend. Companies need to rethink what they stand for, how they prove that to their customers and how they can stand out from their competitors. The days of the 2022 growth plan are long gone.
(Note: Here’s a short primer on SEO/AEO/GEO and why it is important for your marketing plans)
Here’s a breakdown of five tactical priorities that you need to include in your marketing and growth plans for 2026 to help set you up for success with AI-driven SEO.
1. Make Sure Your Brand Positioning is Clear to AI Search and LLMs
Everything old is new again. SaaS companies have devalued the need for brand differentiation, often just getting into feature slugfest with competitors with differentiation coming down to pricing models and the colour they chose. But this won’t cut it, your brand needs to stand for something so that it motivates others to talk about you. AI models construct their understanding of your brand by synthesizing information from your entire digital footprint. Not just your website, but also news articles, reviews, and forum discussions. Inconsistent messaging can confuse these models, leading them to misrepresent your brand. A strong, clear brand identity is a primary defence. AI platforms assess authority and trust, and a consistent brand is a powerful signal of both. In short, if your brand doesn’t stand for something, it stands for nothing.
How to create unique brand positioning and where to allocate budget:
Strategic Definition: Dedicate resources to clearly define your unique market position. Are you the most innovative, the highest quality, or the best solution for a specific niche audience? This core identity must be the foundation of all content and messaging.
Brand Consistency Audit: Allocate resources for a comprehensive audit of all digital touchpoints—website, social media, customer service interactions, and third-party listings. The goal is to ensure your core value proposition is communicated consistently everywhere. You may have to redo some assets or create new assets to make elements work together.
Optimize Core Identity Pages: Prioritize updating your key pages. If you overhaul the brand, that is a big effort. But if you are evolving, pick core pages like your “Home Page” and "About Us". Make sure things like ‘who you are’ and ‘company history’ reflect your positioning. These pages are high-value sources that AI uses to understand your purpose, expertise, and credibility.
2. Conduct Primary Research Studies Help Show Your Authority and Expertise to LLMs
AI models are designed to synthesize existing information. To become a citable source, you must provide them with something new. Generic content that rehashes what's already known is unlikely to be referenced. Proprietary data, original industry reports, and unique case studies are highly "citation-worthy" assets. In fact, content with exclusive data is 78% more likely to be referenced by AI (don’t I wish I fielded a study to prove this). Publishing original research positions your brand as a definitive authority, directly demonstrating the Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) that both Google and AI models reward.
Where to allocate resources for research studies:
Invest in Data-Driven Content: Earmark a significant portion of your content budget for one or two major research projects per year. This could involve surveying your industry, analyzing anonymized user data, or commissioning a formal study. Or, you may have data in your platform that could be analyzed to produce reports - but you’ll need data analysts to unlock the data and storytellers to make it valuable.
Identify Knowledge Gaps: Use your market knowledge to identify unanswered questions or emerging trends in your industry. Your research should aim to fill these gaps, making your findings truely valuable to your target audience.
Collaborate for Credibility: Consider partnering with other folks in your industry and industry organizations on research. AI models show a preference for content from institutional domains when assessing trustworthiness. Plus, if you partner, this can help on the distribution front and get your content in front of more people.
Examples:
FreshBooks produced an ongoing studies like “The Self-Employment Report” to drive marketing PR and overall authority on self-employment, a key target audience.
3. Community Engagement and Engineering
AI models, particularly Google's AI Overviews, actively look to community platforms like Reddit and Quora to understand public sentiment and find real answers to user questions. These forums are loaded with conversational, intent-driven data that AI uses to learn what real problems people face and how they talk about them. Being present and helpful in these communities builds brand trust and generates the positive, unlinked brand mentions that AI models weigh heavily as authority signals.
Where to allocate community engagement budget for to be cited by LLMs:
Resource for Active Participation: Allocate employee time (or budget for a dedicated community manager) to engage authentically in 2-3 key subreddits topics relevant to your audience. The mandate should be to help, not to sell. You can even create automated bots to provide answers on some topics - but don’t just have them sell, they can offer solutions like your plus other competitors to look at. You may need to pay for tools like relay.app, zapier or n8n.
Fuel Content Strategy with Ground-level Insights: Use these platforms as a primary research tool. The questions, pain points, and language used by the community should directly inform your content calendar, ensuring you create resources that resonate and answer real-world needs. You will need people to do this work and some help from some of the automation and agentic tools mentioned above.
Identify SuperEngagers: Have your community team identify people across different groups - is ‘ChillEntrepreneur’ on r/smallbusiness and r/financialadvice and actively talking about your category? Reach out to them and see if they’ll be on a customer panel and give feedback on your product. This again will take time and people to manage outreach and start to foster your communities of people.
4. SME Marketing (ugh, is this ‘Influencer Marketing’?) is Key to Establishing Authority
In the context of AI, "influencers" are synonymous with subject matter experts. Collaborating with recognized authorities in your field is a powerful way to build a "layered authority ecosystem" and demonstrate E-E-A-T. When a credible expert with a strong personal brand writes for your blog, speaks at your webinar, or reviews your product, it sends a strong signal of trustworthiness to AI models. A review from an expert who has firsthand experience with your product is far more valuable than a generic advertisement.
How to create unique positioning and allocate budget:
Focus on Experts, Not Just Reach: Shift budget from broad-reach influencers to niche subject matter experts with verifiable credentials and a respected voice in your industry. Go for quality, not quantity.
Empower Internal Experts: Invest in building the personal brands of your own internal experts. Budget for their participation in industry podcasts, speaking engagements, and webinars. Their individual authority reflects directly onto your brand.
Co-Create Authoritative Content: Allocate funds for collaborative projects with external experts, having them as regular blog contributors, co-authoring a research reports or hosting a joint webinars. This combines their credibility with your platform, creating a powerful asset that AI is more likely to trust and cite.
Example: There are agencies like LemonPie who focus on getting your people as industry experts on podcasts - use them on the research reports you produce and get folks in your company talking about it on Podcasts.
5. PR and Media Outreach Need to Be Integrated with Your Core SEO/AEO/GEO Strategies
The goal of PR is to always focus on mentions in reputable, contextually relevant media outlets. They key is to plan your research, SEO and GEO activity with the PR teams for a cohesive strategy. Signals from relevant media are one of the strongest signals of authority for AI models. One study found that brand web mentions have the highest correlation with visibility in Google's AI Overviews. A steady drumbeat of positive media coverage effectively trains AI to associate your brand with expertise in your field, making you a more likely candidate for recommendation.
How to create unique positioning and allocate budget:
Promote Your Primary Research: Your original research studies should be the centerpiece of your PR strategy. Budget for a dedicated outreach campaign to pitch the exclusive findings to journalists and industry bloggers.
Target Niche Publications: While major outlets are valuable, securing coverage in topically relevant niche publications can provide stronger signals for AI citation. Allocate PR resources to build relationships with key editors and writers in your specific vertical.
Integrate PR and SEO: Ensure your PR, content, and SEO teams are tightly aligned. The messaging and narratives pushed through media outreach must be consistent with your on-site content to create a clear, unified signal of your brand's positioning for AI engines.
That’s it. Boy, my take-away is that I really need to start investing in more of my own primary research instead of reading what other people are writing!