At CMO Today, we’ve covered all manner of online optimization tactics that have emerged in the AI era, from thwarted attempts at manipulating Reddit threads to Mailchimp’s plans to improve the “crawlability” of its sites. Last week, a newer one crossed the threshold of my inbox: Creator-first answer engine optimization. It’s an offering peddled by Influencer, the creator marketing agency, and Profound, an AI marketing company. The two firms on Wednesday announced a partnership that aims to wield creator content to influence the brand and product recommendations that show up on platforms like Chat GPT.

Profound’s software will analyze which creators are already showing up in LLM results, as well as the types of conversations they’re having in videos, posts, podcasts and other content across the internet. Influencer will then take that information and use it to help develop clients’ influencer campaigns, according to Ben Jeffries, the company’s co-founder and CEO.

Creator-first AEO will be an iterative process, with Profound checking back again and again to see how the LLMs’ preferred creators change over time. An advertiser off the back of the recommendations may choose to hire influencers they’ve never worked with before, Jeffries said. But small tweaks could also have an impact, he said. “It might be the way that the title is written on a You Tube video, or the caption of the You Tube video,” Jeffries said. “It might be what the subtext of the You Tube video actually is.”

The announcement comes after influencer platform Later introduced a similar offering, Creator AEO, in May. It serves as a reminder of the sheer amount of strategizing that organic marketing now demands. Brands must continue to service the ever-changing algorithms and trends of social-media platforms in order to reach their desired group of consumers, while at the same time keeping an eye on where AI engines are scraping information from, a factor that’s constantly in motion. Marketers will also be watching for whether LLMs will preclude paid-for social media endorsements that are badged with #ad or similar disclosures in their results.