I’m a bit of a YouTube junkie, consuming copious amounts of independent media and behind-the-scenes videos on the Artemis II saga (I’m a sucker for all things “space”). As such, I’m spending more time streaming videos on the platform than ever before.

That means between the moonshots, I’m being served more ads. Like a metric ton. Sure, I could upgrade and avoid the burn of orbital re-entry. But that would bring my streaming channels to a patently unhealthy number.

I digress. The point is that I’m subjected to a lot of video promotion, and there’s one that keeps popping up about outsourced SEO services. Blame the algorithm: I research a lot of DX platforms and agency-related content.

When I watch these ads, I’m reminded that SEO – good old Search Engine Optimization – is still a thing. And it’s always been viewed as an amplifier, a potential "longtail" growth engine (see what I did there?) that was strictly the domain of marketing types.

But AEO? It’s an altogether different beast, shrouded by a veil of existential urgency. Unlike its elder cousin, AEO – Answer Engine Optimization – is all about achieving AI search visibility in the gilded palaces of ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. It’s a nascent discipline that (hopefully) ensures your company appears and is cited in AI-generated answers.

The topic is getting noisy – and for good reason. People are increasingly bypassing the dense, multi-page “blue links” of Google Search and letting AI be its co-pilot. Skepticism is giving way to trust, and these single points of LLM interaction are becoming the norm.

The numbers back it up. As I noted in my opening keynote at the Boye & Company CMS Kickoff 26, some organizations have reported losing as much as 90% of their traffic, the result of a perfect storm of zero-click searches and chatbots. And while Google still represents three-quarters of all digital queries, 800 million users on ChatGPT each week can’t be ignored.

So here’s how the video plays: Once upon a time, you invested in SEO to enhance visibility. Now, if you’re not fully embracing AEO, you risk something much worse: being invisible.

As such, brands are rapidly reallocating budget and resources toward AEO to help hedge against this threat. As organic traffic continues to circle the drain, brands and organizations are discussing Answer Engine Optimization in the boardroom, not just the marketing bullpen – and C-level leaders are swimming towards it like a digital life ring.

Conductor might just be the rope that pulls that ring to safe harbor.

The company, which considers itself an end-to-end AEO platform, just released its new AgentStack, an enterprise assemblage of native LLM apps, developer infrastructure, and turnkey agents – all designed to help brands build, manage, and scale their visibility across AI-driven search experiences.

Conductor Chief Product Officer Wei Zheng. Source: LinkedIn

I recently caught up with Conductor’s brilliant and lively Chief Product Officer, Wei Zheng, to discuss AgentStack and why it matters. We spoke last year just as Conductor – which has always been in the enterprise optimization and intelligence quadrant – was rolling out some innovative tools for GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).

As she told me, the enrichment of AEO is giving the platform a more complete vision and enhanced partnership opportunities that spell growth across the board. In fact, it’s become the company’s central message. Because it’s no longer enough to just engage in SEO. Like Artemis, you have to shoot for the moon.

Your future might just depend on it.

What is AgentStack?

Conductor’s AgentStack is like an all-in-one toolbox for AEO. It gives a brand everything it needs to deploy agentic workflows that are built for Answer Engine Optimization – and does it all at enterprise scale.

We all know that AI is continuously reshaping how marketing technology is built and delivered. Now, as AI-powered agents become more customizable, marketing teams can build agentic systems and custom apps that meet their specific needs. AgentStack leverages Conductor’s APIs, MCP server, and LLM apps in ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot, enabling enterprises and partners to power agents and applications on their own terms.

By connecting Conductor’s MCP to your AI platform or deploying its native connectors, you can build a custom version of its app in as little as a day. According to Conductor, you can achieve compelling results with this model, like reducing your reporting time by 90%, or even amplifying your ability to produce AI search-optimized content by 100x.

AEO is still perceived as a bit mystical to many of the stakeholders I’ve spoken to. That could be a result of the “smoke and mirrors” burn that some SEO firms have left in their wake. But Conductor has always provided a strong foundation for its enterprise-worthiness, and as it pivots hard to AEO leadership, it’s providing substantive skills guides and use case libraries to make the journey successful.

For marketing teams, Conductor is a salve for the lack of high-level transparency. It’s not just visibility in the engines that matters – it’s being able to translate the value internally for leaders and stakeholders who are more tuned into performance than ever.

To that end, Conductor enables users to automatically generate board-worthy presentations that focus on AI visibility data. It showcases how brand sentiment is manifesting across AI engines in real time and identifies which topics your competitors are gaining ground with.

Armed with these insights, they can optimize content in minutes. At the same time, technical teams can monitor whether AI crawlers can access key pages to ensure discoverability and resolve issues before performance is impacted.

Source: Conductor website

Conductor has spent the last four years building the foundation for this new reality. Its unified data engine brings together the intent, content, and technical signals that determine discoverability across both AI systems and traditional search, all fully connected within a single software stack.

“Agents are only as powerful as the intelligence behind them,” Wei said. “Conductor brings together the signals that determine discoverability across AI systems and search engines. That intelligence is what enables agents to automate meaningful marketing work.”

From an innovation perspective, AgentStack’s agents combine Conductor’s proprietary AI search and content intelligence with a zero-configuration workflow. The benefit: it can accelerate insight into optimized content faster than ever, with no prompt engineering or technical expertise required.

As Wei told me, Conductor's agents are the only turnkey solution built exclusively for AEO and content teams, making it markedly different from other tools with complex, convoluted interfaces. AgentStack simplifies everything with a step-by-step, point-and-click flow that makes enterprise AEO easier to achieve.

A data moat powered by Conductor’s legacy

One of the key foundations of AgentStack is Conductor’s long, methodical investment in data. In a market awash in new AEO tools and AI-ready dashboards, Wei was clear about how Conductor goes beyond shiny surfaces – bringing over a decade of deep, meaningful, and hard-earned proprietary intelligence to its interfaces.

“A big part of the Conductor story has always been about our data and intelligence moat,” she told me. “We don't just show you some reports and dashboards about your rankings. That's table stakes. We have the data, but on top of that, we've always focused on how we actually turn that data into intelligence that can be activated in your content workflow and in your content lifecycle.”

Building this cache of intelligence hasn’t always been glamorous work. Wei described years of “janitorial labor,” stitching together where the data comes from, how it’s normalized, and how it connects to outcomes. This throws water at any overnight AEO products that have sprung up in response to market hype, providing a truly unique facet that isn’t easily replicated.

Wei told me in no uncertain terms what this means from a competitive perspective.

“Over time, they don't stand a chance, in my opinion,” she said, speaking of the other market solutions entering the gambit. “Our really durable IP, the really durable moat, is the years and years of doing the grunt work that nobody wants to talk about.”

This is the irreplicable advantage that AgentStack taps into. It’s Conductor's data-enabled connective tissue – not just the agents – that Wei sees as the real long-term bet.

Turning AEO confusion into actionable insight

For many organizations, AEO is both urgent and opaque. As we’ve discussed on recent episodes of the Matt & Matt Show (where we offer hot takes on hot topics across the CMS and DX industries), the C-suite is suddenly paying attention, and the primary question is universal: What’s happening to our brand in AI answers, and what can we do about it?

Marketing teams are feeling this pressure. The problem? They’re accustomed to having proven tools to manage SEO, and this new landscape feels a bit like landing on the moon. There’s rampant uncertainty – and a lack of grounded trust in whether any tools can deliver tangible results. All of this is compounded by a searing pressure from above to address the crisis of waning traffic.

“Things have changed, but people are slow to adapt to this new reality,” Wei said. “The slowness doesn't just come from questions like, ‘What data do I need to track now?’ or ‘What metrics do I need to care about?’ But it's this insane expectation that with AI, you should be able to 10x your output with one-tenth the effort.”

Meanwhile, raw LLM interfaces promise magic – as they’re prone to do – but often produce noise. Ask ChatGPT for an AEO diagnosis and it will happily conjure something that sounds credible. The problem, as Wei pointed out, is that these answers aren’t reinforced by the context of your brand.

“It will always give you an answer,” she said. “How good are those answers? They’re not grounded in real intelligence or real data, like your web pages, your brand voice, and even your wisdom.”

AgentStack’s architecture is essentially a remedy to this pattern. In this sense, Conductor is trying to bring real value and discipline to AI performance. “You should be able to use ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, and Gemini as a conversational interface,” Wei said. “We should absolutely encourage AI tool adoption, but it's not to ask random questions. You actually need to hook these tools into real sources, and this is where Conductor comes in.”

By wiring those conversational layers directly into Conductor’s intelligence, AgentStack turns AEO from an abstract concept into something marketers can measure, interrogate, and act on – with agents that are aware of a brand’s reality rather than just guessing at it.

A three-layered architecture for enterprise AEO

Like the Artemis SLS rocket system, AgentStack has a smart architecture powering its capabilities. It’s really three products in one, designed to accommodate different levels of technical maturity inside the enterprise. Some teams want to live in ChatGPT and Copilot. Others want APIs. And there are those who crave a finished application that just works.

“We wanted to build a set of tools for marketers that meets them where they are today,” Wei explained. “When I say ‘meets them where they are,’ I mean both in terms of their maturity from an organizational perspective, as well as from an AI technology perspective.”

For those already using LLMs, Conductor provides native apps that sit inside tools like ChatGPT via an MCP connector. Customers authenticate and immediately get access to their real AEO and SEO performance data in a conversational format, without sending sensitive information into a black box.

“If they're a Conductor customer, they can authenticate, knowing that there’s enterprise-grade security, and that the data has been blessed and tested,” Wei explained.

“We wanted to build a set of tools for marketers that meets them where they are today. When I say ‘meets them where they are,’ I mean both in terms of their maturity from an organizational perspective, as well as from an AI technology perspective.”

The second layer is aimed at builders: agencies, ISVs, and internal dev teams that want to compose their own agent ecosystems. Here, Conductor exposes its intelligence via an MCP server and APIs that speak the same language as modern agent platforms.

“By plugging our data and intelligence into those stacks,” she continued, “we’re all of a sudden enabling a flourish of third-party applications and third-party workflows.”

The third layer – the icing on the digital cake, so to speak – is where Conductor takes the wheel with turnkey agents built on top of its own stack. Its content-focused agent, for example, allows a user to set goals about what they’re trying to accomplish. AgentStack coordinates multiple agents to research opportunities, assess existing content, propose new topics, and modify assets – all grounded in your performance data and within brand parameters.

The best part? No code required. In practice, that means marketers get the upside of agentic AI without having to become prompt engineers or low-code developers to realize value.

“It doesn’t require you to have coding skills,” Wei emphasized. “And it doesn’t require you to have ChatGPT access. It just requires a web browser. We’re the ones spending the tokens, doing all the background work, and providing a turnkey solution for the end user.”

Where Conductor clicks with agencies

As I just mentioned, agencies are a part of the layered recipe for AgentStack, which is opening up new and more fruitful partnerships. Conductor has historically focused on direct enterprise relationships, as large SEO platforms were often perceived as agency competitors when it came to services budgets.

According to Wei, the rise of agents and AEO has changed that calculus. In fact, established vendors like Optimizely, Razorfish, Havas, and IBM are already building on AgentStack for their clients.

“Finally, we found a way to really, truly coexist without crossing into each other's distribution channels,” she said. “Most of these agencies are saying, ‘We don't want to do the thing you do.’ They don’t want to engineer all this complex singing, dancing, and integrating with 15 different agents, and ultimately building an orchestration stack. That's our expertise. We provide a pretty narrow but very critical data and intelligence signal for how brands are presented in AI.”

In this rush to AEO, agencies are realizing they need a serious and effective production layer if they want to deliver credible agentic strategies to their clients. But they need it yesterday – and that’s where a partnership with Conductor is manifesting as a strategic play.

In response, Conductor is investing in these relationships with intention – more than at any point in its history. “We have so many people calling us,” Wei shared. “We've actually hired someone recently to head up our partner and alliance strategy.”

In this hyperbolic and often confusing chapter of the AI journey, enterprises and their partners need help. Badly. In my own conversations with multiple agencies – including a recent interview with Razorfish’s SVP and National SEM Lead at Amos Ductan – it’s clear that AEO is serving as a “wedge” issue, opening up opportunities for companies to optimize in new ways for the AI economy. It's not surprising to see these synergies emerge.

The verdict

We can all feel it: we're living in an “agent world” right now. Cutting through the chaos is getting increasingly difficult. But Artemis captured everyone’s attention by going boldly into the unknown – and daring to lead in new ways.

Conductor isn’t just reacting to this market shift. They’re taking their own moonshot. But it’s been thoughtful surrounding the execution. AgentStack isn’t a rushed AI feature bolted onto its existing SEO product, it’s a logical expression of what they've been building for years: a dense, well-structured intelligence layer about how brands are discovered and represented across search.

The difference now is that this intelligence is being wired directly into agents, APIs, and turnkey workflows that are explicitly designed for the realities of AEO. And at a time when traffic is bleeding, AI answers are ascendant, and AEO is echoing across boardrooms, Conductor is offering something refreshingly concrete with its AgentStack vision, grounded in its truly differentiated value: data.

My Recommendation: If you’re an enterprise wrestling with AI-driven visibility, Conductor’s AgentStack is an evolutionary step built on years of a rock-solid foundation. It gives you a way to plug trustworthy intelligence into the agents and platforms you already use, while offering turnkey options for teams that simply need to execute. For agencies, AgentStack could be a smart ecosystem bet for its robust, enterprise-grade foundation for building your own AEO practices – enabling you to focus on strategy and client outcomes while Conductor handles the complexity of enhancing AI search visibility and agent orchestration.

It's early days for this feature set, and there are many choices emerging in this space. Demo thoughtfully as you evaluate tools, and pay close attention to the fit based on your enterprise needs, specifically cost. That’s a big one, as it's sometimes a black box. I do love the rapid-fire, board-worthy AI briefings and competitive benchmarks that can be generated from AgentStack in minutes, so there are intangible benefits that go beyond the core functionality.

If you want to fly, I’d consider putting Conductor on your launchpad.

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All Systems Go for AEO: Conductor’s AgentStack Aims to Power the Next Era of AI Search Visibility