There's a new reason brands are willing to pay you money, and it has nothing to do with your follower count.

It's called AEO. Answer Engine Optimization. And it means tools like ChatGPT and Claude are now citing creators the same way they'd cite a magazine or a news outlet.

I sat down with Kaleigh Moore, an AI search strategist who works with B2B brands, to break down exactly how this works and how you can pitch it. If you've ever felt like your reach was too small to land bigger deals, this one's going to mess with your head a little. In a good way.

Why Brands Care About This Right Now

I asked Kaleigh to pretend I was a brand. Sales call. Elevator pitch. Why should I care about creator AEO?

Here's how she broke it down: the further a source is from a brand's own control, the more trustworthy it looks to an LLM. Creators and influencers are exactly those sources. Subject matter experts. Existing audiences. High-trust signals.

And the more niche you are, the more valuable you are as a partner. Because when a brand needs someone external who can talk about their product and actually answer questions, generic content doesn't cut it. Specificity does.

So I pushed back a little. Why not just hire a content marketer to write listicles and rank on the blog, the old-school SEO way?

Here's the thing. You still can. But creators come pre-loaded with something a content marketer doesn't have: an audience that already trusts them on one specific topic. And on platforms like LinkedIn, articles get cited by these tools in as little as 24 hours.

One in three searches now start with an AI tool instead of Google. That adoption curve is moving faster than anything Kaleigh has seen in her career, and she was a journalist at Forbes before this.

The Client Making Real Money From a Tiny Audience

Kaleigh gave me a real example that stuck with me. Her client, Dr. Alex, runs a podcast called Digital Pathology Place. She's a veterinarian who nerds out on AI applications in histopathology.

Her downloads? Hundreds. Not thousands.

But medical device companies and pharmaceutical brands are banging down her door. Why? Because she is the voice in an extremely narrow lane, and that specificity is exactly what an LLM needs to build trust around a topic.

There it is. That's the whole game. You don't need reach. You need to be unmistakably the person who talks about one specific thing.

If you're sitting there thinking your audience is too small to matter for sponsorships, this should reframe how you think about your own numbers.

Three Things You Can Start Doing This Week

I asked Kaleigh how someone would actually execute this. She gave me three moves, and none of them require you to become an AI expert.

Start a LinkedIn newsletter. If you already have one, syndicate it. LinkedIn has a high domain ranking and gets crawled daily, so every article you publish is a fresh shot at earning a citation. You don't need to create anything new. Just put out what you already have.

Build a named framework. Three or four words, max, that describe how you talk about your topic. Kaleigh uses "the Source Signal Stack" to explain why LLMs trust certain sources. The LLM needs something to grab onto. Vague expertise doesn't get remembered. A named framework does.

Start making video. Get on YouTube and proactively answer the questions your audience is already asking. When an answer engine gets that same question, you want to already be sitting there with the answer.

Beyond LinkedIn and YouTube, Reddit is the third major platform Kaleigh watches. She admitted she doesn't fully understand what works there, but she's had people tell her they found her through a random subreddit answer. Worth paying attention to, even if it's not your main channel.

85% of citations happen off of your own website, by the way. Not your blog. Not your landing pages. Third-party platforms where the conversation is already happening.

The Question That Kills Every Negotiation

Here's the part that's going to save you from making a promise you can't keep.

If a brand asks you to guarantee they'll get cited in LLMs within three months, the honest answer is: you can't. Nobody can. Even Kaleigh, who's been living in this space for six months, can't tell you exactly how citation algorithms work. It's a black box, and everyone is reverse-engineering it in real time.

What would you do if a brand pushed you for that guarantee anyway?

Kaleigh's answer is the one to steal: "I can never promise it'll get cited, but what I can promise is that it'll be tracked." She runs weekly checks across major engines and reports results back. No overpromising. Just consistent, honest measurement.

That's not a weakness in the pitch. That's the pitch. Brands are so used to creators overselling vague metrics that a strategist who says "here's exactly what I'll track and how often" stands out immediately.

She also uses a tool called Sauce to track her own LinkedIn and YouTube citations over time, because here's the uncomfortable truth: citations aren't permanent. You earn one, and then you have to keep earning it. It's the old SEO problem all over again, just with a new interface.

If You Don't Have a Track Record Yet

I asked Kaleigh to talk a nervous creator off the ledge. Someone who isn't an AI expert, doesn't have case studies, and is wondering who they even are to pitch this to a brand.

Her answer: get specific about who you are and who you're talking to. Not "creators." Not "marketers." A defined slice of a defined audience. Then build your named framework and start talking about it every single week.

She was blunt about the hard part too. If you've never done customer research or had real conversations with your audience, answering "I'm a creator who talks about ___ to ___" is genuinely difficult. That's not a you problem. That's most creators.

Screw what's normal. Strive to be abnormal. The creators who can answer that sentence cleanly are the ones who are going to get the calls.

Pricing Something Nobody Has Priced Before

This is genuinely new territory, and Kaleigh was refreshingly honest that she's still figuring it out. Her own words: "I have overquoted, I have underquoted."

Her process now: she plugs her audience demographics into Claude, asks for pricing ranges based on her specific niche and audience value, and then pushes toward the upper end until she starts getting pushback. That's how she finds the ceiling.

For context, her audience is B2B software buyers making purchasing decisions worth six figures a year. That audience is worth a premium, and she prices accordingly. Your number depends entirely on who's actually listening to you and what they're worth to the brand sitting across the table.

The Contract Clause Nobody's Talking About

This part came up almost as an aside, but it might be the most important thing in this whole conversation.

One of our Wizard's Guild members recently brought us a contract that granted the brand rights to train their own AI on the creator's content. No limits on duration. No restrictions on use.

Kaleigh flagged something we hadn't even considered: make sure your contract explicitly states the brand can't use your likeness to AI-generate a version of you for future ads. Without that line, you could hand over your content today and end up seeing an AI version of yourself in an ad campaign a year from now that you never agreed to.

Beyond the AI training clause, ask about usage rights the old-fashioned way too. Where will this run? US only, or globally? For how long? On what channels? Is this becoming a TV ad? Could you turn on your television one day and see yourself?

Read every word of these agreements before you sign. This is exactly the kind of clause that gets missed when everyone's excited about a new format.

Why You Shouldn't Sit This One Out

I told Kaleigh this whole conversation reminded me of the early short-form video shift. My wife and I had built a long-form YouTube channel for over a decade, and when short form exploded, we resisted it. Ego, humility, exhaustion, probably all three. It felt like one more thing on an already overloaded content treadmill.

Looking back, that hesitation cost us time we didn't need to lose.

Kaleigh's take: resist the urge to be skeptical. Be an early adopter. Every time she's done that in her career, it's paid off, and she's only six months into this AI search pivot herself. She left a stable content agency with year-long contracts to bet on this full-time, and by her own admission, it was terrifying.

But the pattern holds. The creators who get ahead of a shift always look a little uncomfortable doing it first.

If you want to hear about the deal I was negotiating with Perplexity that fell apart at the very last minute, along with the exact proposal I sent them, check out this episode right here.

Want the full framework for turning your existing audience into consistent sponsorship revenue? My book, Sponsor Magnet, walks through exactly how to position yourself for brands, no matter your niche or audience size.

If you want hands-on help pricing deals, building your pitch, and navigating contracts like the one above, that's exactly what we work through inside Wizard's Guild. Come build your pitch with us.

What's the one specific thing you'd want an AI tool to know you as the go-to source on?