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Picture this: You’re looking for a dietitian-approved protein powder, a trail-running shoe that handles wet rocks, or the medicine a pediatric nurse gives her own kids. Two years ago, you’d type that into Google and click through a bunch of links. Today? You just ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini—and you roll with whatever answer it gives you.

That shift is massive. According to a recent SEMrush study, 55% of US consumers who use AI tools are tapping them for product research at least once a week, and half have actually bought something based on an AI recommendation. So, the question isn’t if your customers are asking AI about you—they absolutely are. The question is: Is AI giving them the right answer?

This is where Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) comes in. A whole new industry of tools has popped up to help brands manage this, and they’re getting pretty good. But there’s a huge blind spot in all of them—especially for brands that rely on influencers and creators.

The Infrastructure Problem Nobody Saw Coming
Here’s the brutal truth: according to McKinsey, your own brand’s website only accounts for 5 to 10% of the sources that AI search actually references. The other 90 to 95%? That comes from outside: product reviews, Reddit threads, YouTube videos, and creator posts.

At a recent conference, Lyle Stevens (Later’s CSO) nailed it: most brands are pouring money into optimizing the 5% they own, while completely ignoring the 95% that AI actually reads. To make it worse, most companies have an SEO team optimizing the website and a creator team running influencer campaigns—and they almost never talk to each other.

AI engines trust three specific types of content:

1. Brand-owned content (your website, your facts).
2. Creator content (expert reviews, deep-dive YouTube videos, Substack articles).
3. Community content (Reddit, forums, real user discussions).

Most AEO tools only handle the first one. They leave the other two on the table.

The Tool Landscape: What’s Out There (and What’s Missing)
Let’s look at the current players. They all do specific things well, but they all share the same gap.

• Profound is the big-data dashboard. It tracks your brand across 10+ AI engines. Great for seeing where you stand, but it’s pricey and requires an internal expert to make sense of it.
• AirOps connects the dots between AI gaps and content production. If you’re missing in a search result, it helps you write new web pages to fix it. However, it only tracks three AI engines (missing Perplexity and Claude).
• SEMrush is the classic SEO tool that now lets you track AI visibility. It’s perfect if you already live in the SEMrush ecosystem, but it’s a “visibility gauge”—it tells you the score but doesn’t help you actually play the game.
• Evertune digs deep into what AI models fundamentally believe about your brand versus what they show in real-time. Great if AI is spreading a misconception about you.
• Scrunch tracks nine AI engines and even links to Google Analytics so you can see actual traffic from AI referrals. It’s the most attribution-focused tool out there.

But here’s the catch: None of these tools can fix the 90-95% problem. They tell you about the gap, but they can’t actually create the third-party content needed to fill it.

The Creator Solution: How Later Fills the Gap
That’s exactly where Later’s Creator AEO steps in. We sit right on top of all those monitoring tools and act as the “activation layer.” If the platforms tell you where you’re missing, we actually go out and get you those citations using creators.

Here’s our 4-step playbook:

1. Find the Right Prompts: We figure out exactly what questions your customers are typing into AI. These become the foundation for every creator brief.
2. Pick the Right Creators (Follower Count Doesn’t Matter): This is key. We don’t look for the biggest influencers. We look for the authoritative ones—creators who have spent years making expert content in your space. AI indexes archives, not just viral TikTok dances.
3. Create Indexable Content: We activate these creators to produce long-form, authoritative content on the platforms AI loves most—think deep-dive YouTube videos, Substack newsletters, and detailed Reddit discussions.
4. Measure Real Impact: Using our EdgeAI tech (trained on over $2.9B in creator-driven purchases), we track your “Share of Model”—how often AI actually cites your brand in answers—and optimize from there.

The Bottom Line
McKinsey projects that a staggering $750 billion in US revenue will flow through AI-powered search by 2028. The infrastructure for this new world is being built right now. If you ignore the creator and community layer (that massive 95%), you’re essentially handing your competitors the keys to the kingdom. The brands that align their SEO and creator teams today will build a lead that’s nearly impossible to overtake.