Zoom CMO Kimberly Storin says a growing part of the job is now “optimizing how [Zoom] appear[s] in conversations with large language models like ChatGPT or Google Gemini.” Depending on who is making the deck, that work goes by answer engine optimization, AEO, generative engine optimization, GEO, or probably several other acronyms currently being laminated.
The goal is not just to have Zoom show up as the “industry standard” for videoconferencing — a Wall Street Journal interviewer noted that Gemini listed Zoom first, citing sources including Gartner. Storin’s bigger problem is getting LLMs to recognize Zoom for the parts of the business it is trying to grow as video meetings become a commodity: recruiter tools, contact centers, small-business phone service, webinars, and events.
The trigger, per Storin, came “last fall,” after a conversation with G2’s CMO and “hot, fresh data” showing that more people were starting product discovery on LLMs, and that the number had “shot up quickly.” Zoom’s response was to create a cross-functional “SWAT team” spanning SEO, content, web, data, and brand/media. The group meets weekly and uses what Storin calls an “agile marketing approach” for something that is not really a campaign so much as “fundamentally how we do work.”
The operational detail is the point. Storin says old SEO expertise does not automatically translate, because the problem is bigger than tuning keywords. It is about making sure LLMs “pull the right information,” down to whether FAQs are “built into every single page that they need to be.”
In B2B, the stakes are shortlist math. Storin says buyers spend “80%” of their time researching — “talking to ChatGPT,” asking peers, and reading online — before they will meet a vendor at all. That pushes Zoom into a strange new content posture where “authenticity” and executive presence become distribution mechanics. She cites an unnamed report saying LinkedIn is “number one” for LLM citing, with Reddit and Substack also “up there,” and says press releases “matter again” after years of telling teams to do fewer of them. Now, she says, they need to be “specifically designed for LLM pickup.”
The caveat is usefully unresolved. “Nobody can be on top of it,” Storin says. Which makes the whole program sound less like a solved channel than a culture shift into perpetual experimentation.
Full story at The Wall Street Journal.