How Cybersecurity Companies Show Up When AI Is the One Answering the Question
Lessons I Took Away From My Conversation With Lee Cooper on AEO and the Future of Search
Search is changing fast. Not “someday” changing. Right now changing.
When I sat down with Lee Cooper, founder of Cooper Marketing, I wanted to cut through the panic and the hype around Google’s “AI Mode,” ChatGPT answering buying questions, Perplexity surfacing vendors before anyone hits a homepage.
The question isn’t “is SEO dead?”
The real question is: How do cybersecurity companies show up when their ICP goes to LLMs for answers about products and solutions?
Lee brought clarity, context, and a lot of hard-earned realism. Here are the biggest lessons that stuck with me.
You can watch the full vodcast below 👇
AEO Isn’t a Tactic. It’s a Shift in How People Ask Questions.
One of the most helpful things Lee did early in the conversation was reset expectations around AEO, Answer Engine Optimization.
This isn’t just SEO with a new acronym.
Traditional search forced people to compress real problems into a few keywords and hope for the best. AI flips that completely. Buyers are now asking long, specific, contextual questions like:
“What’s the best endpoint security tool for a small team with limited budget?”
“Which vendors have strong support and flexible contracts?”
“What are the real pros and cons of this platform?”
AI tools are good at answering those questions because they pull from content across the web. Not just your website.
Which leads to the uncomfortable truth.
If AI Is Summarizing the Web, You Need to Exist Beyond Your Website
Lee was very clear about this. If you want to show up in AI-generated answers, your brand can’t live only on your own domain.
AI pulls from:
Press coverage
Review sites
Community discussions
Comparison posts
Forums and UGC
That means brand mentions matter. A lot.
In some cases, a mention with no link is more powerful than a pristine backlink buried in an old guest post.
Why? Because AI is trying to answer a question, not reward publishers.
You Can’t Fake Trust at Scale
This part of the conversation hit hard, in a good way.
Lee shared how AI doesn’t just surface positive mentions. It surfaces sentiment. If customers are unhappy and saying so publicly, AI will reflect that.
Which means:
Bad support shows up
Unresolved reviews show up
Reputation gaps show up
There’s no optimization trick that fixes this.
Strong AEO starts post-sale:
A product that actually works
Customer success teams that respond
Issues addressed publicly and professionally
Marketing can’t out-run reality anymore. AI won’t let it.
Small Cyber Companies Aren’t Locked Out. They Just Need to Be Specific.
One of the most common fears I hear is that AI search will only benefit big brands.
Lee pushed back on that.
While big names still have advantages, AI search creates real opportunity in niche, long-tail questions that large vendors often ignore.
Smaller cybersecurity companies can win by:
Answering very specific problems extremely well
Publishing content tied to real buyer questions
Owning a narrow use case instead of chasing generic categories
AI doesn’t care who spent the most on backlinks. It cares who gave the clearest answer.
Sales Questions Are Moving Left. Way Left.
This was one of my biggest takeaways.
Buyers are now asking AI the questions that used to be saved for sales calls:
Pricing expectations
Contract flexibility
Deployment complexity
Support quality
Ideal customer profiles
If your site hides all of that behind “Contact Sales,” AI will say so. And buyers don’t love that answer.
Companies that win are the ones willing to:
Explain what they do well
Be honest about where they fit
Help buyers self-qualify before the demo
That doesn’t kill sales. It warms it up.
Don’t Optimize for the Algorithm. Optimize for the Searcher.
Lee dropped a line that I immediately underlined.
The algorithm is not the audience.
Trying to game AI is the fastest way to get ignored by it later. Models evolve. Shortcuts get neutralized. Spam gets discounted.
The consistent strategy is boring but effective:
Understand real customer questions
Answer them clearly
Make those answers easy to find across the web
That’s not new. It’s just harder to fake now.
You Don’t Need to Be Everywhere. You Need to Be Where Your Buyers Are.
One last practical insight I loved was Lee’s take on optimizing for specific AI models.
Different tools attract different audiences:
ChatGPT leans consumer-heavy
Claude is gaining traction with professionals and enterprises
Perplexity appeals to researchers and technical decision-makers
You don’t need to chase all of them. You need to understand which ones your buyers actually use and focus there.
Spray-and-pray doesn’t work in AI search either.
My Bottom Line
AI search isn’t killing visibility. It’s raising the bar for relevance.
If your content answers real questions, your customers talk about you positively, and your product delivers on what you promise, AI becomes an amplifier instead of a threat.
This conversation with Lee reinforced something I already believed, but needed to hear again.
Good marketing still starts with helping people.
If you want to go deeper, the full Community Spotlight conversation is worth watching. It’s practical, honest, and grounded in what’s actually happening right now.
More of this coming soon.
Learn More about Lee Cooper
Lee Cooper is an SEO strategist and the founder of Cooper Marketing, where he helps B2B tech and cybersecurity startups grow organic visibility in an increasingly AI-driven search landscape. His work focuses on sustainable search strategy, content that actually answers buyer questions, and helping smaller companies compete without relying on outdated SEO tricks.
If you want to dive deeper into Lee’s thinking or connect with him directly, here are the best places to do that:
🌐 Cooper Marketing – SEO strategy, resources, and client work
https://cooper-marketing.com/💼 LinkedIn – Practical insights on SEO, AEO, and the future of search
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leecooper6/
If you’re responsible for search, content, or GTM at a cybersecurity or B2B tech company, Lee is absolutely worth following.
