Optimizely Tackles AI's 'Black Box' with New AEO Platform, Conductor Pact

NEW YORK, NY – June 10, 2026 – As generative AI reshapes how information is discovered and consumed, enterprise marketers have been grappling with a critical visibility gap: a digital black box where they have little insight into how AI models use their content. Today, digital experience platform (DXP) provider Optimizely announced a major move to illuminate this space, launching a comprehensive Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) platform powered by a new strategic partnership with AEO leader Conductor.

The new offering combines Optimizely's new Agent Visibility Analytics, which provides factual, log-level data on AI agent activity, with Conductor's vast repository of search and AI discovery intelligence. By integrating these capabilities with a new suite of autonomous agents, Optimizely aims to give marketers not just a view into the black box, but the tools to act on what they find, marking a significant step in the evolution from traditional SEO to a new era of AI-driven discovery.

The New Visibility Imperative: From SEO to AEO

The tectonic plates of digital marketing are shifting. For two decades, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been the bedrock of digital discovery, a practice focused on climbing the rankings of search engine results pages. But the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews has introduced a new paradigm. Users are increasingly turning to these "answer engines" for direct, synthesized responses, bypassing the traditional list of blue links.

This shift presents a profound challenge for businesses. Industry analysts are already predicting its impact, with Gartner forecasting a 25% drop in traffic from traditional search engines by 2026. As users adopt AI for research and purchasing decisions, the new currency of visibility is not page rank, but citation. The critical questions for every Chief Marketing Officer have become: Is our brand being mentioned in these AI-generated answers? Is the information accurate? And what content are the AI's retrieval agents actually consuming from our websites?

Until now, answering these questions has involved guesswork and incomplete signals. "AI has created a new discovery layer, and most marketing teams are still trying to measure it with only partial signals," said Shafqat Islam, President at Optimizely, in a statement. He criticized existing methods as being built "in a vacuum," without a grounding in real user search behavior or the actual activity of AI agents on corporate websites.

A Two-Pronged Attack on the AI Black Box

Optimizely's strategy to crack open this black box is twofold, combining granular, factual data with broad market intelligence.

The first component is the newly unveiled Agent Visibility Analytics. Built within the Optimizely Analytics suite, this tool moves beyond inferred or modeled data. It taps directly into a company's own server logs to provide a factual record of which AI agents and crawlers are visiting the site, what content they are accessing, and for what purpose—be it retrieval for an answer, indexing for a model, or training. This allows marketers to see, for the first time, not what an AI might be doing, but what it is actually doing.

"Beyond visibility tracking, CMOs also need to know what agents are actually doing on their sites," Islam emphasized. "The next phase of AEO has to be grounded in real behavior."

The second, and equally crucial, component is the strategic partnership with Conductor. While Optimizely's analytics reveal the "what" of AI activity on a brand's own domain, Conductor provides the "why" and the broader market context. Conductor, a leader in the AEO and SEO space, has built an enterprise-grade data engine based on over a decade of analyzing billions of search queries. By integrating Conductor's AEO intelligence, Optimizely's platform can now connect observed AI agent behavior with what real people are searching for, how competitors are performing in AI answers, and where the most valuable content opportunities lie.

"AEO only works with scaled, enterprise-class intelligence," noted Seth Besmertnik, CEO and Co-founder of Conductor. "Your strategy and your actions are only as strong as the foundational data behind them. When the market-leading DXP chooses you to exclusively power their AEO data pipeline, that's a real testament to what we've built."

From Insights to Autonomous Action

Data and dashboards are only half the battle. The true value lies in turning insight into action, a process Optimizely is aiming to automate. The AEO platform is deeply integrated with Optimizely Opal, the company's AI orchestration layer, and introduces a new library of pre-built autonomous agents designed to act on the data provided by Agent Visibility Analytics and Conductor.

Three new agents were announced as part of the launch:
* AEO Gap Finding Agent: This agent cross-references a company's content with Conductor's AI search data to identify high-priority topics where the brand is losing to competitors, delivering a prioritized plan to close those gaps.
* Competitive AI Share of Voice Agent: This provides an automated benchmark of a brand's visibility in AI answers against its key competitors across different topics, highlighting top priorities for improvement.
* AI Brand Visibility Report Agent: This agent automatically generates comprehensive reports on brand ranking, share of voice, and sentiment within major AI engines, complete with actionable next steps.

This move toward agentic workflows reflects a broader industry trend. As one marketing technology analyst noted, "The real differentiator for DXP vendors in 2025 and beyond will be 'agentic orchestration'—the ability to not just present data, but to have AI agents intelligently and autonomously execute tasks based on that data." Optimizely is positioning itself at the forefront of this shift.

Reshaping the Enterprise Marketing Stack

Optimizely's announcement is a clear signal of intent in the increasingly competitive DXP market. While competitors like Adobe and Sitecore are also heavily investing in generative AI, Optimizely's approach—fusing factual log-level AI traffic data with premier AEO intelligence and wrapping it in an agentic framework—creates a distinct and compelling offering.

The partnership effectively combines a best-in-class DXP and experimentation platform with a best-in-class AEO data engine, creating a unified system for managing what is arguably the most significant channel shift in a generation. For enterprise marketers, it offers the promise of moving from a reactive, uncertain posture toward AI to a proactive, data-driven strategy. It reframes the goal from simply optimizing a webpage for a search engine to strategically managing a brand's information landscape to ensure it becomes a trusted, authoritative source for the AI models that now mediate a growing portion of human knowledge.