• HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan says she uses Sundays to think deeply about the week ahead.
• She sets hard mental limits about taking a day of rest on Saturday, she said in a recent podcast interview.
• In order to perform at her "peak," Rangan says a break is necessary.

HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan has a method to avoid the "Sunday scaries" — starting her workweek early.

"I'm not scared of Sundays," Rangan said on a recent episode of the Grit podcast. "I enjoy it because it's my time. I get to decide what I'm learning, what I'm doing, what I'm thinking, what I'm writing. It is completely my schedule. I have nothing else to disturb me except my own thoughts."

Rangan said there hasn't been a weekend in the past fifteen years that she hasn't been working, though she hedges that it's not always particularly grueling.

"I can't claim that I work really hard," she said. "I have a schedule that works for me."

Rangan said she uses the day to prepare, more than anything else. Keeping up with the ever-shifting trends within the tech industry demands a decent amount of study, she added — she often uses Sundays for catching up, learning, and "play."

"Sunday morning, it's a full workday for me, and it's my workday," Rangan said. "This is the time I read, this is the time I do deep thinking, this is the time I write. It's a full day."

Rangan has set a hard line, though. Whenever she's finally done with work on Friday night, she's firmly clocking out for her version of the weekend.

"Then what I try to do is, Friday night whenever I'm done — it might be 8, 9, 10 — whatever time I'm done on Friday, I don't touch my computer and I don't think about work 'til Sunday morning," Rangan said.

Her boundaries came about, in part, thanks to the blurring of the home and the workplace during the pandemic. Because there was no real distinction between her office and what had previously been places of rest, Rangan said she had to set mental limits.

"One of the things I found, especially post-COVID or during the pandemic, is that there was no constraint," she said. "Your office was two minutes away from your kitchen, and so you're working all the time."

The CEO said that when she does pause on Saturdays, she doesn't send out so much as an email, even if a board member is trying to get a hold of her.

"My team knows that most of the time, almost always, I will schedule it for Monday morning," Rangan said. "They're probably waiting for the 5 a.m. Monday morning string of emails from me. But I work on Sundays, and I think on Sundays, and I do everything, and then I send it out. That's my day. I enjoy my Sundays."

Monday through Friday, it's lots of meetings and long days.

"During the work week, I start probably around 6, 6:30, and my first call is at 7," she said. "Then it's a full day—lots of calls like everybody else. Then I'll have dinner with the kids and then I'll work 'till 11. That's my schedule. Any day is maybe 12, 14, 15 hours."

To operate at full capacity, Rangan says that stopping, even if only for a day, is a nonnegotiable.

"I've constrained myself on that to say I need a break," she said. "It's almost like peak performance requires peak rest. You do need to take breaks."

• "AEO" is replacing "SEO" as AI chatbots such as Sam Altman's ChatGPT change online discovery.
• AEO focuses on influencing AI chatbot responses. It's different from traditional keyword-driven SEO.
• AEO startups are rapidly emerging, raising venture capital, and analyzing growing AI-driven traffic.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the art and science of crafting websites and other online content so it shows up prominently when people Google something.

A massive industry of experts, advisors, gurus (and charlatans) has grown up around the interplay between Google, which purposely sets opaque rules, and website owners tweaking stuff and trying to work the system.

The rise of generative AI, large language models, and AI chatbots is changing all this — radically and quickly.

While SEO has long been a cornerstone of digital marketing strategy, a new paradigm is rapidly threatening to take its place: "answer engine optimization," or AEO.

As AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity become the front door to online discovery, AEO is emerging as a strategic imperative for growth. There's been an explosion of AEO startups and tools in recent months, all promising to help online businesses show up when chatbots and AI models answer user questions.

"There must have been 30 AEO product launches in the last few months, all trying to do what SEO did 20 years ago," said David Slater, a chief marketing officer who's worked at Mozilla, Salesforce, and other tech companies. "It's absolutely going to be a hot space."

What Is AEO?

AEO is SEO adapted for the world of conversational AI, says Ethan Smith, CEO of digital marketing firm Graphite Growth. He wrote an excellent blog recently about this new trend.

Where traditional SEO focused on optimizing for static keyword-driven queries, AEO centers on influencing how AI chatbots respond to user questions, he says. With tools like ChatGPT increasingly integrating real-time web search and surfacing clickable links, chat interfaces now function like hybrid search engines. The result is a fast feedback loop that makes influencing LLM outputs not just possible, but essential for online businesses.

Unlike SEO, where a landing page might target a single keyword, AEO pages must address clusters of related questions. Smith shares an example: Instead of optimizing a webpage for "project management software," AEO pages might answer dozens or even hundreds of variations such as "What's the best project management tool for remote teams?" or "Which project management platforms support API integration?"

Why ChatGPT's live web access makes AEO important

This shift didn't happen overnight. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, its responses were generated from outdated training data with no live web access. But over the past year, LLMs have started using retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, and other techniques that help them incorporate more real-time information. They often perform a live online search, for instance, and then summarize results in real time. This makes AEO both faster to influence and more dynamic than its SEO predecessor, Smith writes.

There's been some interest in AEO for about a year or so. But in early 2025, OpenAI's ChatGPT and other generative AI services began surfacing prominent links and citations in answers a lot more. That's when AEO really took off.

Now, AEO startups are raising venture capital, some online businesses are seeing conversion spikes from AI traffic, and there's been a Cambrian explosion of AEO analytics, tracking, and content tools.

Check out this list of AEO startups and tools, identified by Smith from Graphite Growth. There are a few established players in here, too, including HubSpot. (Overall, there are a lot, so click on the button in the top right of this table to see all the options!)

Looking into the 'brain' of an AI model

There's already a race to try to determine how these AI chatbots spit out results and recommendations, so website owners can hack their way to better online distribution in the new era of generative AI and large language models.

GPTrends is one of these up-and-coming AEO providers. David Kaufman, one of the entrepreneurs behind the firm, shared an interesting analysis recently on LinkedIn.

He said that AI search results from tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity are unpredictable. They can change even when you ask the same question multiple times. Unlike Google, where search results stay mostly the same, AI tools give different answers depending on how the model responds in the moment, Kaufman writes.

For example, Kaufman and his colleagues asked ChatGPT this question 100 times: "What's the best support ticketing software?" Then they tracked which providers appeared most often. Here are the results of the test:

Zendesk showed up in 94% of answers, while other companies, including Freshworks and Zoho, appeared less often and in different positions. This randomness gives less well-known brands a better shot at being seen, at least some of the time.

"Strategically, this means brands need to rethink how they optimize for discovery, focusing less on traditional SEO tactics and more on comprehensive, authoritative content that AI systems recognize as valuable," Kaufman writes.

When you really probe venture capitalists about investing in AI startups, they’ll tell you that businesses are experimenting wildly but are very slow to add AI solutions into their ongoing business processes.  But there are some exceptions. And one of them appears to be an area known as AI sales development representatives, or AI SDRs. […]

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