The Sonora Method
Four stages for turning search into a source of leads.
- 01Listen
- 02Locate
- 03Saturate
- 04Sustain
01
Listen
What buyers actually search, and who currently gets the answer.
Everything starts with learning the market. Who else is in it, what they claim, and which of them get named when someone goes looking for a solution like yours.
Then the buyers. What they search, in their words, and where they are in the process. There’s a real difference between someone reading about a problem and someone comparing two vendors, and most content programs only serve the first.
Then the answers themselves. Who gets cited in AI results and search results for the questions that matter, which sources those answers draw from, and what it would take to be there instead.
And finally your own site, read the way a stranger reads it. When it says one thing and your competitors’ sites say the same thing in different words, that’s the finding.
02
Locate
The position you can own, in language a stranger understands.
Next we find your strongest differentiator — something your competitors can’t claim, that your buyers actually care about, and that you can hold onto for at least a year. It’s often not the thing the founder expects.
A stranger should be able to read one line and know what you sell and who it’s for. Most companies can’t manage that, usually because their homepage, sales deck, and documentation each answer it differently.
03
Saturate
Present across the whole path, not just the front of it.
Then the position goes out into the world, which is the part most engagements skip.
Lean teams spend around 90% of their effort on making content and 10% on distributing it. It should be closer to even. A page nobody finds is not a marketing asset.
That means three layers at once. Your owned content. The technical layer that decides whether a model can read you at all — structured data, clean served HTML, content not buried behind JavaScript. And the third-party surfaces that carry the most weight in AI answers: reviews, forums, comparison sites, press.
Those are the places. What matters just as much is where someone is in their process when they land. Most content programs pile everything at the front — explainers, definitions, problem-awareness posts — and put almost nothing at the point of decision. Comparison pages, alternatives pages, clear pricing, direct answers to the objections your sales calls keep hitting.
Ranking for the question that starts a search is worth very little if you’re missing from the page where it ends.
04
Sustain
Measurement that stays comparable quarter over quarter.
Last, we measure what happened — against pipeline rather than pageviews.
Every quarter: where you’re showing up in AI answers and search results, who’s showing up instead of you, and which sources those answers pull from.
Then the part most reporting skips — which queries and which pages are attached to real deals, and which are just producing traffic.
Common questions
How do I increase my pipeline?
Build the marketing engine first and the sales team second. A rep with no leads spends the week prospecting cold instead of closing, which is the slowest and most expensive way to create demand — and it’s why so many first sales hires don’t work out. Marketing that’s aimed correctly puts you in front of people at the moment they’re deciding, and it keeps working after the spend stops. Hire salespeople to work that flow, not to create it.
What is answer engine optimization?
Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is the practice of getting your company named and cited by AI systems that answer questions directly instead of returning a list of links. In practice it means making your site readable by models, structuring content so answers can be extracted from it, and getting into the third-party sources those models cite when describing your category.
How is AEO different from SEO?
SEO optimizes for ranking in a list of results; AEO optimizes for being named inside an answer where no list appears. Clean technical foundations help both, but AEO depends much more on third-party sources you don’t own, structured data, and whether your category has a term a model can attach to you.
How do you get cited by AI search engines?
Three conditions have to be met: the model can access and parse your content, your site describes what you are in consistent language, and the sources it trusts in your category already reference you. This applies across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews — the mechanics differ but the conditions don’t. Most companies fail the first or second and spend their budget on the third.
Does this actually generate leads?
Yes, and that’s the only reason to do it. The work targets the questions people ask when they’re close to spending money, not whatever has the most search volume. People who arrive from AI answers have usually already defined their problem and narrowed their options, which is why they convert at higher rates than general organic traffic.
How long before it shows up in pipeline?
Plan on six months. Training and retrieval cycles aren’t published, changes usually surface in retrieval-based engines like Perplexity before they appear elsewhere, and search compounds slowly by nature. Anyone promising results in thirty days is guessing.
See where you stand in AI and search.
Thirty minutes. Tell us what’s not working and we’ll tell you whether we can fix it.