How Calm Got Ahead of the Biggest Shift in Search in Under 2 Months

Under Greg Justice's leadership as Chief Content Officer, Calm had built one of the most effective content engines in consumer wellness — consistently outpacing competitors in organic traffic, app downloads, and brand awareness.

Then the traffic data started telling a new story. Referrals from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI-powered tools were climbing. But with AI-generated answers, the picture looked different. When consumers asked an AI tool which meditation app to try, Calm wasn't always the recommended answer. Greg and his team recognized it immediately: AEO wasn't a trend to monitor — it was a channel to own.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) has become the loudest conversation in marketing. “Between the cold emails, the LinkedIn feeds, and people talking about it casually at work, it's an area that is top of mind for everyone,” says Jane Shin, Calm's Marketing Strategy Director.

She and her team ran their own investigation into AEO — evaluating tools, mapping the landscape, and identifying what an actionable strategy would actually require. The conclusion was clear: visibility data was available. Guidance on how to act on it wasn't.

John Stephens, Calm SEO Consultant from Once an SEO Always an SEO, was already tracking AI-referred traffic through Google Analytics, monitoring LLM behavior, and building his own frameworks to fill the gaps. But the deeper challenge was structural.

The challenge wasn't a lack of expertise — it was a lack of infrastructure. “In SEO, we've always had the demand side of it: the search volume for keywords. There's no such equivalent with generative engines,” John explains. Even the most analytically rigorous teams are working from hypotheses, testing assumptions in a channel that hasn't yet developed the measurement tools SEO spent decades building.

Greg had been tracking the AEO landscape and recommended Tallee's AI visibility and optimization platform. John had sat through more than a dozen AEO vendor pitches, and most tools surfaced competitive visibility data without a single recommendation for improving it. Tallee's team told a different story: real clients and documented results to back it up. Five minutes into the meeting, John Slacked Jane from the call: “This is legit.” The team's verdict was unanimous.

Tallee's engagement opened with a structured brief. Before anything was measured or reported, they sat down with Greg's team to define which content categories were priorities, which queries were worth tracking, and what success needed to look like.

It was a true partnership from the outset. John brought the SEO-native frame, Jane brought the content operations lens, and Tallee brought the AEO perspective. Tallee seeded the process with keyword and question starters mapped to Calm's content categories. That combination surfaced a clear, stack-ranked view of exactly where Calm needed to show up in AI-generated answers — and a concrete plan to get there.

A Forward-Deployed Team, Not Another Tool

Tallee's forward-deployed team embeds directly into Calm's operation. Unlike most AEO tools that hand over a dashboard and a standard playbook — and leave execution to whichever team has the bandwidth to figure it out — Tallee works closely with Calm to drive implementation and results.

“What differentiated Tallee for us is the fact that they give concrete steps for how we can get there.”

Bi-weekly syncs, ongoing async threads, and a direct line between Greg's team and Tallee keep strategy and execution tightly connected. As Jane puts it, “What differentiated Tallee for us is the fact that they give concrete steps for how we can get there.”

“Closing the loop between what we're actually seeing and what we're actually doing — and doing it continuously — is how you win. Tallee seems to have that in their DNA.”

For Calm's lean team, this meant they could move on AEO with confidence. “Closing the loop between what we're actually seeing and what we're actually doing — and doing it continuously — is how you win,” explains John. “Tallee seems to have that in their DNA.”

Is Calm the answer, or isn't it?

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Action-Oriented, Not Just Scored

Where most AEO platforms surface visibility scores, share of voice, and sentiment, leaving the client to determine what any of it means, Tallee reframed the question entirely for Greg and his team.

Instead of another dashboard to interpret, Tallee organizes its data around the question that actually drives decisions: “Is Calm the answer, or isn't it?” Query by query, across the categories that matter most, Calm has a clear view into how they stack up against their competitors. The platform surfaces a clear percentage, not a complex dataset to reverse-engineer. The insights are actionable from the moment they surface.

Tracing the Narrative Back to Its Source

Knowing what AI models are saying about a brand is only half the picture. Tallee traces Calm's brand narratives back to their origin. For Greg's team, it revealed a dimension of AEO they hadn't fully considered.

Shaping how AI models represent Calm wasn't just an on-site content challenge. The narratives feeding those models were being shaped across the entire web: through third-party mentions, external forums, and off-site surfaces that hadn't been on the team's radar. Tallee gave Calm a way to see it, trace it back to its source, and act on it with a measurable baseline where none had existed before.

As the partnership moves into execution, Tallee's recommendations will feed directly into Calm's content workflow, giving Greg's team a faster, more targeted path from AI visibility data to published output. For a lean operation already at full capacity, that's the difference between reacting to the AEO shift and staying ahead of it.

“In a matter of weeks, Tallee has changed how we think about AEO — and we're just getting started. We now know exactly where we stand, exactly what we need to do, and we have the right team alongside us to do it.”

Through their partnership with Tallee, Calm moved from fragmented AEO signals to a fully prioritized action plan, with a clear, query-by-query view of where the brand stood and exactly where it needed to go. For Greg and his team, that means the data is paired with actionable direction — without adding to an already full plate.