"If You Automate Without Judgment, You Just Produce Noise Faster": A Conversation with Jon Armitage on AI-Driven Discovery

A conversation with Jon Armitage, COO at Apartment List, on why this moment in marketing is different, and how we're building to win it.

What does a real AEO program actually consist of? How fast it can measure the channel and respond to what it finds. Apartment List tracks its citation share across AI platforms and runs weekly content optimization against that data. Position in this channel can move within weeks, which rewards teams measuring on that cadence over teams waiting on a quarterly report.

Last week we published our breakdown of the August citation shift, and why most of the viral charts about it don't survive scrutiny. Jon Armitage, our COO, sat down with us to talk about what's working on our side of that shift and what the citation data shows. He also explained why he thinks the next 12 months matter more than the last five years combined.

Let's start big. Why does this moment feel different to you than past marketing shifts?

Because it's a rare once-in-a-cycle chance for real disruption. Most years, marketing is incremental — you're optimizing the same channels a little better than last year. AEO and AI-based discovery aren't incremental. They're a new layer on top of everything that existed before, and the players who move first and build real technical depth get a durable head start. Speed, data, and technical excellence are where we think we can win.

But I'd push back on the assumption a lot of people are making right now, which is that more AI automatically equals winning. It doesn't. If you automate without judgment, you just produce noise faster. The companies that actually pull ahead are the ones that build a judgment layer into the automation — deciding what's worth publishing, what's worth targeting, what's worth saying — not just the ones that generate the most content or run the most agents.

You've built a hiring push around a "Marketing Engineer" role. What's the thinking there?

The honest goal with that role is: can we 100x marketing velocity? Not 10%, not double — a fundamentally different order of magnitude. Every new channel and platform shift adds to marketing's workload; it never replaces the old work, it stacks on top of it. Headcount can't keep scaling linearly against that. So instead of hiring our way through it, we're building people whose job is to find where automation creates real leverage — and where it doesn't — and build the systems that let judgment scale instead of just effort.

Paid marketing has always been a strength for Apartment List. How does that connect to what you're doing now?

It's actually the foundation. We've long been experts at running the flywheel between what multifamily communities need and how renters search — that's the core of our paid program for property management companies, and it's been a real strength for years. What's new is that we've recently expanded our core marketplace algorithms — the same ones that power matching and search on the renter side — into digital marketing itself. We're already seeing the value that brings. It means our paid targeting isn't just informed by marketing data; it's informed by real marketplace behavior, at a level most rental marketing partners can't replicate because they don't have a marketplace underneath them.

Let's talk AEO specifically — how are you approaching it?

We think of it as a triangle: data, technical scaling, and content, all working together. We work strategically with Profound to get visibility into how AI platforms are actually citing and representing us and our partners, and we connect directly into platforms like Reddit to see what's happening in the conversations that increasingly feed AI answers. That visibility is what powers the rest of the engine — it tells us where to put content, where to prioritize renter outreach, and where to shift paid targeting toward the opportunities we can actually see forming.

It's already paying off. We've built toward holding the #1 citation share among rental sites in tracked LLM answers — meaning when renters ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity about apartments or specific markets, our content is the one those models pull from most. We published over 300 AEO-optimized articles last quarter alone, and updates to existing content have driven traffic gains as high as 190% week over week on individual pages. Rent affordability content saw citation share grow nearly 10% in a single four-week window.

How fast can a property management company actually expect to see movement here?

Genuinely fast, and that's the part people underestimate. We see instant results in a lot of cases — the opportunity to change your position quickly, in a channel that's still being defined, is real. City-level content clusters we've focused on have posted 6–7% citation share gains within weeks of publication. That's a very different pace than traditional SEO, where you're often waiting months to see movement.

You've said you think this is "just getting started." What do you mean by that?

I mean it literally. There are thousands of individual data points that make up a brand's reputation externally — reviews, mentions, forum discussion, listing content, how AI platforms interpret all of it — and almost nobody has built a way to manage that consistently at scale. That's the opportunity. Not a one-off campaign, but a scaled model that keeps every one of those signals working in your favor, continuously, instead of hoping a few of them land right.

Where does partnership fit into this? You've talked about wanting to work more closely with others in the industry.

We're actively looking at ways to work more closely with partners across the industry, in ways that are genuinely mutually beneficial — not just us selling a service. A lot of what we're building is grounded in proprietary data: real renter search behavior, real pricing and market signals, real performance data across paid and organic channels. We want to partner around better shared intelligence on performance, so property management companies aren't just getting our output, they're getting sharper visibility into what's actually working for their own communities.

Last question — what would you tell a PMC that's watching AI reshape search and isn't sure where to start?

Start by asking who's actually building for this moment versus who's talking about it. A lot of the industry is still treating AEO like an SEO checklist item. We're treating it as a structural shift that touches data, content, paid, and product all at once — and we're moving on all of those fronts simultaneously, in-house, with real technical investment behind it. That's the partner you want in your corner right now: one that's not just reacting to the shift, but building the infrastructure to win it.

The Screening Question

Jon's advice to a PMC is worth taking literally. Ask who is building for this moment, and who is only describing it. That question works on any vendor sitting across from you in a budget meeting.

He clears his own bar here, with a role the company is hiring for and a measurement partner named on the record. Ask the same of whoever brings you an AI visibility pitch. If all they can tell you is that the shift is real, they are selling you news you have already read.

Operator Takeaway: A partner's measurement cadence tells you more than their forecast. In a channel where position changes inside a few weeks, a citation number tied to a specific window is the only proof worth budgeting against.

See How This Applies to Your Communities

Want to learn more about how Apartment List is helping property management companies show up in AI-driven search? [Reach out to our team →]

AEO Program FAQ: What Operators Ask

What does an AEO program actually include?

An AEO program has three parts: measurement of how AI platforms cite a brand, technical work that makes content readable to those systems, and the content itself. Measurement comes first, because the other two are guesses without it. Apartment List tracks citation share through Profound and runs weekly content optimization against that data.

How long does AEO take to show results?

AEO can show measurable results within weeks, while traditional SEO usually takes months. City-level content clusters at Apartment List have gained 6-7% citation share within weeks of publication. Individual page updates have driven traffic gains as high as 190% week over week. Position in AI answers moves in both directions at that speed, so gains require ongoing work to hold.

Does publishing more content improve AI visibility?

Publishing more content does not improve AI visibility on its own. Volume without a filter produces more pages for AI systems to ignore. Citation share moves when a company chooses which questions are worth answering and then checks whether the platforms responded. Apartment List published over 300 AEO-focused articles last quarter, all directed by what its citation tracking showed.

How should an operator evaluate an AEO partner?

A multifamily operator should evaluate an AEO partner by asking what that partner measures and how often. A credible answer names the AI platforms tracked and the date range a given number came from. Vague claims about AI visibility usually mean there is no measurement underneath and no way to verify the work later.