Buffer

40%+ of Buffer's new signups now come from AEO and LLM-driven discovery. We only know that because we ask them. If we relied on click-based attribution, this channel would look like a rounding error. The number comes from a "how did you hear about us" question during onboarding. Without it, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and the rest would barely register in our analytics. Referrer data is patchy, the journey is multi-touch, and the click that eventually converts usually shows up as direct or branded search. Two things this has clarified for me: Traditional attribution is already broken for what is, for many products, the largest potential growth surface. If your team is making investment decisions only on what shows up in GA4 or your warehouse, you're underweighting AEO by an order of magnitude. Self-attribution surveys aren't a nice-to-have here. They're one of the few ways to see this channel at all. And AEO isn't something you hack your way into. We work on it deliberately at Buffer, but the work sits upstream of the citation: clear positioning, content worth referencing, and real presence in the places people talk about tools. The brands that LLMs surface have product credibility and honest third-party coverage behind them. You earn citations by being worth referencing, not by optimizing for them. The discovery layer changed quickly. The fundamentals that earn you a place in it haven't.

TIL that you can use keyboard shortcuts in Buffer 🤯 I've been using Buffer for 11 years, and somehow I never knew this existed until I stumbled across it in their help docs. This discovery made me wonder what I'd missed in other tools I use every day, so I went looking for shortcuts. Here's what I found: Slack - Hit cmd+z within 15 seconds of sending a message to unsend it - Cmd+shift+\ opens the emoji picker Todoist - When the app is open, hit f to find a task, q to open quick add - When it's running in the background, set global custom hotkeys to trigger quick add a task, quick Ramble, and show Todoist Visual Studio Code - Cmd+K, then Cmd+T opens the theme picker (I toggle between light and dark modes, depending on what I'm working on) TextExpander - Cmd+/ opens inline search If you're wondering why I'm geeking out over this, it's pretty simple: keyboard shortcuts make work faster. For me, once they become muscle memory, I'm just doing the thing instead of thinking about doing the thing. And when you can customize them it's even better, because that lets you work in a way that works for YOU. I wrote more about setting custom keyboard shortcuts on a Mac here. https://lnkd.in/ev7VvvY9

So much action and reflection throughout our AI Native talks at Buffer company retreat! Doodle featuring AI as the tool rather than the goal.

This week our team is together in Barcelona for Buffer's company retreat. We're a fully remote, distributed team — most of us only meet in person once or twice a year. So these retreats have a different weight than the usual team offsite. You're not just catching up on work. You're catching up on *people*. The conversations that matter most don't happen in scheduled sessions. They happen over dinner, walking between venues, waiting for coffee. The kind of context you only pick up when you're actually in the same room. One of my goals is to come back with clearer thinking on a few things I'd been going back and forth on for the last weeks. Talking through them out loud with the people who care about the same problems changes how you see them. Remote work is real and it works. But I'm also grateful we still make space for this time together. Does your team do in-person retreats? What makes them worth it for you?

Most tech workplaces treat vulnerability as a liability. At Buffer, we schedule it. The team is currently in Barcelona for our annual retreat, and one of my favourite traditions is something called Personal Stories. You're put into a small group of four, randomly, which means it's not uncommon to find our CEO sitting with someone from support, an engineer, and a data analyst. It's a mix of crafts, geographies, and levels you'd rarely see in the same room. Each night, two people share their story: • Where they came from. • The defining moments of their life. • The stuff that shapes how they show up at work. When I attended my first Personal Stories session years ago, it felt alien to me. But I've seen how that kind of connection can shift teams, building empathy you can't manufacture on Zoom, giving people real perspective on why others operate the way they do, and creating trust that compounds long after the retreat ends. The reason it works is the part most companies avoid: shared vulnerability. Talking about mental health, family, hard chapters, and identity without worrying it'll change how you're seen by your peers or your execs. In most tech environments, that kind of openness carries real risk, so people learn to keep it out of work and end up staying strangers, even on tight teams. But vulnerability builds bonds that push the work forward in a meaningful way, and it's part of what makes a place like Buffer truly special.

Buffer's 2026 Barcelona retreat snapshot! 🇪🇸