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Most people who sell their agency spend the first year of the earnout looking over their shoulder. Fiona McKenzie proactively focused on quickly tearing down the walls between two businesses and building something new. Seven months on from the acquisition of her agency Revere by Marketbridge, she is out of earnout, off the legacy systems, and running a near-100-person European operation as its President. She is also, in the same breath, thinking about the CMOs who quietly ask her how to stay in their jobs for another two years.
Rich: What have your new American overlords actually put you on the hook for?
Fiona: Europe is a really strategic part of the overarching plan. Expanding beyond the US was a key strategic initiative and part of their growth strategy. My remit in the immediate term was to take the two businesses that are now together and form part of our European base. Revere has only just finished a very fast integration. We are out of earnout already. We are fully integrated. We are working as one team on the same P&L, everyone aligned, working towards common goals.
In the long term it is continued expansion in Europe across geographies, building out service capabilities aligned to the wider group model. But most importantly, every agency is evolving regardless of whether you are part of an acquisition or not. Clients are layering in AI, layering in technology. They have their own challenges. Agencies have to be evolving constantly to meet those needs.
“The real hard work happens the day you sell your agency. You have to be more present than ever as a leader.”
Rich: How on earth did you achieve so much so quickly? I would expect a typical earnout to be at least 12 months.
Fiona: A big part of the success was the fact that I spent a lot of time with Fiona Shepherd, who was leading Europe at the time, even ahead of the announcement. We had very transparent conversations, not just with her but with the rest of the leadership team. When you go into these discussions and you have decided that a particular brand is right for your agency’s next stage of growth, you have to go into the diligence phase and trust the process. Keep it human.
I spoke to any agency leader that would let me buy them lunch ahead of going through that process. I asked them for their war stories, understood the journey through the sales process, asked them what they would do differently. So, I felt I went in with my eyes open. I was almost overly human. I wanted to have conversations outside of all the spreadsheets and finance.
The advice I always give now is: if you are about to go out to market to sell your business, have a holiday before you go out, not after. Because the real hard work happens the day you sell your agency. You have to be more present than ever as a leader, not just to the team you have led but to the team you are going to be working with. And everyone has had their own journey of how they got there.
I practised what I preached on that one. We got to the point where we had a number of LOIs (Letter of Intents) and then we went on a two-week holiday and signed the LOI when we came back. So, we could go into diligence full throttle. I always do my best thinking on holiday. Your mind slows down, you think about the big picture, and you come back with real clarity on what comes next.
Bob Ray, our CEO, says something to people when he talks to them in smaller groups that has always stuck with me. He says: “no one here chose to work for Marketbridge”. So, you have to be really respectful. People chose to work for Revere. They ended up in here. I tried to over-communicate during the process to explain to people why it was the right move.
It was also a real divide and conquer effort on the integration itself. I cannot lead everything, nor can a few of us. You have to empower people in the right roles and trust them to get on with it. Seven months on and we are all on the same systems, working to the same goals. That allows you to move at pace. And that is what you need to do in this market.
Rich: It sounds like you went into a marriage wanting to build foundations and settle down, rather than going in thinking about what happens when you get divorced.
Fiona: Exactly. And as someone who has been through divorce, it can be a very complicated and traumatic experience. You can only make the right decision in the moment. My experience before Revere was a few other agency brands. I had had a little experience of acquisitions and mergers with other agencies, and sometimes you can have a happy divorce and sometimes it can be a really bad divorce.
In this instance, I was joining under Fiona Shepherd as the leader of Europe. I do not think at the time she necessarily had plans to step out so quickly. But I think she always had a vision for what Europe could look like. She really saw that our team would be the next step for that vision. And the success of the integration meant she felt she could step back and hand over the reins. She has been in this industry a long time and it is a big decision.
Now, funnily enough, everyone wants to buy me lunch. Which is quite good fun. You just do not have enough hours in the day.
Rich: I’ve heard you say that a lot of CMOs have lost their marketing mojo. Why?
Fiona: There are a large number of restructures that continue to take place. That creates fear in role. And there is a constant need to prove ROI. Essentially, they are in defence mode. There are very few businesses or marketing leaders that are able to step out into that proactive mode as much as they try, because they are exhausted. They constantly feel like they are fighting a battle and justifying their existence.
I very much see agencies as a comfort blanket for those CMOs, but also as their superpower. How can we be here to protect you? How can we help you? A lot of CMOs cannot open up to their teams. They cannot open up to wider stakeholders. So, my team and I become that outlet.
“A lot of CMOs cannot open up to their teams. They cannot open up to the wider stakeholders. So, we become that outlet.”
Rich: I see a lot of CMOs in a form of paralysis out of fear. Like the housing market. Sitting still, nervous to move, nervous to remodel.
Fiona: Yes. And I can tell you, having hosted my own event for people out of seat, people put on a brave face but underneath it there is real struggle. You get a real sense of what brands are expecting from CMOs when you speak to people trying to go into those roles. A lot of people are not even wanting the CMO role anymore, for that reason.
I went into a meeting with a CMO at a global enterprise organisation, someone I had seen online, clearly very capable from everything I had heard. My objective going in was to position our agency well. We had worked with her previous employer for over seven years, so I wanted to get in front of her early. As you build trust through the meeting, slowly people break down and expose how they really feel. At the end of the conversation, she flipped it entirely and turned to me and said: “what advice would you give me, so I am still in my role in two years?” I walked out and thought, God, what a turn of events. I walked in thinking about how to impress her. I left thinking about how to help her survive.
What CMOs need is to show that marketing is connected to revenue. They need to show that marketing is part of a revenue system. It needs to be process driven. And a lot of CMOs and marketing leaders did not come into marketing to do the role they are actually being asked to do today.
“I walked in thinking about how to impress her. I left thinking about how to help her survive.”
Rich: I see a lot of synergies with what happened 10 years ago when marketing automation came in. There was a misguided belief that it would make marketing cheaper. That same conversation has gone up a level again with AI.
Fiona: Exactly that. We are firmly adopting a very proactive and aggressive AI strategy. We did that at Revere and won a couple of awards for the work we did with that adoption. But it is not really about AI. It is about going back to what the client actually has a challenge on.
The conversation starts with AI. It very quickly moves away from AI and into what is it your business is trying to do, what are the goals you are trying to achieve, how can we work together to get you to those outcomes as effectively as possible. If that is using AI as a growth catalyst, great. If it is redefining your workflows, okay, let us look at that.
And for all the hype, we have to remember there are brands in very different situations. I was speaking to a CMO recently who has moved into a global role and is trying to redefine the central regional model. In reality, his team is barely doing digital marketing properly, let alone automated workflow. We have to meet people where they are.
One area where we have moved fast and seen real pickup is generative engine optimisation. We were pretty quick out of the blocks on the GEO story and have been running a lot of client projects in that space. But even there, you cannot look at it in isolation. It ties into a bigger story about how buyer behaviour is changing and how brands need to show up in a world where AI is increasingly part of the buying committee.
“The conversation starts with AI. It very quickly moves away from AI.”
Rich: How do you actually help CMOs get their mojo back then?
Fiona: Show them a roadmap to creating a growth system. There are so many directions of travel that people get pulled in, and CMOs just need to know they are on a roadmap. We cannot all change everything overnight. No leader can.
It is always about the roadmap and the process. You cannot ignore the business realities and the needs that have to be met in the short term, but ultimately you have to be visionary and make the right investments for the long term as well. Our job is to help them prioritise. Get some quick wins in. Do not overcomplicate it. But also help them prove investment to grow the roadmap toward long-term growth.
Ultimately that is where people get their mojo. They want to be doing stuff that is meaningful. We all got into marketing because we wanted to connect with the customer. Everything is about creating a connection. To get your mojo back is about having those human connections and feeling like you are making progress.
When people lose their mojo, things have got a bit messy. How do we strip it back? They need to be able to say no. They need to be able to prioritise. And it just seems to be, for the myriad of reasons we have discussed, increasingly hard for marketing leaders to do that.
“We all got into marketing because we wanted to connect with the customer. To get your mojo back is about having those human connections and feeling like you are making progress.”
Rich: What does success look like for you in 12 months’ time?
Fiona: Being recognised as a category creator and disruptor. Not a typical agency services model. A blend of consultancy services and agency services, bringing in new expertise, creating a new category as a leading growth and go-to-market business. Expanding beyond the CMO buyer, working into the C-suite.
I have this vision of being at your CMO roundtables and people saying: oh, you guys are a different kind of business, they would not consider themselves an agency, they consider themselves a company to support growth. That is what I want to hear. And I am going to be doing everything I can over the next 12 months to make sure we are seen that way.
I will be straight with you. I feel like I have gone from, and I probably would not normally describe it this way, but I will now, from a Championship club to the Premier League. We always felt like a Premier League brand. We just did not have the squad depth.
B2B Marketing United publishes practitioner-led content for senior B2B marketers. All editorial is independent.
Most people who sell their agency spend the first year of the earnout looking over their shoulder. Fiona McKenzie proactively focused on quickly tearing down the walls between two businesses and building something new. Seven months on from the acquisition of her agency Revere by Marketbridge, she is out of earnout, off the legacy systems, and running a near-100-person European operation as its President. She is also, in the same breath, thinking about the CMOs who quietly ask her how to stay in their jobs for another two years.
Rich: What have your new American overlords actually put you on the hook for?
Fiona: Europe is a really strategic part of the overarching plan. Expanding beyond the US was a key strategic initiative and part of their growth strategy. My remit in the immediate term was to take the two businesses that are now together and form part of our European base. Revere has only just finished a very fast integration. We are out of earnout already. We are fully integrated. We are working as one team on the same P&L, everyone aligned, working towards common goals.
In the long term it is continued expansion in Europe across geographies, building out service capabilities aligned to the wider group model. But most importantly, every agency is evolving regardless of whether you are part of an acquisition or not. Clients are layering in AI, layering in technology. They have their own challenges. Agencies have to be evolving constantly to meet those needs.
“The real hard work happens the day you sell your agency. You have to be more present than ever as a leader.”
Rich: How on earth did you achieve so much so quickly? I would expect a typical earnout to be at least 12 months.
Fiona: A big part of the success was the fact that I spent a lot of time with Fiona Shepherd, who was leading Europe at the time, even ahead of the announcement. We had very transparent conversations, not just with her but with the rest of the leadership team. When you go into these discussions and you have decided that a particular brand is right for your agency’s next stage of growth, you have to go into the diligence phase and trust the process. Keep it human.
I spoke to any agency leader that would let me buy them lunch ahead of going through that process. I asked them for their war stories, understood the journey through the sales process, asked them what they would do differently. So, I felt I went in with my eyes open. I was almost overly human. I wanted to have conversations outside of all the spreadsheets and finance.
The advice I always give now is: if you are about to go out to market to sell your business, have a holiday before you go out, not after. Because the real hard work happens the day you sell your agency. You have to be more present than ever as a leader, not just to the team you have led but to the team you are going to be working with. And everyone has had their own journey of how they got there.
I practised what I preached on that one. We got to the point where we had a number of LOIs (Letter of Intents) and then we went on a two-week holiday and signed the LOI when we came back. So, we could go into diligence full throttle. I always do my best thinking on holiday. Your mind slows down, you think about the big picture, and you come back with real clarity on what comes next.
Bob Ray, our CEO, says something to people when he talks to them in smaller groups that has always stuck with me. He says: “no one here chose to work for Marketbridge”. So, you have to be really respectful. People chose to work for Revere. They ended up in here. I tried to over-communicate during the process to explain to people why it was the right move.
It was also a real divide and conquer effort on the integration itself. I cannot lead everything, nor can a few of us. You have to empower people in the right roles and trust them to get on with it. Seven months on and we are all on the same systems, working to the same goals. That allows you to move at pace. And that is what you need to do in this market.
Rich: It sounds like you went into a marriage wanting to build foundations and settle down, rather than going in thinking about what happens when you get divorced.
Fiona: Exactly. And as someone who has been through divorce, it can be a very complicated and traumatic experience. You can only make the right decision in the moment. My experience before Revere was a few other agency brands. I had had a little experience of acquisitions and mergers with other agencies, and sometimes you can have a happy divorce and sometimes it can be a really bad divorce.
In this instance, I was joining under Fiona Shepherd as the leader of Europe. I do not think at the time she necessarily had plans to step out so quickly. But I think she always had a vision for what Europe could look like. She really saw that our team would be the next step for that vision. And the success of the integration meant she felt she could step back and hand over the reins. She has been in this industry a long time and it is a big decision.
Now, funnily enough, everyone wants to buy me lunch. Which is quite good fun. You just do not have enough hours in the day.
Rich: I’ve heard you say that a lot of CMOs have lost their marketing mojo. Why?
Fiona: There are a large number of restructures that continue to take place. That creates fear in role. And there is a constant need to prove ROI. Essentially, they are in defence mode. There are very few businesses or marketing leaders that are able to step out into that proactive mode as much as they try, because they are exhausted. They constantly feel like they are fighting a battle and justifying their existence.
I very much see agencies as a comfort blanket for those CMOs, but also as their superpower. How can we be here to protect you? How can we help you? A lot of CMOs cannot open up to their teams. They cannot open up to wider stakeholders. So, my team and I become that outlet.
“A lot of CMOs cannot open up to their teams. They cannot open up to the wider stakeholders. So, we become that outlet.”
Rich: I see a lot of CMOs in a form of paralysis out of fear. Like the housing market. Sitting still, nervous to move, nervous to remodel.
Fiona: Yes. And I can tell you, having hosted my own event for people out of seat, people put on a brave face but underneath it there is real struggle. You get a real sense of what brands are expecting from CMOs when you speak to people trying to go into those roles. A lot of people are not even wanting the CMO role anymore, for that reason.
I went into a meeting with a CMO at a global enterprise organisation, someone I had seen online, clearly very capable from everything I had heard. My objective going in was to position our agency well. We had worked with her previous employer for over seven years, so I wanted to get in front of her early. As you build trust through the meeting, slowly people break down and expose how they really feel. At the end of the conversation, she flipped it entirely and turned to me and said: “what advice would you give me, so I am still in my role in two years?” I walked out and thought, God, what a turn of events. I walked in thinking about how to impress her. I left thinking about how to help her survive.
What CMOs need is to show that marketing is connected to revenue. They need to show that marketing is part of a revenue system. It needs to be process driven. And a lot of CMOs and marketing leaders did not come into marketing to do the role they are actually being asked to do today.
“I walked in thinking about how to impress her. I left thinking about how to help her survive.”
Rich: I see a lot of synergies with what happened 10 years ago when marketing automation came in. There was a misguided belief that it would make marketing cheaper. That same conversation has gone up a level again with AI.
Fiona: Exactly that. We are firmly adopting a very proactive and aggressive AI strategy. We did that at Revere and won a couple of awards for the work we did with that adoption. But it is not really about AI. It is about going back to what the client actually has a challenge on.
The conversation starts with AI. It very quickly moves away from AI and into what is it your business is trying to do, what are the goals you are trying to achieve, how can we work together to get you to those outcomes as effectively as possible. If that is using AI as a growth catalyst, great. If it is redefining your workflows, okay, let us look at that.
And for all the hype, we have to remember there are brands in very different situations. I was speaking to a CMO recently who has moved into a global role and is trying to redefine the central regional model. In reality, his team is barely doing digital marketing properly, let alone automated workflow. We have to meet people where they are.
One area where we have moved fast and seen real pickup is generative engine optimisation. We were pretty quick out of the blocks on the GEO story and have been running a lot of client projects in that space. But even there, you cannot look at it in isolation. It ties into a bigger story about how buyer behaviour is changing and how brands need to show up in a world where AI is increasingly part of the buying committee.
“The conversation starts with AI. It very quickly moves away from AI.”
Rich: How do you actually help CMOs get their mojo back then?
Fiona: Show them a roadmap to creating a growth system. There are so many directions of travel that people get pulled in, and CMOs just need to know they are on a roadmap. We cannot all change everything overnight. No leader can.
It is always about the roadmap and the process. You cannot ignore the business realities and the needs that have to be met in the short term, but ultimately you have to be visionary and make the right investments for the long term as well. Our job is to help them prioritise. Get some quick wins in. Do not overcomplicate it. But also help them prove investment to grow the roadmap toward long-term growth.
Ultimately that is where people get their mojo. They want to be doing stuff that is meaningful. We all got into marketing because we wanted to connect with the customer. Everything is about creating a connection. To get your mojo back is about having those human connections and feeling like you are making progress.
When people lose their mojo, things have got a bit messy. How do we strip it back? They need to be able to say no. They need to be able to prioritise. And it just seems to be, for the myriad of reasons we have discussed, increasingly hard for marketing leaders to do that.
“We all got into marketing because we wanted to connect with the customer. To get your mojo back is about having those human connections and feeling like you are making progress.”
Rich: What does success look like for you in 12 months’ time?
Fiona: Being recognised as a category creator and disruptor. Not a typical agency services model. A blend of consultancy services and agency services, bringing in new expertise, creating a new category as a leading growth and go-to-market business. Expanding beyond the CMO buyer, working into the C-suite.
I have this vision of being at your CMO roundtables and people saying: oh, you guys are a different kind of business, they would not consider themselves an agency, they consider themselves a company to support growth. That is what I want to hear. And I am going to be doing everything I can over the next 12 months to make sure we are seen that way.
I will be straight with you. I feel like I have gone from, and I probably would not normally describe it this way, but I will now, from a Championship club to the Premier League. We always felt like a Premier League brand. We just did not have the squad depth.
B2B Marketing United publishes practitioner-led content for senior B2B marketers. All editorial is independent.
Most people who sell their agency spend the first year of the earnout looking over their shoulder. Fiona McKenzie proactively focused on quickly tearing down the walls between two businesses and building something new. Seven months on from the acquisition of her agency Revere by Marketbridge, she is out of earnout, off the legacy systems, and running a near-100-person European operation as its President. She is also, in the same breath, thinking about the CMOs who quietly ask her how to stay in their jobs for another two years.
Rich: What have your new American overlords actually put you on the hook for?
Fiona: Europe is a really strategic part of the overarching plan. Expanding beyond the US was a key strategic initiative and part of their growth strategy. My remit in the immediate term was to take the two businesses that are now together and form part of our European base. Revere has only just finished a very fast integration. We are out of earnout already. We are fully integrated. We are working as one team on the same P&L, everyone aligned, working towards common goals.
In the long term it is continued expansion in Europe across geographies, building out service capabilities aligned to the wider group model. But most importantly, every agency is evolving regardless of whether you are part of an acquisition or not. Clients are layering in AI, layering in technology. They have their own challenges. Agencies have to be evolving constantly to meet those needs.
“The real hard work happens the day you sell your agency. You have to be more present than ever as a leader.”
Rich: How on earth did you achieve so much so quickly? I would expect a typical earnout to be at least 12 months.
Fiona: A big part of the success was the fact that I spent a lot of time with Fiona Shepherd, who was leading Europe at the time, even ahead of the announcement. We had very transparent conversations, not just with her but with the rest of the leadership team. When you go into these discussions and you have decided that a particular brand is right for your agency’s next stage of growth, you have to go into the diligence phase and trust the process. Keep it human.
I spoke to any agency leader that would let me buy them lunch ahead of going through that process. I asked them for their war stories, understood the journey through the sales process, asked them what they would do differently. So, I felt I went in with my eyes open. I was almost overly human. I wanted to have conversations outside of all the spreadsheets and finance.
The advice I always give now is: if you are about to go out to market to sell your business, have a holiday before you go out, not after. Because the real hard work happens the day you sell your agency. You have to be more present than ever as a leader, not just to the team you have led but to the team you are going to be working with. And everyone has had their own journey of how they got there.
I practised what I preached on that one. We got to the point where we had a number of LOIs (Letter of Intents) and then we went on a two-week holiday and signed the LOI when we came back. So, we could go into diligence full throttle. I always do my best thinking on holiday. Your mind slows down, you think about the big picture, and you come back with real clarity on what comes next.
Bob Ray, our CEO, says something to people when he talks to them in smaller groups that has always stuck with me. He says: “no one here chose to work for Marketbridge”. So, you have to be really respectful. People chose to work for Revere. They ended up in here. I tried to over-communicate during the process to explain to people why it was the right move.
It was also a real divide and conquer effort on the integration itself. I cannot lead everything, nor can a few of us. You have to empower people in the right roles and trust them to get on with it. Seven months on and we are all on the same systems, working to the same goals. That allows you to move at pace. And that is what you need to do in this market.
Rich: It sounds like you went into a marriage wanting to build foundations and settle down, rather than going in thinking about what happens when you get divorced.
Fiona: Exactly. And as someone who has been through divorce, it can be a very complicated and traumatic experience. You can only make the right decision in the moment. My experience before Revere was a few other agency brands. I had had a little experience of acquisitions and mergers with other agencies, and sometimes you can have a happy divorce and sometimes it can be a really bad divorce.
In this instance, I was joining under Fiona Shepherd as the leader of Europe. I do not think at the time she necessarily had plans to step out so quickly. But I think she always had a vision for what Europe could look like. She really saw that our team would be the next step for that vision. And the success of the integration meant she felt she could step back and hand over the reins. She has been in this industry a long time and it is a big decision.
Now, funnily enough, everyone wants to buy me lunch. Which is quite good fun. You just do not have enough hours in the day.
Rich: I’ve heard you say that a lot of CMOs have lost their marketing mojo. Why?
Fiona: There are a large number of restructures that continue to take place. That creates fear in role. And there is a constant need to prove ROI. Essentially, they are in defence mode. There are very few businesses or marketing leaders that are able to step out into that proactive mode as much as they try, because they are exhausted. They constantly feel like they are fighting a battle and justifying their existence.
I very much see agencies as a comfort blanket for those CMOs, but also as their superpower. How can we be here to protect you? How can we help you? A lot of CMOs cannot open up to their teams. They cannot open up to wider stakeholders. So, my team and I become that outlet.
“A lot of CMOs cannot open up to their teams. They cannot open up to the wider stakeholders. So, we become that outlet.”
Rich: I see a lot of CMOs in a form of paralysis out of fear. Like the housing market. Sitting still, nervous to move, nervous to remodel.
Fiona: Yes. And I can tell you, having hosted my own event for people out of seat, people put on a brave face but underneath it there is real struggle. You get a real sense of what brands are expecting from CMOs when you speak to people trying to go into those roles. A lot of people are not even wanting the CMO role anymore, for that reason.
I went into a meeting with a CMO at a global enterprise organisation, someone I had seen online, clearly very capable from everything I had heard. My objective going in was to position our agency well. We had worked with her previous employer for over seven years, so I wanted to get in front of her early. As you build trust through the meeting, slowly people break down and expose how they really feel. At the end of the conversation, she flipped it entirely and turned to me and said: “what advice would you give me, so I am still in my role in two years?” I walked out and thought, God, what a turn of events. I walked in thinking about how to impress her. I left thinking about how to help her survive.
What CMOs need is to show that marketing is connected to revenue. They need to show that marketing is part of a revenue system. It needs to be process driven. And a lot of CMOs and marketing leaders did not come into marketing to do the role they are actually being asked to do today.
“I walked in thinking about how to impress her. I left thinking about how to help her survive.”
Rich: I see a lot of synergies with what happened 10 years ago when marketing automation came in. There was a misguided belief that it would make marketing cheaper. That same conversation has gone up a level again with AI.
Fiona: Exactly that. We are firmly adopting a very proactive and aggressive AI strategy. We did that at Revere and won a couple of awards for the work we did with that adoption. But it is not really about AI. It is about going back to what the client actually has a challenge on.
The conversation starts with AI. It very quickly moves away from AI and into what is it your business is trying to do, what are the goals you are trying to achieve, how can we work together to get you to those outcomes as effectively as possible. If that is using AI as a growth catalyst, great. If it is redefining your workflows, okay, let us look at that.
And for all the hype, we have to remember there are brands in very different situations. I was speaking to a CMO recently who has moved into a global role and is trying to redefine the central regional model. In reality, his team is barely doing digital marketing properly, let alone automated workflow. We have to meet people where they are.
One area where we have moved fast and seen real pickup is generative engine optimisation. We were pretty quick out of the blocks on the GEO story and have been running a lot of client projects in that space. But even there, you cannot look at it in isolation. It ties into a bigger story about how buyer behaviour is changing and how brands need to show up in a world where AI is increasingly part of the buying committee.
“The conversation starts with AI. It very quickly moves away from AI.”
Rich: How do you actually help CMOs get their mojo back then?
Fiona: Show them a roadmap to creating a growth system. There are so many directions of travel that people get pulled in, and CMOs just need to know they are on a roadmap. We cannot all change everything overnight. No leader can.
It is always about the roadmap and the process. You cannot ignore the business realities and the needs that have to be met in the short term, but ultimately you have to be visionary and make the right investments for the long term as well. Our job is to help them prioritise. Get some quick wins in. Do not overcomplicate it. But also help them prove investment to grow the roadmap toward long-term growth.
Ultimately that is where people get their mojo. They want to be doing stuff that is meaningful. We all got into marketing because we wanted to connect with the customer. Everything is about creating a connection. To get your mojo back is about having those human connections and feeling like you are making progress.
When people lose their mojo, things have got a bit messy. How do we strip it back? They need to be able to say no. They need to be able to prioritise. And it just seems to be, for the myriad of reasons we have discussed, increasingly hard for marketing leaders to do that.
“We all got into marketing because we wanted to connect with the customer. To get your mojo back is about having those human connections and feeling like you are making progress.”
Rich: What does success look like for you in 12 months’ time?
Fiona: Being recognised as a category creator and disruptor. Not a typical agency services model. A blend of consultancy services and agency services, bringing in new expertise, creating a new category as a leading growth and go-to-market business. Expanding beyond the CMO buyer, working into the C-suite.
I have this vision of being at your CMO roundtables and people saying: oh, you guys are a different kind of business, they would not consider themselves an agency, they consider themselves a company to support growth. That is what I want to hear. And I am going to be doing everything I can over the next 12 months to make sure we are seen that way.
I will be straight with you. I feel like I have gone from, and I probably would not normally describe it this way, but I will now, from a Championship club to the Premier League. We always felt like a Premier League brand. We just did not have the squad depth.
B2B Marketing United publishes practitioner-led content for senior B2B marketers. All editorial is independent.
London
Apr 17, 2026
Rich Fitzmaurice
Letters
"I am a freelance marketing consultant. My latest prospect has just told me that they've decided to try and do all their marketing for free using ChatGPT so 'Thanks, but no thanks for your proposal'.
It's becoming more and more common, marketing getting bumped into the general AI company strategy, insane. But mid-sized organisations are all starting to do it. Are you seeing this too?"
Katie, Fleet, UK
Dear Katie,
We are very much in the middle of the AI honeymoon period. I feel a rant coming…
More and more people are being exposed to, and experimenting with, basic, easily accessible AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot. We must all admit that the first few times you play with them, they can be impressive.
But the moment you converse with them on a topic you specialise in, the limitations become glaringly obvious. You can spot the oversimplifications. The generalisations. The lack of actual nuance. The factual errors. Even the typos.
Because although AI assistants seem smart, they are not. They are simply pulling common answers together from common sources, by recognising patterns. Top and tailed with some pleasantries and faux encouragement, and you can be forgiven for wondering if they might pass the Turing test.
At this moment in time, AI assistants cannot understand. They do not understand nuance. Context. Experience. Intuition. Instinct. Creativity.
One day, maybe. But now? Absolutely not. And if anyone tries to convince you otherwise, they probably have a hard drive full of NFTs.
Before anyone accuses me of being anti-AI, I'm not. I'm just anti-stupid.
AI assistants can be extremely useful. I use them daily for different purposes. They help guide you to an answer. They can help you iterate so much faster. They can help get you to a decision point, but they just as easily give you bad ideas you do not want to explore.
The responsibility to ensure quality of output is still unmistakably on the human. AI in the right hands is extremely powerful. And I see AI making good marketers faster, better and smarter.
But the gap between those people and the average user being overconfident in AI is widening by the day. And it's the latter that we should be worried about.
I've had a CEO pull me into his office to show me that his AI assistant can quickly build a marketing plan. Spoiler: it would get a C at high school, but that's about it. So unfortunately, I can very well believe that some people out there think AI can write and execute their marketing for them (after all, marketing and HR are the two professions everyone secretly thinks they could do).
But AI can't. Not for a few more years at the very least. Even the AI tools developed by marketers are still evolving and require a real marketer on top.
In the last few months alone, I have seen real-world examples of AI-generated mistakes that have made it all the way to board level:
Invented competitors mentioned in board reports
Cited and falsely referenced statistics in business plans
Numbers which did not add up
Now obviously, the humans involved looked sheepish. It is ultimately their mistake. But these specific mistakes happened under human supervision. Remove that expert supervision and ask yourself how bad those documents become.
ChatGPT may give some a short-term dopamine boost when they see a high-level strategy presented with confidence, and maybe even an exportable file. But a real marketer will quickly see what is missing, what is generic and what hasn't even been considered.
Claude might pump out a content strategy and articles at the click of a button. But no one will want to read them, and platforms are getting much better at identifying and suppressing them automatically.
AI cannot replace experience, street smarts, creativity, judgement.
AI is not a replacement for marketing functions. It is a potential multiplier for one that already exists. Without a marketer holding the wheel, they are not saving any money. They are just automating 'meh'. Adding to the deluge of noise that their prospects are increasingly filtering out.
So how should marketing consultants like yourself react when this happens? You have several options:
Ask them to send you their AI-generated plan and offer to feedback at a high level
Highlight the pitfalls, explain why AI isn't a shortcut, and offer to help them use AI in the right way
Attend events and take courses so that in your next exploratory call, the prospect feels how much you know about marketing and AI, and how little they do
Leave the door open. "If it doesn't work out as well as you hope, you know where I am"
It is always frustrating to lose a potential client you've worked to win, but stay professional, be courteous and try your best not to burn bridges. If they engaged with you once, they must have had some interest in your offer. Prospects sometimes make mistakes. Don't cut yourself off from the option of being their saviour later.
I emphasise the word option.
Knowing which clients are a good fit for you and which ones are a bad fit is one of the most powerful levers you have as a marketing consultant. And time is your most valuable commodity.
Bad clients drain energy. Good ones give it back.
Onwards!
Rich
"I am a freelance marketing consultant. My latest prospect has just told me that they've decided to try and do all their marketing for free using ChatGPT so 'Thanks, but no thanks for your proposal'.
It's becoming more and more common, marketing getting bumped into the general AI company strategy, insane. But mid-sized organisations are all starting to do it. Are you seeing this too?"
Katie, Fleet, UK
Dear Katie,
We are very much in the middle of the AI honeymoon period. I feel a rant coming…
More and more people are being exposed to, and experimenting with, basic, easily accessible AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot. We must all admit that the first few times you play with them, they can be impressive.
But the moment you converse with them on a topic you specialise in, the limitations become glaringly obvious. You can spot the oversimplifications. The generalisations. The lack of actual nuance. The factual errors. Even the typos.
Because although AI assistants seem smart, they are not. They are simply pulling common answers together from common sources, by recognising patterns. Top and tailed with some pleasantries and faux encouragement, and you can be forgiven for wondering if they might pass the Turing test.
At this moment in time, AI assistants cannot understand. They do not understand nuance. Context. Experience. Intuition. Instinct. Creativity.
One day, maybe. But now? Absolutely not. And if anyone tries to convince you otherwise, they probably have a hard drive full of NFTs.
Before anyone accuses me of being anti-AI, I'm not. I'm just anti-stupid.
AI assistants can be extremely useful. I use them daily for different purposes. They help guide you to an answer. They can help you iterate so much faster. They can help get you to a decision point, but they just as easily give you bad ideas you do not want to explore.
The responsibility to ensure quality of output is still unmistakably on the human. AI in the right hands is extremely powerful. And I see AI making good marketers faster, better and smarter.
But the gap between those people and the average user being overconfident in AI is widening by the day. And it's the latter that we should be worried about.
I've had a CEO pull me into his office to show me that his AI assistant can quickly build a marketing plan. Spoiler: it would get a C at high school, but that's about it. So unfortunately, I can very well believe that some people out there think AI can write and execute their marketing for them (after all, marketing and HR are the two professions everyone secretly thinks they could do).
But AI can't. Not for a few more years at the very least. Even the AI tools developed by marketers are still evolving and require a real marketer on top.
In the last few months alone, I have seen real-world examples of AI-generated mistakes that have made it all the way to board level:
Invented competitors mentioned in board reports
Cited and falsely referenced statistics in business plans
Numbers which did not add up
Now obviously, the humans involved looked sheepish. It is ultimately their mistake. But these specific mistakes happened under human supervision. Remove that expert supervision and ask yourself how bad those documents become.
ChatGPT may give some a short-term dopamine boost when they see a high-level strategy presented with confidence, and maybe even an exportable file. But a real marketer will quickly see what is missing, what is generic and what hasn't even been considered.
Claude might pump out a content strategy and articles at the click of a button. But no one will want to read them, and platforms are getting much better at identifying and suppressing them automatically.
AI cannot replace experience, street smarts, creativity, judgement.
AI is not a replacement for marketing functions. It is a potential multiplier for one that already exists. Without a marketer holding the wheel, they are not saving any money. They are just automating 'meh'. Adding to the deluge of noise that their prospects are increasingly filtering out.
So how should marketing consultants like yourself react when this happens? You have several options:
Ask them to send you their AI-generated plan and offer to feedback at a high level
Highlight the pitfalls, explain why AI isn't a shortcut, and offer to help them use AI in the right way
Attend events and take courses so that in your next exploratory call, the prospect feels how much you know about marketing and AI, and how little they do
Leave the door open. "If it doesn't work out as well as you hope, you know where I am"
It is always frustrating to lose a potential client you've worked to win, but stay professional, be courteous and try your best not to burn bridges. If they engaged with you once, they must have had some interest in your offer. Prospects sometimes make mistakes. Don't cut yourself off from the option of being their saviour later.
I emphasise the word option.
Knowing which clients are a good fit for you and which ones are a bad fit is one of the most powerful levers you have as a marketing consultant. And time is your most valuable commodity.
Bad clients drain energy. Good ones give it back.
Onwards!
Rich
"I am a freelance marketing consultant. My latest prospect has just told me that they've decided to try and do all their marketing for free using ChatGPT so 'Thanks, but no thanks for your proposal'.
It's becoming more and more common, marketing getting bumped into the general AI company strategy, insane. But mid-sized organisations are all starting to do it. Are you seeing this too?"
Katie, Fleet, UK
Dear Katie,
We are very much in the middle of the AI honeymoon period. I feel a rant coming…
More and more people are being exposed to, and experimenting with, basic, easily accessible AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot. We must all admit that the first few times you play with them, they can be impressive.
But the moment you converse with them on a topic you specialise in, the limitations become glaringly obvious. You can spot the oversimplifications. The generalisations. The lack of actual nuance. The factual errors. Even the typos.
Because although AI assistants seem smart, they are not. They are simply pulling common answers together from common sources, by recognising patterns. Top and tailed with some pleasantries and faux encouragement, and you can be forgiven for wondering if they might pass the Turing test.
At this moment in time, AI assistants cannot understand. They do not understand nuance. Context. Experience. Intuition. Instinct. Creativity.
One day, maybe. But now? Absolutely not. And if anyone tries to convince you otherwise, they probably have a hard drive full of NFTs.
Before anyone accuses me of being anti-AI, I'm not. I'm just anti-stupid.
AI assistants can be extremely useful. I use them daily for different purposes. They help guide you to an answer. They can help you iterate so much faster. They can help get you to a decision point, but they just as easily give you bad ideas you do not want to explore.
The responsibility to ensure quality of output is still unmistakably on the human. AI in the right hands is extremely powerful. And I see AI making good marketers faster, better and smarter.
But the gap between those people and the average user being overconfident in AI is widening by the day. And it's the latter that we should be worried about.
I've had a CEO pull me into his office to show me that his AI assistant can quickly build a marketing plan. Spoiler: it would get a C at high school, but that's about it. So unfortunately, I can very well believe that some people out there think AI can write and execute their marketing for them (after all, marketing and HR are the two professions everyone secretly thinks they could do).
But AI can't. Not for a few more years at the very least. Even the AI tools developed by marketers are still evolving and require a real marketer on top.
In the last few months alone, I have seen real-world examples of AI-generated mistakes that have made it all the way to board level:
Invented competitors mentioned in board reports
Cited and falsely referenced statistics in business plans
Numbers which did not add up
Now obviously, the humans involved looked sheepish. It is ultimately their mistake. But these specific mistakes happened under human supervision. Remove that expert supervision and ask yourself how bad those documents become.
ChatGPT may give some a short-term dopamine boost when they see a high-level strategy presented with confidence, and maybe even an exportable file. But a real marketer will quickly see what is missing, what is generic and what hasn't even been considered.
Claude might pump out a content strategy and articles at the click of a button. But no one will want to read them, and platforms are getting much better at identifying and suppressing them automatically.
AI cannot replace experience, street smarts, creativity, judgement.
AI is not a replacement for marketing functions. It is a potential multiplier for one that already exists. Without a marketer holding the wheel, they are not saving any money. They are just automating 'meh'. Adding to the deluge of noise that their prospects are increasingly filtering out.
So how should marketing consultants like yourself react when this happens? You have several options:
Ask them to send you their AI-generated plan and offer to feedback at a high level
Highlight the pitfalls, explain why AI isn't a shortcut, and offer to help them use AI in the right way
Attend events and take courses so that in your next exploratory call, the prospect feels how much you know about marketing and AI, and how little they do
Leave the door open. "If it doesn't work out as well as you hope, you know where I am"
It is always frustrating to lose a potential client you've worked to win, but stay professional, be courteous and try your best not to burn bridges. If they engaged with you once, they must have had some interest in your offer. Prospects sometimes make mistakes. Don't cut yourself off from the option of being their saviour later.
I emphasise the word option.
Knowing which clients are a good fit for you and which ones are a bad fit is one of the most powerful levers you have as a marketing consultant. And time is your most valuable commodity.
Bad clients drain energy. Good ones give it back.
Onwards!
Rich
Content
May 7, 2026
Content
How to's
Here is the number that should be on every B2B CMO's desk this quarter. In G2's August 2025 buyer survey, 87% of B2B software buyers said AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude are changing how they research purchases. In the same study, only 12% of B2B SaaS brands appeared when buyers ran category-level searches inside those tools. The other 88% were simply absent from the moment their buyers were forming opinions.
That gap, between where buyers are researching and where brands are visible, is the single biggest unpriced risk in B2B marketing right now. It is also not a distant problem. A multi-source analysis published in March 2026, covering 680 million AI citations and almost two million browsing sessions, found that 73% of B2B buyers are already using AI tools inside their purchase research process. Forrester's 2025 buyer study put a number on the downstream consequence. 61% of the B2B buying journey now completes before a buyer ever contacts a vendor, and that figure climbs every time an AI tool synthesises a shortlist on their behalf.
Meanwhile, McKinsey estimates that around 50% of Google searches already include AI summaries, rising above 75% by 2028, and projects that $750 billion in US revenue will funnel through AI-powered search by 2028. This is a rewiring of how B2B buyers discover, compare and choose, not a marginal channel shift.
The discipline that governs whether you are visible inside those AI-generated answers has a name. It is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), and it is a different discipline to SEO.
Why SEO tactics don't translate (and why that matters to your budget)
For most of the last two decades, B2B marketers have optimised for a specific user behaviour. Type a query into Google, scan a list of ten blue links, click one. The entire SEO playbook (keyword targeting, backlinks, domain authority, ranking positions) is a set of levers pulled against that behaviour.
Answer engines don't work that way. When a buyer asks ChatGPT "what are the best account-based marketing platforms for mid-market B2B?", the model doesn't show them ten blue links. It synthesises an answer, names two or three vendors, and sometimes cites a handful of sources. The buyer leaves with a shortlist instead of a search results page.
That one behavioural change breaks several of the core assumptions B2B marketers have been budgeting against.
Rankings don't map to citations. A page that ranks #1 on Google may never be cited by ChatGPT, and a page that doesn't rank in Google's top 20 can be cited repeatedly by Perplexity. The 2025 AI Visibility Report from The Digital Bloom found that only 11% of domains cited by ChatGPT were also cited by Perplexity for the same queries. These are different retrieval systems with different signals.
Backlinks are no longer the dominant signal. In the same study, brand search volume was the strongest predictor of AI citations, with a correlation of 0.334. That is materially stronger than any backlink-based metric. Models are increasingly using brand familiarity as a proxy for trust.
Content freshness suddenly matters in a way SEO never rewarded. Roughly 65% of log hits to cited content were for pages published in the last year, and 79% were from the last two years. AI systems lean toward recent, actively maintained sources.
Traditional measurement is silent on the question that matters. GA4 will not tell you how often ChatGPT recommends you. Your rank tracker will not tell you whether Perplexity is citing your competitor. The measurement stack most B2B marketing teams rely on was built for a world where discovery happened on a SERP.
These differences add up. The inputs, the signals, the measurement and the skills required are distinct enough that treating AEO as "the SEO team's next project" is already producing a second wave of wasted budget across the industry.
The four pillars of AEO for B2B marketers
The methodology breaks down into four pillars. They work as concurrent workstreams rather than sequential steps, and each one pulls a different lever.
1. Entity positioning: make the model understand who you are
Before an answer engine can recommend you, it has to understand what you are. Large language models reason in terms of entities: companies, products, categories, people. If the model's internal representation of your brand is vague, incomplete or confused with a competitor, no amount of content will fix it.
Entity positioning is the work of making sure every AI system has an unambiguous understanding of who you are, what category you compete in, what you do better than alternatives, and who your ideal customer is. The practical work includes Wikidata entries, Knowledge Panel optimisation, structured data (Organization, Product, Software Application schemas), and consistent entity descriptions across high-authority third-party sources.
Diagnostic question for your team: open ChatGPT and ask "What does [your brand] do?" Then ask "Who are [your brand]'s main competitors?" If the answers are vague, wrong, or list your brand alongside companies you don't actually compete with, you have an entity problem. Entity sits upstream of every other AEO lever, so this is usually where the work starts.
2. Answer architecture: structure content so models can extract and cite it
Most B2B content is written for humans scrolling on a laptop. Answer engines don't scroll. They extract. Content that wins citations is content that answers specific questions directly, in a structure the model can parse.
The brands that get cited repeatedly across platforms usually aren't the ones producing the most content. They are the ones whose content is architected for extraction: clear definitions, direct answers at the top of sections, FAQ blocks with schema, concise paragraphs, well-structured headers, and explicit comparisons. Seer Interactive's data on AI Overviews found that brands cited in Google's AI answers earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks. The same Seer analysis showed that when AI Overviews are present and your brand is not cited, organic CTR drops 61% and paid CTR drops 68%. Answer architecture is what determines which side of that line you sit on.
3. Source signal: earn mentions in the places LLMs actually weight
Not all sources are weighted equally. Each AI platform draws from a different constellation of trusted inputs, and the differences are significant. The same 2025 cross-platform analysis found that Reddit accounted for 46.7% of top Perplexity citations but under 10% on ChatGPT after a September 2025 rebalancing. ChatGPT leans heavily on Wikipedia and long-standing editorial sources. Google AI Overviews favour a diversified cross-platform presence.
Source signal is the discipline of earning mentions, reviews and references in the specific places each platform treats as authoritative for your category. For a B2B SaaS brand, that usually means G2 and Gartner Peer Insights (G2's own internal study confirms they are heavily cited across LLMs), plus category-specific industry publications, relevant subreddits, and any analyst coverage that ends up in the training corpus. This is PR, earned media and community work done with a very specific retrieval target in mind.
4. Measurement: track what your rank tracker can't see
If you can't measure AI visibility, you can't manage it, and you certainly can't defend the budget in front of a board. The four metrics we track for clients map directly to the commercial question every B2B CMO cares about: are we showing up when our buyers are choosing?
AI Mention Rate. For a defined set of 20 to 50 buyer-intent queries, what percentage of the time does your brand appear in the answer across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews?
Citation Authority. When those platforms cite sources, how often is your domain among them, and how does that compare to your top three competitors?
Entity Clarity Score. When you ask the model directly "What does [brand] do?", is the answer accurate, complete and differentiated, or generic and interchangeable?
Answer Ownership. For the queries that matter most to your pipeline, are you the primary recommendation or a supporting mention?
This is the layer most B2B marketing teams are missing entirely. Only 22% of marketers currently track AI visibility and traffic, and only 25.7% plan to develop content specifically for AI citations. That gap is, for the moment, the single biggest competitive opportunity in B2B marketing.
You can read the full methodology behind each of these pillars on the [growthvibe AI search optimisation methodology page](https://www.growthvibe.com/ai-search-optimization-services/).
A worked example: what this looks like in martech
Consider a mid-market martech category, say, account-based marketing platforms. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overview the same question: "What are the best account-based marketing platforms for B2B companies with 200 to 2,000 employees?"
Run it once and you'll notice a pattern. Two or three vendors show up consistently across all three engines. A handful appear on one platform but not the others. And a long tail of category players, some of them with significantly better products, bigger marketing budgets and stronger Google rankings, don't appear at all.
When we dig into the brands that win across all three platforms, the same four things are usually true. Their entity is clear (the model knows what they do without hesitation). Their owned content is structured for extraction, with direct answers, comparison pages and FAQ schema. They have strong, recent source signal across G2, Gartner coverage, analyst mentions, and in Perplexity's case, organic Reddit discussion. And they are measuring AI visibility as a discipline rather than guessing at it.
The brands that lose? Usually strong on traditional SEO, weak on entity clarity, inconsistent on answer architecture, and invisible in the places the models trust. Their dashboards look healthy. Their pipeline is quietly leaking.
The mistakes I see most often
After running diagnostics across dozens of B2B brands, the same patterns recur.
Treating AEO as a content problem. Most teams respond to the AI search shift by publishing more blog posts about AI. That is content marketing with the word "AI" in the title. AEO requires work across entity, architecture, source signal and measurement. Content is one of four levers.
Over-indexing on a single platform. Teams obsess over ChatGPT and ignore Perplexity, or vice versa. The retrieval systems are different enough that you need a cross-platform view. The 11% citation overlap figure is the most important number most B2B marketers haven't heard.
Letting the incumbent SEO agency redefine AEO as "SEO plus schema". This is the most expensive mistake in the market right now. Schema helps, but it is a single lever inside the second pillar. If your AEO strategy can be executed by adding FAQ markup, it is not an AEO strategy.
Waiting for measurement to get easier. It will not. The teams winning in 2026 are the ones who built a measurement layer manually, accepted the rough edges, and used the data to make decisions. Waiting for a perfect dashboard is a way of conceding ground to the brands who didn't wait.
A 30-minute AEO self-audit for B2B marketers
If you want to stress-test your own position before the next board meeting, here is a condensed version of the audit we run for clients. It takes about half an hour.
1. The entity test. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overview. Ask each one "What does [your brand] do?" and "Who are [your brand]'s main competitors?" Note the answers verbatim. If any of them are wrong, vague or list competitors you don't actually compete with, flag an entity issue.
2. The category test. Run your three most important buyer-intent queries across all three platforms. Example: "What are the best [your category] platforms for [your ICP]?" Note whether your brand appears, and if so, where in the answer.
3. The competitor test. Run the same three queries again, but replace your brand name with each of your top three competitors. Compare who gets cited, how often, and in what position.
4. The source test. For every citation that appears across those queries, note the source. Which domains are being pulled? Is your domain among them? If not, which domains are, and do you have a presence on those surfaces?
5. The freshness test. Check the publication dates on your most important category pages. If your pillar content hasn't been updated in the last 12 to 18 months, you are likely losing ground to competitors whose content is fresher.
If you do nothing else this quarter, run this audit. It will tell you, in thirty minutes, whether you have an AEO problem, and roughly how big it is.
The window is open, and it won't stay open
AEO is in the phase every new marketing discipline goes through before it becomes table stakes. The market data is clear enough that ignoring it is a choice. The measurement tooling is rough but workable. The playbooks are being written in real time by the brands who decided not to wait.
B2B marketing teams that treat AEO as a discipline now, with its own strategy, its own measurement, and its own owned workstream inside the marketing function, will compound an advantage every month their competitors spend arguing about whether it matters. The ones that treat it as a side project, or hand it to an agency still thinking in terms of rankings and links, will spend 2027 trying to catch up on ground they didn't realise they were losing.
The brands being cited by AI today are the brands being chosen tomorrow. Everything else is a dashboard.
Request a free AI Visibility Report
---
*Sources: [G2: Does G2 Get Ranked in AI LLM Search?](https://learn.g2.com/tech-signals-does-g2-get-ranked-in-ai-llm-search); [PR Newswire: 73% of B2B Buyers Use AI Tools in Purchase Research](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/73-of-b2b-buyers-use-ai-tools-in-purchase-research-multi-source-analysis-finds-302733319.html); [The Digital Bloom: 2025 AI Visibility Report](https://thedigitalbloom.com/learn/2025-ai-citation-llm-visibility-report/); [McKinsey: The new front door to the internet](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/new-front-door-to-the-internet-winning-in-the-age-of-ai-search); [Seer Interactive: AIO impact on Google CTR](https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-september-2025-update); [SparkToro: 2024 Zero-Click Search Study](https://sparktoro.com/blog/2024-zero-click-search-study-for-every-1000-us-google-searches-only-374-clicks-go-to-the-open-web-in-the-eu-its-360/); [Adobe: The explosive rise of generative AI referral traffic](https://business.adobe.com/blog/the-explosive-rise-of-generative-ai-referral-traffic); Forrester 2025 B2B Buyer Journey Study.*
Here is the number that should be on every B2B CMO's desk this quarter. In G2's August 2025 buyer survey, 87% of B2B software buyers said AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude are changing how they research purchases. In the same study, only 12% of B2B SaaS brands appeared when buyers ran category-level searches inside those tools. The other 88% were simply absent from the moment their buyers were forming opinions.
That gap, between where buyers are researching and where brands are visible, is the single biggest unpriced risk in B2B marketing right now. It is also not a distant problem. A multi-source analysis published in March 2026, covering 680 million AI citations and almost two million browsing sessions, found that 73% of B2B buyers are already using AI tools inside their purchase research process. Forrester's 2025 buyer study put a number on the downstream consequence. 61% of the B2B buying journey now completes before a buyer ever contacts a vendor, and that figure climbs every time an AI tool synthesises a shortlist on their behalf.
Meanwhile, McKinsey estimates that around 50% of Google searches already include AI summaries, rising above 75% by 2028, and projects that $750 billion in US revenue will funnel through AI-powered search by 2028. This is a rewiring of how B2B buyers discover, compare and choose, not a marginal channel shift.
The discipline that governs whether you are visible inside those AI-generated answers has a name. It is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), and it is a different discipline to SEO.
Why SEO tactics don't translate (and why that matters to your budget)
For most of the last two decades, B2B marketers have optimised for a specific user behaviour. Type a query into Google, scan a list of ten blue links, click one. The entire SEO playbook (keyword targeting, backlinks, domain authority, ranking positions) is a set of levers pulled against that behaviour.
Answer engines don't work that way. When a buyer asks ChatGPT "what are the best account-based marketing platforms for mid-market B2B?", the model doesn't show them ten blue links. It synthesises an answer, names two or three vendors, and sometimes cites a handful of sources. The buyer leaves with a shortlist instead of a search results page.
That one behavioural change breaks several of the core assumptions B2B marketers have been budgeting against.
Rankings don't map to citations. A page that ranks #1 on Google may never be cited by ChatGPT, and a page that doesn't rank in Google's top 20 can be cited repeatedly by Perplexity. The 2025 AI Visibility Report from The Digital Bloom found that only 11% of domains cited by ChatGPT were also cited by Perplexity for the same queries. These are different retrieval systems with different signals.
Backlinks are no longer the dominant signal. In the same study, brand search volume was the strongest predictor of AI citations, with a correlation of 0.334. That is materially stronger than any backlink-based metric. Models are increasingly using brand familiarity as a proxy for trust.
Content freshness suddenly matters in a way SEO never rewarded. Roughly 65% of log hits to cited content were for pages published in the last year, and 79% were from the last two years. AI systems lean toward recent, actively maintained sources.
Traditional measurement is silent on the question that matters. GA4 will not tell you how often ChatGPT recommends you. Your rank tracker will not tell you whether Perplexity is citing your competitor. The measurement stack most B2B marketing teams rely on was built for a world where discovery happened on a SERP.
These differences add up. The inputs, the signals, the measurement and the skills required are distinct enough that treating AEO as "the SEO team's next project" is already producing a second wave of wasted budget across the industry.
The four pillars of AEO for B2B marketers
The methodology breaks down into four pillars. They work as concurrent workstreams rather than sequential steps, and each one pulls a different lever.
1. Entity positioning: make the model understand who you are
Before an answer engine can recommend you, it has to understand what you are. Large language models reason in terms of entities: companies, products, categories, people. If the model's internal representation of your brand is vague, incomplete or confused with a competitor, no amount of content will fix it.
Entity positioning is the work of making sure every AI system has an unambiguous understanding of who you are, what category you compete in, what you do better than alternatives, and who your ideal customer is. The practical work includes Wikidata entries, Knowledge Panel optimisation, structured data (Organization, Product, Software Application schemas), and consistent entity descriptions across high-authority third-party sources.
Diagnostic question for your team: open ChatGPT and ask "What does [your brand] do?" Then ask "Who are [your brand]'s main competitors?" If the answers are vague, wrong, or list your brand alongside companies you don't actually compete with, you have an entity problem. Entity sits upstream of every other AEO lever, so this is usually where the work starts.
2. Answer architecture: structure content so models can extract and cite it
Most B2B content is written for humans scrolling on a laptop. Answer engines don't scroll. They extract. Content that wins citations is content that answers specific questions directly, in a structure the model can parse.
The brands that get cited repeatedly across platforms usually aren't the ones producing the most content. They are the ones whose content is architected for extraction: clear definitions, direct answers at the top of sections, FAQ blocks with schema, concise paragraphs, well-structured headers, and explicit comparisons. Seer Interactive's data on AI Overviews found that brands cited in Google's AI answers earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks. The same Seer analysis showed that when AI Overviews are present and your brand is not cited, organic CTR drops 61% and paid CTR drops 68%. Answer architecture is what determines which side of that line you sit on.
3. Source signal: earn mentions in the places LLMs actually weight
Not all sources are weighted equally. Each AI platform draws from a different constellation of trusted inputs, and the differences are significant. The same 2025 cross-platform analysis found that Reddit accounted for 46.7% of top Perplexity citations but under 10% on ChatGPT after a September 2025 rebalancing. ChatGPT leans heavily on Wikipedia and long-standing editorial sources. Google AI Overviews favour a diversified cross-platform presence.
Source signal is the discipline of earning mentions, reviews and references in the specific places each platform treats as authoritative for your category. For a B2B SaaS brand, that usually means G2 and Gartner Peer Insights (G2's own internal study confirms they are heavily cited across LLMs), plus category-specific industry publications, relevant subreddits, and any analyst coverage that ends up in the training corpus. This is PR, earned media and community work done with a very specific retrieval target in mind.
4. Measurement: track what your rank tracker can't see
If you can't measure AI visibility, you can't manage it, and you certainly can't defend the budget in front of a board. The four metrics we track for clients map directly to the commercial question every B2B CMO cares about: are we showing up when our buyers are choosing?
AI Mention Rate. For a defined set of 20 to 50 buyer-intent queries, what percentage of the time does your brand appear in the answer across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews?
Citation Authority. When those platforms cite sources, how often is your domain among them, and how does that compare to your top three competitors?
Entity Clarity Score. When you ask the model directly "What does [brand] do?", is the answer accurate, complete and differentiated, or generic and interchangeable?
Answer Ownership. For the queries that matter most to your pipeline, are you the primary recommendation or a supporting mention?
This is the layer most B2B marketing teams are missing entirely. Only 22% of marketers currently track AI visibility and traffic, and only 25.7% plan to develop content specifically for AI citations. That gap is, for the moment, the single biggest competitive opportunity in B2B marketing.
You can read the full methodology behind each of these pillars on the [growthvibe AI search optimisation methodology page](https://www.growthvibe.com/ai-search-optimization-services/).
A worked example: what this looks like in martech
Consider a mid-market martech category, say, account-based marketing platforms. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overview the same question: "What are the best account-based marketing platforms for B2B companies with 200 to 2,000 employees?"
Run it once and you'll notice a pattern. Two or three vendors show up consistently across all three engines. A handful appear on one platform but not the others. And a long tail of category players, some of them with significantly better products, bigger marketing budgets and stronger Google rankings, don't appear at all.
When we dig into the brands that win across all three platforms, the same four things are usually true. Their entity is clear (the model knows what they do without hesitation). Their owned content is structured for extraction, with direct answers, comparison pages and FAQ schema. They have strong, recent source signal across G2, Gartner coverage, analyst mentions, and in Perplexity's case, organic Reddit discussion. And they are measuring AI visibility as a discipline rather than guessing at it.
The brands that lose? Usually strong on traditional SEO, weak on entity clarity, inconsistent on answer architecture, and invisible in the places the models trust. Their dashboards look healthy. Their pipeline is quietly leaking.
The mistakes I see most often
After running diagnostics across dozens of B2B brands, the same patterns recur.
Treating AEO as a content problem. Most teams respond to the AI search shift by publishing more blog posts about AI. That is content marketing with the word "AI" in the title. AEO requires work across entity, architecture, source signal and measurement. Content is one of four levers.
Over-indexing on a single platform. Teams obsess over ChatGPT and ignore Perplexity, or vice versa. The retrieval systems are different enough that you need a cross-platform view. The 11% citation overlap figure is the most important number most B2B marketers haven't heard.
Letting the incumbent SEO agency redefine AEO as "SEO plus schema". This is the most expensive mistake in the market right now. Schema helps, but it is a single lever inside the second pillar. If your AEO strategy can be executed by adding FAQ markup, it is not an AEO strategy.
Waiting for measurement to get easier. It will not. The teams winning in 2026 are the ones who built a measurement layer manually, accepted the rough edges, and used the data to make decisions. Waiting for a perfect dashboard is a way of conceding ground to the brands who didn't wait.
A 30-minute AEO self-audit for B2B marketers
If you want to stress-test your own position before the next board meeting, here is a condensed version of the audit we run for clients. It takes about half an hour.
1. The entity test. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overview. Ask each one "What does [your brand] do?" and "Who are [your brand]'s main competitors?" Note the answers verbatim. If any of them are wrong, vague or list competitors you don't actually compete with, flag an entity issue.
2. The category test. Run your three most important buyer-intent queries across all three platforms. Example: "What are the best [your category] platforms for [your ICP]?" Note whether your brand appears, and if so, where in the answer.
3. The competitor test. Run the same three queries again, but replace your brand name with each of your top three competitors. Compare who gets cited, how often, and in what position.
4. The source test. For every citation that appears across those queries, note the source. Which domains are being pulled? Is your domain among them? If not, which domains are, and do you have a presence on those surfaces?
5. The freshness test. Check the publication dates on your most important category pages. If your pillar content hasn't been updated in the last 12 to 18 months, you are likely losing ground to competitors whose content is fresher.
If you do nothing else this quarter, run this audit. It will tell you, in thirty minutes, whether you have an AEO problem, and roughly how big it is.
The window is open, and it won't stay open
AEO is in the phase every new marketing discipline goes through before it becomes table stakes. The market data is clear enough that ignoring it is a choice. The measurement tooling is rough but workable. The playbooks are being written in real time by the brands who decided not to wait.
B2B marketing teams that treat AEO as a discipline now, with its own strategy, its own measurement, and its own owned workstream inside the marketing function, will compound an advantage every month their competitors spend arguing about whether it matters. The ones that treat it as a side project, or hand it to an agency still thinking in terms of rankings and links, will spend 2027 trying to catch up on ground they didn't realise they were losing.
The brands being cited by AI today are the brands being chosen tomorrow. Everything else is a dashboard.
Request a free AI Visibility Report
---
*Sources: [G2: Does G2 Get Ranked in AI LLM Search?](https://learn.g2.com/tech-signals-does-g2-get-ranked-in-ai-llm-search); [PR Newswire: 73% of B2B Buyers Use AI Tools in Purchase Research](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/73-of-b2b-buyers-use-ai-tools-in-purchase-research-multi-source-analysis-finds-302733319.html); [The Digital Bloom: 2025 AI Visibility Report](https://thedigitalbloom.com/learn/2025-ai-citation-llm-visibility-report/); [McKinsey: The new front door to the internet](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/new-front-door-to-the-internet-winning-in-the-age-of-ai-search); [Seer Interactive: AIO impact on Google CTR](https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-september-2025-update); [SparkToro: 2024 Zero-Click Search Study](https://sparktoro.com/blog/2024-zero-click-search-study-for-every-1000-us-google-searches-only-374-clicks-go-to-the-open-web-in-the-eu-its-360/); [Adobe: The explosive rise of generative AI referral traffic](https://business.adobe.com/blog/the-explosive-rise-of-generative-ai-referral-traffic); Forrester 2025 B2B Buyer Journey Study.*
Here is the number that should be on every B2B CMO's desk this quarter. In G2's August 2025 buyer survey, 87% of B2B software buyers said AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude are changing how they research purchases. In the same study, only 12% of B2B SaaS brands appeared when buyers ran category-level searches inside those tools. The other 88% were simply absent from the moment their buyers were forming opinions.
That gap, between where buyers are researching and where brands are visible, is the single biggest unpriced risk in B2B marketing right now. It is also not a distant problem. A multi-source analysis published in March 2026, covering 680 million AI citations and almost two million browsing sessions, found that 73% of B2B buyers are already using AI tools inside their purchase research process. Forrester's 2025 buyer study put a number on the downstream consequence. 61% of the B2B buying journey now completes before a buyer ever contacts a vendor, and that figure climbs every time an AI tool synthesises a shortlist on their behalf.
Meanwhile, McKinsey estimates that around 50% of Google searches already include AI summaries, rising above 75% by 2028, and projects that $750 billion in US revenue will funnel through AI-powered search by 2028. This is a rewiring of how B2B buyers discover, compare and choose, not a marginal channel shift.
The discipline that governs whether you are visible inside those AI-generated answers has a name. It is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), and it is a different discipline to SEO.
Why SEO tactics don't translate (and why that matters to your budget)
For most of the last two decades, B2B marketers have optimised for a specific user behaviour. Type a query into Google, scan a list of ten blue links, click one. The entire SEO playbook (keyword targeting, backlinks, domain authority, ranking positions) is a set of levers pulled against that behaviour.
Answer engines don't work that way. When a buyer asks ChatGPT "what are the best account-based marketing platforms for mid-market B2B?", the model doesn't show them ten blue links. It synthesises an answer, names two or three vendors, and sometimes cites a handful of sources. The buyer leaves with a shortlist instead of a search results page.
That one behavioural change breaks several of the core assumptions B2B marketers have been budgeting against.
Rankings don't map to citations. A page that ranks #1 on Google may never be cited by ChatGPT, and a page that doesn't rank in Google's top 20 can be cited repeatedly by Perplexity. The 2025 AI Visibility Report from The Digital Bloom found that only 11% of domains cited by ChatGPT were also cited by Perplexity for the same queries. These are different retrieval systems with different signals.
Backlinks are no longer the dominant signal. In the same study, brand search volume was the strongest predictor of AI citations, with a correlation of 0.334. That is materially stronger than any backlink-based metric. Models are increasingly using brand familiarity as a proxy for trust.
Content freshness suddenly matters in a way SEO never rewarded. Roughly 65% of log hits to cited content were for pages published in the last year, and 79% were from the last two years. AI systems lean toward recent, actively maintained sources.
Traditional measurement is silent on the question that matters. GA4 will not tell you how often ChatGPT recommends you. Your rank tracker will not tell you whether Perplexity is citing your competitor. The measurement stack most B2B marketing teams rely on was built for a world where discovery happened on a SERP.
These differences add up. The inputs, the signals, the measurement and the skills required are distinct enough that treating AEO as "the SEO team's next project" is already producing a second wave of wasted budget across the industry.
The four pillars of AEO for B2B marketers
The methodology breaks down into four pillars. They work as concurrent workstreams rather than sequential steps, and each one pulls a different lever.
1. Entity positioning: make the model understand who you are
Before an answer engine can recommend you, it has to understand what you are. Large language models reason in terms of entities: companies, products, categories, people. If the model's internal representation of your brand is vague, incomplete or confused with a competitor, no amount of content will fix it.
Entity positioning is the work of making sure every AI system has an unambiguous understanding of who you are, what category you compete in, what you do better than alternatives, and who your ideal customer is. The practical work includes Wikidata entries, Knowledge Panel optimisation, structured data (Organization, Product, Software Application schemas), and consistent entity descriptions across high-authority third-party sources.
Diagnostic question for your team: open ChatGPT and ask "What does [your brand] do?" Then ask "Who are [your brand]'s main competitors?" If the answers are vague, wrong, or list your brand alongside companies you don't actually compete with, you have an entity problem. Entity sits upstream of every other AEO lever, so this is usually where the work starts.
2. Answer architecture: structure content so models can extract and cite it
Most B2B content is written for humans scrolling on a laptop. Answer engines don't scroll. They extract. Content that wins citations is content that answers specific questions directly, in a structure the model can parse.
The brands that get cited repeatedly across platforms usually aren't the ones producing the most content. They are the ones whose content is architected for extraction: clear definitions, direct answers at the top of sections, FAQ blocks with schema, concise paragraphs, well-structured headers, and explicit comparisons. Seer Interactive's data on AI Overviews found that brands cited in Google's AI answers earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks. The same Seer analysis showed that when AI Overviews are present and your brand is not cited, organic CTR drops 61% and paid CTR drops 68%. Answer architecture is what determines which side of that line you sit on.
3. Source signal: earn mentions in the places LLMs actually weight
Not all sources are weighted equally. Each AI platform draws from a different constellation of trusted inputs, and the differences are significant. The same 2025 cross-platform analysis found that Reddit accounted for 46.7% of top Perplexity citations but under 10% on ChatGPT after a September 2025 rebalancing. ChatGPT leans heavily on Wikipedia and long-standing editorial sources. Google AI Overviews favour a diversified cross-platform presence.
Source signal is the discipline of earning mentions, reviews and references in the specific places each platform treats as authoritative for your category. For a B2B SaaS brand, that usually means G2 and Gartner Peer Insights (G2's own internal study confirms they are heavily cited across LLMs), plus category-specific industry publications, relevant subreddits, and any analyst coverage that ends up in the training corpus. This is PR, earned media and community work done with a very specific retrieval target in mind.
4. Measurement: track what your rank tracker can't see
If you can't measure AI visibility, you can't manage it, and you certainly can't defend the budget in front of a board. The four metrics we track for clients map directly to the commercial question every B2B CMO cares about: are we showing up when our buyers are choosing?
AI Mention Rate. For a defined set of 20 to 50 buyer-intent queries, what percentage of the time does your brand appear in the answer across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews?
Citation Authority. When those platforms cite sources, how often is your domain among them, and how does that compare to your top three competitors?
Entity Clarity Score. When you ask the model directly "What does [brand] do?", is the answer accurate, complete and differentiated, or generic and interchangeable?
Answer Ownership. For the queries that matter most to your pipeline, are you the primary recommendation or a supporting mention?
This is the layer most B2B marketing teams are missing entirely. Only 22% of marketers currently track AI visibility and traffic, and only 25.7% plan to develop content specifically for AI citations. That gap is, for the moment, the single biggest competitive opportunity in B2B marketing.
You can read the full methodology behind each of these pillars on the [growthvibe AI search optimisation methodology page](https://www.growthvibe.com/ai-search-optimization-services/).
A worked example: what this looks like in martech
Consider a mid-market martech category, say, account-based marketing platforms. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overview the same question: "What are the best account-based marketing platforms for B2B companies with 200 to 2,000 employees?"
Run it once and you'll notice a pattern. Two or three vendors show up consistently across all three engines. A handful appear on one platform but not the others. And a long tail of category players, some of them with significantly better products, bigger marketing budgets and stronger Google rankings, don't appear at all.
When we dig into the brands that win across all three platforms, the same four things are usually true. Their entity is clear (the model knows what they do without hesitation). Their owned content is structured for extraction, with direct answers, comparison pages and FAQ schema. They have strong, recent source signal across G2, Gartner coverage, analyst mentions, and in Perplexity's case, organic Reddit discussion. And they are measuring AI visibility as a discipline rather than guessing at it.
The brands that lose? Usually strong on traditional SEO, weak on entity clarity, inconsistent on answer architecture, and invisible in the places the models trust. Their dashboards look healthy. Their pipeline is quietly leaking.
The mistakes I see most often
After running diagnostics across dozens of B2B brands, the same patterns recur.
Treating AEO as a content problem. Most teams respond to the AI search shift by publishing more blog posts about AI. That is content marketing with the word "AI" in the title. AEO requires work across entity, architecture, source signal and measurement. Content is one of four levers.
Over-indexing on a single platform. Teams obsess over ChatGPT and ignore Perplexity, or vice versa. The retrieval systems are different enough that you need a cross-platform view. The 11% citation overlap figure is the most important number most B2B marketers haven't heard.
Letting the incumbent SEO agency redefine AEO as "SEO plus schema". This is the most expensive mistake in the market right now. Schema helps, but it is a single lever inside the second pillar. If your AEO strategy can be executed by adding FAQ markup, it is not an AEO strategy.
Waiting for measurement to get easier. It will not. The teams winning in 2026 are the ones who built a measurement layer manually, accepted the rough edges, and used the data to make decisions. Waiting for a perfect dashboard is a way of conceding ground to the brands who didn't wait.
A 30-minute AEO self-audit for B2B marketers
If you want to stress-test your own position before the next board meeting, here is a condensed version of the audit we run for clients. It takes about half an hour.
1. The entity test. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overview. Ask each one "What does [your brand] do?" and "Who are [your brand]'s main competitors?" Note the answers verbatim. If any of them are wrong, vague or list competitors you don't actually compete with, flag an entity issue.
2. The category test. Run your three most important buyer-intent queries across all three platforms. Example: "What are the best [your category] platforms for [your ICP]?" Note whether your brand appears, and if so, where in the answer.
3. The competitor test. Run the same three queries again, but replace your brand name with each of your top three competitors. Compare who gets cited, how often, and in what position.
4. The source test. For every citation that appears across those queries, note the source. Which domains are being pulled? Is your domain among them? If not, which domains are, and do you have a presence on those surfaces?
5. The freshness test. Check the publication dates on your most important category pages. If your pillar content hasn't been updated in the last 12 to 18 months, you are likely losing ground to competitors whose content is fresher.
If you do nothing else this quarter, run this audit. It will tell you, in thirty minutes, whether you have an AEO problem, and roughly how big it is.
The window is open, and it won't stay open
AEO is in the phase every new marketing discipline goes through before it becomes table stakes. The market data is clear enough that ignoring it is a choice. The measurement tooling is rough but workable. The playbooks are being written in real time by the brands who decided not to wait.
B2B marketing teams that treat AEO as a discipline now, with its own strategy, its own measurement, and its own owned workstream inside the marketing function, will compound an advantage every month their competitors spend arguing about whether it matters. The ones that treat it as a side project, or hand it to an agency still thinking in terms of rankings and links, will spend 2027 trying to catch up on ground they didn't realise they were losing.
The brands being cited by AI today are the brands being chosen tomorrow. Everything else is a dashboard.
Request a free AI Visibility Report
---
*Sources: [G2: Does G2 Get Ranked in AI LLM Search?](https://learn.g2.com/tech-signals-does-g2-get-ranked-in-ai-llm-search); [PR Newswire: 73% of B2B Buyers Use AI Tools in Purchase Research](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/73-of-b2b-buyers-use-ai-tools-in-purchase-research-multi-source-analysis-finds-302733319.html); [The Digital Bloom: 2025 AI Visibility Report](https://thedigitalbloom.com/learn/2025-ai-citation-llm-visibility-report/); [McKinsey: The new front door to the internet](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/new-front-door-to-the-internet-winning-in-the-age-of-ai-search); [Seer Interactive: AIO impact on Google CTR](https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-september-2025-update); [SparkToro: 2024 Zero-Click Search Study](https://sparktoro.com/blog/2024-zero-click-search-study-for-every-1000-us-google-searches-only-374-clicks-go-to-the-open-web-in-the-eu-its-360/); [Adobe: The explosive rise of generative AI referral traffic](https://business.adobe.com/blog/the-explosive-rise-of-generative-ai-referral-traffic); Forrester 2025 B2B Buyer Journey Study.*
Content
Apr 7, 2026
Content
