Sign up for the weekly B2B Marketing United newsletter
Blog
Letters
How to
Blog
As a CEO, many CMOs are effectively chasing your attention. When they invest heavily in ultimate guides and thought leadership content, what do they need to do differently to get you to engage?
It’s got to be relevant and it’s got to be accessible. I do download content fairly often, but I don’t tend to download massive documents - I just don’t have the time. Time is critical.
I prefer what I’d describe as snackable content. I think a lot of people are overwhelmed by the volume of information out there and we’re all short on time. Most PDFs end up in my “to read” folder and then never actually get read.
The issue isn’t necessarily the insight, it’s the format it’s delivered in. I prefer fast, accessible content: videos, podcasts, short pieces that I can consume easily.
There are exceptions. There are a couple of documents I read every year because they’re directly relevant to the business challenges I’m facing. But fundamentally there’s just a lot out there, so content needs to be targeted, relevant, and consumable.
Many B2B marketing teams would say they already tick those boxes. Is that enough?
There is a lot of repetitive content out there. You only have to look at how many articles are being published on AI, they’re often saying the same things and delivered in the same way.
If content tackled issues in a slightly different way, or was delivered in a more engaging or distinctive format, that would definitely get my attention. Right now, a lot of it looks and sounds the same.
Is content consumption always “on” for you, or are there moments when you actively seek things out?
Personally, I like reading and taking on content. If I’m dealing with a specific business challenge, I’ll actively go out and find solutions to that problem. I’ll ignore a lot of content that feels generic or irrelevant, but when I need to dig into something, I’ll seek it out.
You’ve held senior GTM roles across major organisations. When you look at a marketing dashboard, what’s the metric you care most about and which ones do you have no time for?
The metric I care about most is marketing-sourced pipeline, but it needs to be real pipeline. Opportunities that are actionable and can turn into revenue.
Marketing-attributed revenue is another key one. A single number that shows whether marketing is genuinely helping grow the business.
Those metrics aren’t always available straight away because they rely on good data, systems, and workflows. That data might come from the website, events, inbound enquiries — wherever. But that’s what I want to see.
Vanity metrics, on the other hand, things that look good on dashboards but don’t translate into revenue, are less helpful. Page impressions, generic page views, follower counts: they matter, but they don’t tell me whether we’re generating qualified demand or revenue.
You’re also a practicing artist. Has creativity influenced your approach to marketing?
I’ve been painting pretty much all my life. I wanted to go to art college originally, but my dad encouraged me to get what he called a “proper degree”.
A few years ago I had some downtime and got back into my artwork. We have a place in Cornwall, and I started creating sea-life-inspired pieces in a pop-art style. A gallery there picked them up and began exhibiting them.
So yes, creativity has always been part of who I am.
How does that creative side show up in your marketing philosophy, particularly around brand versus performance?
Brand awareness is vitally important. It doesn’t always translate immediately into revenue metrics, but being known for something, what you’re good at, what you stand for, really matters.
That said, particularly in tougher times, you have to stay focused on growth and revenue. Some marketing metrics simply don’t add value when you’re trying to understand how the business is actually performing.
So it’s about balance. Brand supports long-term growth, but it has to sit alongside clear commercial outcomes.
If a downturn hits and budgets need to be cut quickly, where do you start?
I wouldn’t start by cutting marketing. It’s counterintuitive. You can’t cut your way out of trouble, you have to grow your way out.
Marketing is a lever for growth, not a discretionary cost. I’d look elsewhere first: vendor consolidation, travel, back-office duplication, non-core projects.
In one organisation I worked in, we had around 800 internal projects running at once, many solving the same problems in different ways across regions. We shut most of them down and replaced them with a smaller number of consistent initiatives. The cost savings were significant.
If marketing cuts are unavoidable, it should be about reallocation, not elimination. Dial back experimental activity, but protect channels that reliably generate demand; account-based marketing, targeted industry events, proven performance channels.
You’ve written about the productivity paradox. Are marketers over-tooled?
Yes, I think there are too many tools in most organisations, and that adds complexity. Individually the tools are fine, but collectively - especially in global organisations - they create friction, and friction reduces productivity.
I’ve worked in businesses operating across 30 countries, each with its own CRM system, analytics tools, and implementations. That fragmentation adds cost and slows everything down.
There are huge savings and productivity gains to be made through consolidation. There are dozens of platforms- HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Pardot, Mailchimp, Hootsuite and many more - all doing similar things.
Reducing the number of tools and standardising how they’re used is absolutely key.
Watch the full interview on the B2B Marketing United YouTube channel.
As a CEO, many CMOs are effectively chasing your attention. When they invest heavily in ultimate guides and thought leadership content, what do they need to do differently to get you to engage?
It’s got to be relevant and it’s got to be accessible. I do download content fairly often, but I don’t tend to download massive documents - I just don’t have the time. Time is critical.
I prefer what I’d describe as snackable content. I think a lot of people are overwhelmed by the volume of information out there and we’re all short on time. Most PDFs end up in my “to read” folder and then never actually get read.
The issue isn’t necessarily the insight, it’s the format it’s delivered in. I prefer fast, accessible content: videos, podcasts, short pieces that I can consume easily.
There are exceptions. There are a couple of documents I read every year because they’re directly relevant to the business challenges I’m facing. But fundamentally there’s just a lot out there, so content needs to be targeted, relevant, and consumable.
Many B2B marketing teams would say they already tick those boxes. Is that enough?
There is a lot of repetitive content out there. You only have to look at how many articles are being published on AI, they’re often saying the same things and delivered in the same way.
If content tackled issues in a slightly different way, or was delivered in a more engaging or distinctive format, that would definitely get my attention. Right now, a lot of it looks and sounds the same.
Is content consumption always “on” for you, or are there moments when you actively seek things out?
Personally, I like reading and taking on content. If I’m dealing with a specific business challenge, I’ll actively go out and find solutions to that problem. I’ll ignore a lot of content that feels generic or irrelevant, but when I need to dig into something, I’ll seek it out.
You’ve held senior GTM roles across major organisations. When you look at a marketing dashboard, what’s the metric you care most about and which ones do you have no time for?
The metric I care about most is marketing-sourced pipeline, but it needs to be real pipeline. Opportunities that are actionable and can turn into revenue.
Marketing-attributed revenue is another key one. A single number that shows whether marketing is genuinely helping grow the business.
Those metrics aren’t always available straight away because they rely on good data, systems, and workflows. That data might come from the website, events, inbound enquiries — wherever. But that’s what I want to see.
Vanity metrics, on the other hand, things that look good on dashboards but don’t translate into revenue, are less helpful. Page impressions, generic page views, follower counts: they matter, but they don’t tell me whether we’re generating qualified demand or revenue.
You’re also a practicing artist. Has creativity influenced your approach to marketing?
I’ve been painting pretty much all my life. I wanted to go to art college originally, but my dad encouraged me to get what he called a “proper degree”.
A few years ago I had some downtime and got back into my artwork. We have a place in Cornwall, and I started creating sea-life-inspired pieces in a pop-art style. A gallery there picked them up and began exhibiting them.
So yes, creativity has always been part of who I am.
How does that creative side show up in your marketing philosophy, particularly around brand versus performance?
Brand awareness is vitally important. It doesn’t always translate immediately into revenue metrics, but being known for something, what you’re good at, what you stand for, really matters.
That said, particularly in tougher times, you have to stay focused on growth and revenue. Some marketing metrics simply don’t add value when you’re trying to understand how the business is actually performing.
So it’s about balance. Brand supports long-term growth, but it has to sit alongside clear commercial outcomes.
If a downturn hits and budgets need to be cut quickly, where do you start?
I wouldn’t start by cutting marketing. It’s counterintuitive. You can’t cut your way out of trouble, you have to grow your way out.
Marketing is a lever for growth, not a discretionary cost. I’d look elsewhere first: vendor consolidation, travel, back-office duplication, non-core projects.
In one organisation I worked in, we had around 800 internal projects running at once, many solving the same problems in different ways across regions. We shut most of them down and replaced them with a smaller number of consistent initiatives. The cost savings were significant.
If marketing cuts are unavoidable, it should be about reallocation, not elimination. Dial back experimental activity, but protect channels that reliably generate demand; account-based marketing, targeted industry events, proven performance channels.
You’ve written about the productivity paradox. Are marketers over-tooled?
Yes, I think there are too many tools in most organisations, and that adds complexity. Individually the tools are fine, but collectively - especially in global organisations - they create friction, and friction reduces productivity.
I’ve worked in businesses operating across 30 countries, each with its own CRM system, analytics tools, and implementations. That fragmentation adds cost and slows everything down.
There are huge savings and productivity gains to be made through consolidation. There are dozens of platforms- HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Pardot, Mailchimp, Hootsuite and many more - all doing similar things.
Reducing the number of tools and standardising how they’re used is absolutely key.
Watch the full interview on the B2B Marketing United YouTube channel.
As a CEO, many CMOs are effectively chasing your attention. When they invest heavily in ultimate guides and thought leadership content, what do they need to do differently to get you to engage?
It’s got to be relevant and it’s got to be accessible. I do download content fairly often, but I don’t tend to download massive documents - I just don’t have the time. Time is critical.
I prefer what I’d describe as snackable content. I think a lot of people are overwhelmed by the volume of information out there and we’re all short on time. Most PDFs end up in my “to read” folder and then never actually get read.
The issue isn’t necessarily the insight, it’s the format it’s delivered in. I prefer fast, accessible content: videos, podcasts, short pieces that I can consume easily.
There are exceptions. There are a couple of documents I read every year because they’re directly relevant to the business challenges I’m facing. But fundamentally there’s just a lot out there, so content needs to be targeted, relevant, and consumable.
Many B2B marketing teams would say they already tick those boxes. Is that enough?
There is a lot of repetitive content out there. You only have to look at how many articles are being published on AI, they’re often saying the same things and delivered in the same way.
If content tackled issues in a slightly different way, or was delivered in a more engaging or distinctive format, that would definitely get my attention. Right now, a lot of it looks and sounds the same.
Is content consumption always “on” for you, or are there moments when you actively seek things out?
Personally, I like reading and taking on content. If I’m dealing with a specific business challenge, I’ll actively go out and find solutions to that problem. I’ll ignore a lot of content that feels generic or irrelevant, but when I need to dig into something, I’ll seek it out.
You’ve held senior GTM roles across major organisations. When you look at a marketing dashboard, what’s the metric you care most about and which ones do you have no time for?
The metric I care about most is marketing-sourced pipeline, but it needs to be real pipeline. Opportunities that are actionable and can turn into revenue.
Marketing-attributed revenue is another key one. A single number that shows whether marketing is genuinely helping grow the business.
Those metrics aren’t always available straight away because they rely on good data, systems, and workflows. That data might come from the website, events, inbound enquiries — wherever. But that’s what I want to see.
Vanity metrics, on the other hand, things that look good on dashboards but don’t translate into revenue, are less helpful. Page impressions, generic page views, follower counts: they matter, but they don’t tell me whether we’re generating qualified demand or revenue.
You’re also a practicing artist. Has creativity influenced your approach to marketing?
I’ve been painting pretty much all my life. I wanted to go to art college originally, but my dad encouraged me to get what he called a “proper degree”.
A few years ago I had some downtime and got back into my artwork. We have a place in Cornwall, and I started creating sea-life-inspired pieces in a pop-art style. A gallery there picked them up and began exhibiting them.
So yes, creativity has always been part of who I am.
How does that creative side show up in your marketing philosophy, particularly around brand versus performance?
Brand awareness is vitally important. It doesn’t always translate immediately into revenue metrics, but being known for something, what you’re good at, what you stand for, really matters.
That said, particularly in tougher times, you have to stay focused on growth and revenue. Some marketing metrics simply don’t add value when you’re trying to understand how the business is actually performing.
So it’s about balance. Brand supports long-term growth, but it has to sit alongside clear commercial outcomes.
If a downturn hits and budgets need to be cut quickly, where do you start?
I wouldn’t start by cutting marketing. It’s counterintuitive. You can’t cut your way out of trouble, you have to grow your way out.
Marketing is a lever for growth, not a discretionary cost. I’d look elsewhere first: vendor consolidation, travel, back-office duplication, non-core projects.
In one organisation I worked in, we had around 800 internal projects running at once, many solving the same problems in different ways across regions. We shut most of them down and replaced them with a smaller number of consistent initiatives. The cost savings were significant.
If marketing cuts are unavoidable, it should be about reallocation, not elimination. Dial back experimental activity, but protect channels that reliably generate demand; account-based marketing, targeted industry events, proven performance channels.
You’ve written about the productivity paradox. Are marketers over-tooled?
Yes, I think there are too many tools in most organisations, and that adds complexity. Individually the tools are fine, but collectively - especially in global organisations - they create friction, and friction reduces productivity.
I’ve worked in businesses operating across 30 countries, each with its own CRM system, analytics tools, and implementations. That fragmentation adds cost and slows everything down.
There are huge savings and productivity gains to be made through consolidation. There are dozens of platforms- HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Pardot, Mailchimp, Hootsuite and many more - all doing similar things.
Reducing the number of tools and standardising how they’re used is absolutely key.
Watch the full interview on the B2B Marketing United YouTube channel.
London
Feb 9, 2026
Rich Fitzmaurice
Letters
“Dear Rich,
Quick summary. I left a Head of Marketing role eight months ago to be a fractional CMO. Before I made the move I had done my research, spoken to a few people who had done the same, and felt it was the right next step. I had strong experience, a clear specialism, and my first two clients lined up before I handed in my notice.
Eight months in, the work is interesting, but I am not enjoying some elements. Both clients treat me like a senior contractor rather than a strategic partner. They do not ask for my opinion on commercial decisions; I am just told after the fact. They do not include me in conversations where my perspective could genuinely add value. They schedule and delegate me into execution calls and seem surprised when there is no strategy.
One of them in particular books me for three long execution calls per week. When I have tried to introduce more strategic thinking, I get thanked for it and then ignored. The same tactical requests keep coming.
I do not want to blow up the revenue by resetting the relationship badly as it’s income I rely on. But I also did not leave a good salary to become a very expensive task manager. I have read about fractional CMOs who operate at board level, who are genuinely influential, who shape the direction of businesses they are not employed by. I am not sure how they got there or what I am doing differently/wrong.
How do I fix it?
Helen, Manchester
Rich’s reply
Helen, you are not doing anything wrong, you have simply walked into one of the most common and least discussed problems in fractional work: the client has hired the label but not bought the concept.
They called the role fractional because that is what they saw advertised, or because a peer mentioned it, or because it sounded more interesting than “external marketing resource.” But in their minds, they hired someone senior to help them do things. Not someone to tell them what things to do, or whether the things they are doing are the right things at all.
Being balanced, this is almost never the client’s fault. It is almost always a scoping and onboarding problem, and it starts before you send your first invoice.
You are selling access. They are buying execution.
This is the most important distinction in fractional work. When a client hires you, they have a mental model of what they are getting. Unless you actively change that model in the early days of the engagement, it will default to the most familiar thing: a senior person who does what they ask, faster and smarter than a junior would.
If you walked in on day one and immediately began executing, however sensibly, you confirmed that model. The three execution calls per week were not imposed on you. They grew because no one drew a different boundary for them to understand and agree to.
The fractional CMO who operates at board level did not arrive at board level. They established it before they walked through the door.
There is a framework I use and teach in my course on this called the Diagnostic Bridge. The idea is simple: before any fractional engagement begins producing outputs, there should be a defined discovery phase. Not weeks of auditing for its own sake, but a structured period where you are explicitly operating as a diagnostician rather than a doer. You are asking questions. You are mapping the landscape. You are building an Authority Map of who holds what decisions, what is broken, and where your leverage actually sits.
Crucially, you are doing this visibly and out loud, with the client watching. You are demonstrating that your value is in the judgement you bring before any work is produced, not in the speed at which you produce it.
If you do this properly, by the time the engagement shifts into execution mode, the client has already experienced you as a strategist. That experience is very hard to undo. The problem you have, Helen, is that you accidently skipped this phase, or were not given space for it. So now you need to retrofit it, which is harder but not impossible.
How to reset the relationship without blowing it up
You have two clients, so I will speak generally, but you will need to calibrate this for each one because the dynamics will be different.
The reset does not start with a conversation about your role. It starts with a deliverable.
In the next few weeks, produce something they did not ask for. Not a task from the list. A piece of strategic thinking that reframes something they are currently working on. A short document, maybe two pages, that says: here is what I am observing, here is what I think it means, and here is what I think we should do about it.
Do not send it as an attachment in an email at the end of the day. Request a short call to walk them through it. Say you want fifteen minutes to share some thinking you have been developing. When they read it, they will either push back, in which case you have a strategic conversation, or they will be interested, in which case you have opened a door.
Do this once and it might feel like a one-off. Do it consistently and it becomes how they experience you. You are gradually rewriting the contract in their minds without ever having to say the words “I am not just here to execute your brief.”
The most powerful thing a fractional CMO can do in the first ninety days is make one observation that the client had not made themselves. That single act does more for your positioning than any amount of good execution.
The three execution calls are a symptom, not the problem
I understand why three long calls per week feels like the wrong shape. It probably is the wrong shape. But I would not make the calls themselves the issue you raise.
What you are really trying to change is the nature of the relationship, and the most direct path to that is demonstrating that your thinking is valuable, not that your time is being wasted. The moment you raise the calls as a complaint, even a polite one, you sound like a contractor protecting their hours. That reinforces the very dynamic you are trying to escape.
Instead, use the calls to, subtly, reinforce the role of the wider internal team to focus on the execution, whilst you ask the strategic questions and enquire as to how you can help them manage upwards.
This is not manipulation. It is the job. You are reminding both of you what you are actually there for.
On the clients you have and the ones you should have
There is a harder question underneath all of this, Helen, and I would be doing you a disservice if I did not name it.
Some clients are genuinely not capable of having a strategic relationship with a fractional CMO. Not because they are unsophisticated, but because the founder or CEO is not ready to share thinking with someone who is not on their payroll. They do not trust it, consciously or not. They will always default to telling you what to do rather than asking you what to think.
I am still a practicing Fractional CMO myself, to ensure I stay current and practice what I preach. Before I take on any engagement now, I run what I call a red flags check. The questions I ask are not about the brief. They are about the relationship. Is this person genuinely curious? Do they ask me questions in the sales conversation or just answer mine? Do they talk about decisions they have made differently because of external input? Have they worked with a senior consultant or advisor before and found it valuable?
If the answers are no, no, no, and no, I still might take the work, but I go in knowing the ceiling. And the ceiling tends to be execution.
You are eight months in with two clients who may both have low ceilings. That is useful information. It does not mean you cannot improve things, but it does mean you should be building pipeline for your third and fourth engagements simultaneously and filtering harder next time.
What the fractional CMOs operating at board level did differently
They positioned the engagement before they signed it.
In the sales conversation, before any discussion of deliverables or day rates, they established what they were being hired to do. Not the tasks. The outcome. And they were explicit that achieving the outcome required them to be in the room when commercial decisions were made, not just when campaigns needed running.
This sounds obvious. Most people do not do it because they are worried about losing the client before they have them. But the clients who push back on that framing are the ones with low ceilings. Losing them in the sales process is not a failure. It is your system/filtering/funnel, whatever you want to call it, working.
The other thing they frequently do differently is price by outcome rather than by time. Day rates and hourly fees are a contractor signal. They tell the client you are selling access to your hours. Outcome-based fees or retainers scoped around a defined commercial goal tell the client you are selling a result. The psychological difference in how you are perceived from day one is significant.
I know you are eight months in and changing the pricing model now can feel quite daunting. But it is something to build toward, and it is the right model to try for the next client you bring on.
The short answer
You are not stuck. You are in a very common transitional moment where the label you have and the role you are playing have not yet aligned. The majority of fractionals go through exactly this. It’s almost like a rite of passage.
Retrofit the Diagnostic Bridge by producing unsolicited strategic thinking. Use your calls to demonstrate that your judgement is the product. Start building pipeline with better qualification criteria so your next clients come in with the right expectations from the start.
And if either of your current clients turns out to have a ceiling you cannot raise, that is not a failure of your positioning. Some clients are not ready. The skill is learning to identify them earlier.
Onwards,
Rich
Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
“Dear Rich,
Quick summary. I left a Head of Marketing role eight months ago to be a fractional CMO. Before I made the move I had done my research, spoken to a few people who had done the same, and felt it was the right next step. I had strong experience, a clear specialism, and my first two clients lined up before I handed in my notice.
Eight months in, the work is interesting, but I am not enjoying some elements. Both clients treat me like a senior contractor rather than a strategic partner. They do not ask for my opinion on commercial decisions; I am just told after the fact. They do not include me in conversations where my perspective could genuinely add value. They schedule and delegate me into execution calls and seem surprised when there is no strategy.
One of them in particular books me for three long execution calls per week. When I have tried to introduce more strategic thinking, I get thanked for it and then ignored. The same tactical requests keep coming.
I do not want to blow up the revenue by resetting the relationship badly as it’s income I rely on. But I also did not leave a good salary to become a very expensive task manager. I have read about fractional CMOs who operate at board level, who are genuinely influential, who shape the direction of businesses they are not employed by. I am not sure how they got there or what I am doing differently/wrong.
How do I fix it?
Helen, Manchester
Rich’s reply
Helen, you are not doing anything wrong, you have simply walked into one of the most common and least discussed problems in fractional work: the client has hired the label but not bought the concept.
They called the role fractional because that is what they saw advertised, or because a peer mentioned it, or because it sounded more interesting than “external marketing resource.” But in their minds, they hired someone senior to help them do things. Not someone to tell them what things to do, or whether the things they are doing are the right things at all.
Being balanced, this is almost never the client’s fault. It is almost always a scoping and onboarding problem, and it starts before you send your first invoice.
You are selling access. They are buying execution.
This is the most important distinction in fractional work. When a client hires you, they have a mental model of what they are getting. Unless you actively change that model in the early days of the engagement, it will default to the most familiar thing: a senior person who does what they ask, faster and smarter than a junior would.
If you walked in on day one and immediately began executing, however sensibly, you confirmed that model. The three execution calls per week were not imposed on you. They grew because no one drew a different boundary for them to understand and agree to.
The fractional CMO who operates at board level did not arrive at board level. They established it before they walked through the door.
There is a framework I use and teach in my course on this called the Diagnostic Bridge. The idea is simple: before any fractional engagement begins producing outputs, there should be a defined discovery phase. Not weeks of auditing for its own sake, but a structured period where you are explicitly operating as a diagnostician rather than a doer. You are asking questions. You are mapping the landscape. You are building an Authority Map of who holds what decisions, what is broken, and where your leverage actually sits.
Crucially, you are doing this visibly and out loud, with the client watching. You are demonstrating that your value is in the judgement you bring before any work is produced, not in the speed at which you produce it.
If you do this properly, by the time the engagement shifts into execution mode, the client has already experienced you as a strategist. That experience is very hard to undo. The problem you have, Helen, is that you accidently skipped this phase, or were not given space for it. So now you need to retrofit it, which is harder but not impossible.
How to reset the relationship without blowing it up
You have two clients, so I will speak generally, but you will need to calibrate this for each one because the dynamics will be different.
The reset does not start with a conversation about your role. It starts with a deliverable.
In the next few weeks, produce something they did not ask for. Not a task from the list. A piece of strategic thinking that reframes something they are currently working on. A short document, maybe two pages, that says: here is what I am observing, here is what I think it means, and here is what I think we should do about it.
Do not send it as an attachment in an email at the end of the day. Request a short call to walk them through it. Say you want fifteen minutes to share some thinking you have been developing. When they read it, they will either push back, in which case you have a strategic conversation, or they will be interested, in which case you have opened a door.
Do this once and it might feel like a one-off. Do it consistently and it becomes how they experience you. You are gradually rewriting the contract in their minds without ever having to say the words “I am not just here to execute your brief.”
The most powerful thing a fractional CMO can do in the first ninety days is make one observation that the client had not made themselves. That single act does more for your positioning than any amount of good execution.
The three execution calls are a symptom, not the problem
I understand why three long calls per week feels like the wrong shape. It probably is the wrong shape. But I would not make the calls themselves the issue you raise.
What you are really trying to change is the nature of the relationship, and the most direct path to that is demonstrating that your thinking is valuable, not that your time is being wasted. The moment you raise the calls as a complaint, even a polite one, you sound like a contractor protecting their hours. That reinforces the very dynamic you are trying to escape.
Instead, use the calls to, subtly, reinforce the role of the wider internal team to focus on the execution, whilst you ask the strategic questions and enquire as to how you can help them manage upwards.
This is not manipulation. It is the job. You are reminding both of you what you are actually there for.
On the clients you have and the ones you should have
There is a harder question underneath all of this, Helen, and I would be doing you a disservice if I did not name it.
Some clients are genuinely not capable of having a strategic relationship with a fractional CMO. Not because they are unsophisticated, but because the founder or CEO is not ready to share thinking with someone who is not on their payroll. They do not trust it, consciously or not. They will always default to telling you what to do rather than asking you what to think.
I am still a practicing Fractional CMO myself, to ensure I stay current and practice what I preach. Before I take on any engagement now, I run what I call a red flags check. The questions I ask are not about the brief. They are about the relationship. Is this person genuinely curious? Do they ask me questions in the sales conversation or just answer mine? Do they talk about decisions they have made differently because of external input? Have they worked with a senior consultant or advisor before and found it valuable?
If the answers are no, no, no, and no, I still might take the work, but I go in knowing the ceiling. And the ceiling tends to be execution.
You are eight months in with two clients who may both have low ceilings. That is useful information. It does not mean you cannot improve things, but it does mean you should be building pipeline for your third and fourth engagements simultaneously and filtering harder next time.
What the fractional CMOs operating at board level did differently
They positioned the engagement before they signed it.
In the sales conversation, before any discussion of deliverables or day rates, they established what they were being hired to do. Not the tasks. The outcome. And they were explicit that achieving the outcome required them to be in the room when commercial decisions were made, not just when campaigns needed running.
This sounds obvious. Most people do not do it because they are worried about losing the client before they have them. But the clients who push back on that framing are the ones with low ceilings. Losing them in the sales process is not a failure. It is your system/filtering/funnel, whatever you want to call it, working.
The other thing they frequently do differently is price by outcome rather than by time. Day rates and hourly fees are a contractor signal. They tell the client you are selling access to your hours. Outcome-based fees or retainers scoped around a defined commercial goal tell the client you are selling a result. The psychological difference in how you are perceived from day one is significant.
I know you are eight months in and changing the pricing model now can feel quite daunting. But it is something to build toward, and it is the right model to try for the next client you bring on.
The short answer
You are not stuck. You are in a very common transitional moment where the label you have and the role you are playing have not yet aligned. The majority of fractionals go through exactly this. It’s almost like a rite of passage.
Retrofit the Diagnostic Bridge by producing unsolicited strategic thinking. Use your calls to demonstrate that your judgement is the product. Start building pipeline with better qualification criteria so your next clients come in with the right expectations from the start.
And if either of your current clients turns out to have a ceiling you cannot raise, that is not a failure of your positioning. Some clients are not ready. The skill is learning to identify them earlier.
Onwards,
Rich
Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
“Dear Rich,
Quick summary. I left a Head of Marketing role eight months ago to be a fractional CMO. Before I made the move I had done my research, spoken to a few people who had done the same, and felt it was the right next step. I had strong experience, a clear specialism, and my first two clients lined up before I handed in my notice.
Eight months in, the work is interesting, but I am not enjoying some elements. Both clients treat me like a senior contractor rather than a strategic partner. They do not ask for my opinion on commercial decisions; I am just told after the fact. They do not include me in conversations where my perspective could genuinely add value. They schedule and delegate me into execution calls and seem surprised when there is no strategy.
One of them in particular books me for three long execution calls per week. When I have tried to introduce more strategic thinking, I get thanked for it and then ignored. The same tactical requests keep coming.
I do not want to blow up the revenue by resetting the relationship badly as it’s income I rely on. But I also did not leave a good salary to become a very expensive task manager. I have read about fractional CMOs who operate at board level, who are genuinely influential, who shape the direction of businesses they are not employed by. I am not sure how they got there or what I am doing differently/wrong.
How do I fix it?
Helen, Manchester
Rich’s reply
Helen, you are not doing anything wrong, you have simply walked into one of the most common and least discussed problems in fractional work: the client has hired the label but not bought the concept.
They called the role fractional because that is what they saw advertised, or because a peer mentioned it, or because it sounded more interesting than “external marketing resource.” But in their minds, they hired someone senior to help them do things. Not someone to tell them what things to do, or whether the things they are doing are the right things at all.
Being balanced, this is almost never the client’s fault. It is almost always a scoping and onboarding problem, and it starts before you send your first invoice.
You are selling access. They are buying execution.
This is the most important distinction in fractional work. When a client hires you, they have a mental model of what they are getting. Unless you actively change that model in the early days of the engagement, it will default to the most familiar thing: a senior person who does what they ask, faster and smarter than a junior would.
If you walked in on day one and immediately began executing, however sensibly, you confirmed that model. The three execution calls per week were not imposed on you. They grew because no one drew a different boundary for them to understand and agree to.
The fractional CMO who operates at board level did not arrive at board level. They established it before they walked through the door.
There is a framework I use and teach in my course on this called the Diagnostic Bridge. The idea is simple: before any fractional engagement begins producing outputs, there should be a defined discovery phase. Not weeks of auditing for its own sake, but a structured period where you are explicitly operating as a diagnostician rather than a doer. You are asking questions. You are mapping the landscape. You are building an Authority Map of who holds what decisions, what is broken, and where your leverage actually sits.
Crucially, you are doing this visibly and out loud, with the client watching. You are demonstrating that your value is in the judgement you bring before any work is produced, not in the speed at which you produce it.
If you do this properly, by the time the engagement shifts into execution mode, the client has already experienced you as a strategist. That experience is very hard to undo. The problem you have, Helen, is that you accidently skipped this phase, or were not given space for it. So now you need to retrofit it, which is harder but not impossible.
How to reset the relationship without blowing it up
You have two clients, so I will speak generally, but you will need to calibrate this for each one because the dynamics will be different.
The reset does not start with a conversation about your role. It starts with a deliverable.
In the next few weeks, produce something they did not ask for. Not a task from the list. A piece of strategic thinking that reframes something they are currently working on. A short document, maybe two pages, that says: here is what I am observing, here is what I think it means, and here is what I think we should do about it.
Do not send it as an attachment in an email at the end of the day. Request a short call to walk them through it. Say you want fifteen minutes to share some thinking you have been developing. When they read it, they will either push back, in which case you have a strategic conversation, or they will be interested, in which case you have opened a door.
Do this once and it might feel like a one-off. Do it consistently and it becomes how they experience you. You are gradually rewriting the contract in their minds without ever having to say the words “I am not just here to execute your brief.”
The most powerful thing a fractional CMO can do in the first ninety days is make one observation that the client had not made themselves. That single act does more for your positioning than any amount of good execution.
The three execution calls are a symptom, not the problem
I understand why three long calls per week feels like the wrong shape. It probably is the wrong shape. But I would not make the calls themselves the issue you raise.
What you are really trying to change is the nature of the relationship, and the most direct path to that is demonstrating that your thinking is valuable, not that your time is being wasted. The moment you raise the calls as a complaint, even a polite one, you sound like a contractor protecting their hours. That reinforces the very dynamic you are trying to escape.
Instead, use the calls to, subtly, reinforce the role of the wider internal team to focus on the execution, whilst you ask the strategic questions and enquire as to how you can help them manage upwards.
This is not manipulation. It is the job. You are reminding both of you what you are actually there for.
On the clients you have and the ones you should have
There is a harder question underneath all of this, Helen, and I would be doing you a disservice if I did not name it.
Some clients are genuinely not capable of having a strategic relationship with a fractional CMO. Not because they are unsophisticated, but because the founder or CEO is not ready to share thinking with someone who is not on their payroll. They do not trust it, consciously or not. They will always default to telling you what to do rather than asking you what to think.
I am still a practicing Fractional CMO myself, to ensure I stay current and practice what I preach. Before I take on any engagement now, I run what I call a red flags check. The questions I ask are not about the brief. They are about the relationship. Is this person genuinely curious? Do they ask me questions in the sales conversation or just answer mine? Do they talk about decisions they have made differently because of external input? Have they worked with a senior consultant or advisor before and found it valuable?
If the answers are no, no, no, and no, I still might take the work, but I go in knowing the ceiling. And the ceiling tends to be execution.
You are eight months in with two clients who may both have low ceilings. That is useful information. It does not mean you cannot improve things, but it does mean you should be building pipeline for your third and fourth engagements simultaneously and filtering harder next time.
What the fractional CMOs operating at board level did differently
They positioned the engagement before they signed it.
In the sales conversation, before any discussion of deliverables or day rates, they established what they were being hired to do. Not the tasks. The outcome. And they were explicit that achieving the outcome required them to be in the room when commercial decisions were made, not just when campaigns needed running.
This sounds obvious. Most people do not do it because they are worried about losing the client before they have them. But the clients who push back on that framing are the ones with low ceilings. Losing them in the sales process is not a failure. It is your system/filtering/funnel, whatever you want to call it, working.
The other thing they frequently do differently is price by outcome rather than by time. Day rates and hourly fees are a contractor signal. They tell the client you are selling access to your hours. Outcome-based fees or retainers scoped around a defined commercial goal tell the client you are selling a result. The psychological difference in how you are perceived from day one is significant.
I know you are eight months in and changing the pricing model now can feel quite daunting. But it is something to build toward, and it is the right model to try for the next client you bring on.
The short answer
You are not stuck. You are in a very common transitional moment where the label you have and the role you are playing have not yet aligned. The majority of fractionals go through exactly this. It’s almost like a rite of passage.
Retrofit the Diagnostic Bridge by producing unsolicited strategic thinking. Use your calls to demonstrate that your judgement is the product. Start building pipeline with better qualification criteria so your next clients come in with the right expectations from the start.
And if either of your current clients turns out to have a ceiling you cannot raise, that is not a failure of your positioning. Some clients are not ready. The skill is learning to identify them earlier.
Onwards,
Rich
Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com
Content
Mar 11, 2026
Content
How to's
We can all sense that something has changed in how buyers conduct their research. But most B2B marketers have not caught up with it yet.
A CFO opens Copilot and types: "Which accounting platforms offer AI-powered forecasting?" A marketing director asks ChatGPT: "What are the best agencies for B2B lead generation?" A Head of IT asks Claude: "What project management software works best for a team of fifty?"
None of them went to Google first. And when the AI answered, it named specific brands. Yours may not have been one of them.
This is the problem that Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) exists to solve.
What AEO actually is
Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring your content, your brand presence, and your technical foundations so that AI-powered platforms cite and recommend you when buyers ask questions relevant to your business.
Just as SEO emerged to help brands get found in search engines, AEO has emerged to help brands get found in AI systems. It does not replace SEO. It extends it for an era where the answer, not the link, is the product.
When ChatGPT or Perplexity generates a response to a buyer question, it is not serving a list of links. It is synthesising an answer from sources it considers credible and relevant. Our job, as B2B marketers, is to be one of those sources.
Why this matters right now
Gartner projected that traditional search volume would drop 25% in 2026 as users shift to AI assistants. ChatGPT alone has over 800 million weekly active users. Around 60% of Google searches now end without a single click to a website.
The discovery layer is moving. Buyers are increasingly getting their answers inside the AI response itself, without ever visiting a vendor’s site.
That matters for two reasons beyond the obvious traffic one.
First, the intent behind AI queries is really high. When someone asks an AI for a recommendation, they are past the browsing phase. They want an answer they can act on. AI-referred traffic converts at higher rates than organic search precisely because the AI has already filtered and, implicitly, endorsed.
Second, buyers trust what AI tells them. Probably too much if you've ever had n argument with an LLM (I certainly have!). Research from Capgemini found that 73% of consumers globally trust content created by generative AI. When an AI says “I’d recommend Brand X for this use case”, that carries weight. It lands like expert advice, not an advert.
The brands that build AEO presence now will be the defaults AI recommends for years. Think of SEO in 2008. The companies that invested early still dominate today. The same compounding effect is available in AEO, but only for those who move while most of their competitors are not paying attention.
How AI answer engines decide what to cite
Before you can optimise for AI, you need to understand how it works. It is meaningfully different from traditional search.
Large language models like ChatGPT are trained on vast amounts of web data. What they know about your brand comes from that training: your content, mentions in publications, reviews, directory listings, third-party coverage. When a user asks a question, the model synthesises from everything it has absorbed, weighting sources it considers authoritative.
Retrieval-based systems like Perplexity work differently. They pull real-time information from the web when generating answers, making current content and domain authority more directly relevant.
Google’s AI Overviews blend both approaches, drawing on traditional search signals alongside AI synthesis.
The practical implication is that no single fix works across all platforms (oh, if only it was that easy). A robust AEO strategy has to account for all three models. But the underlying principles are consistent: AI rewards clarity, consistency, and credibility.
The five things AEO actually optimises
Content structure. AI systems parse content differently from humans. They break pages into individual passages and evaluate each one independently. Clear headings, direct answers at the top of each section, factual statements with specific numbers, and Q&A formatting all increase the likelihood of being cited. A page that states “our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime” is far more citable than one that says “we offer industry-leading reliability.” Specific beats vague, always.
Entity recognition. AI needs to understand what your brand is, which category it sits in, and how it relates to other things in its world. This means consistent naming across every platform you appear on, proper schema markup on your website, and presence on the platforms that define entities in AI systems: your Google Knowledge Graph entry, industry directories, authoritative databases. If AI cannot confidently place your brand in a category, it will not confidently recommend you.
Source authority. LLMs weight sources by perceived credibility. Coverage in respected industry publications, thought leadership on high-authority sites, mentions from recognised experts: these all increase the probability that AI treats your content as worth citing. What others say about you matters at least as much as what you say about yourself. Often more. This is why I think PR will make a comeback.
Factual consistency. AI cross-references information across sources. If your founding date, revenue figure, or product description varies between your website, your LinkedIn, your press mentions, and your directory listings, AI loses confidence in citing any of them. Inconsistency reads as unreliability. Fixing it is unglamorous work. It matters enormously. For us B2B marketers, those 'fact books' and 'core scripts' will be coming back in vogue.
Semantic alignment. AI categorises content using semantic relationships. Using the terminology, frameworks, and concepts your industry actually uses, and doing so naturally within authoritative content, strengthens the connection between your brand and the queries you want to own. Write for the buyer’s language, not your internal vocabulary.
How to get started
Step one: audit what AI currently says about you.
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Ask the questions your buyers actually ask. "What are the best platforms for [your category]?" "Which [your service type] providers work with [your target industry]?" "Tell me about [your brand name]."
Note where you appear. Note how accurately you are described. Note which competitors appear instead of you. This is your baseline. Do it across at least fifteen to twenty prompts that represent your real buyer questions. The gaps you find become your content and authority priorities.
Step two: map your target queries.
Build a list of twenty to thirty questions your ideal customers are likely to ask an AI assistant. Include category queries ("best X software for Y"), comparison queries ("X versus Y versus Z"), and recommendation queries ("which X should I use for this use case"). This is your AEO query universe: the questions you need to own.
Step three: restructure your existing content.
You do not necessarily need to create new content. You need to make what you have more legible to AI systems. Start with your most important pages. Lead each section with a direct answer. Add FAQ sections that use the exact language from your target query list. Replace vague claims with specific, citable statements. Use clear heading hierarchies. Make every section able to stand alone as a passage.
Step four: build your authority footprint.
Identify where AI systems go to assess credibility in your category. Industry publications. Analyst reports. Review platforms. Expert directories. Community platforms that AI crawls: LinkedIn, Reddit, relevant industry forums. Pursue presence on those consistently. Not volume. Consistency and quality. One well-placed byline in a credible industry publication does more for AEO than ten posts on your own blog.
Step five: fix your entity consistency.
Audit every place your brand appears online. Your website, your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn company page, your directory listings, your press mentions. Make sure your brand name, description, category, and key facts are identical everywhere. This is the kind of work that nobody wants to do but everybody benefits from.
Step six: measure and iterate.
Start tracking how your AI citation rate changes over time. Run your target query list monthly across the main platforms and record where you appear. Track whether AI referral traffic is showing up in your analytics. This will not be perfect attribution. It does not need to be. You are looking for directional signals: more citations, more accurate descriptions, more queries where you feature.
What good AEO looks like in practice
A page that states "our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime" is far more citable than one that says "we offer industry-leading reliability."
A FAQ section that asks "which B2B marketing platforms are best for companies with under fifty employees?" and answers it directly is far more useful to an AI system than a generic features page.
A founder with a consistent, expert-level presence in trade publications is far more likely to have their brand cited than one who only publishes on their own site.
These are not complicated ideas. But most B2B brands are not doing them systematically, yet! Which is the opportunity!
The honest caveat
AEO is not a one-time project. AI models update continuously. What works today may need adjusting in six months. The platforms themselves are evolving. Perplexity’s citation logic is not identical to ChatGPT’s, which is not identical to Google’s AI Overviews.
As marketers, we must build the habit. The brands that treat AEO as an ongoing discipline rather than a box to tick are the ones that will compound advantage over time.
Most companies have not even started yet. That window will not stay open indefinitely.
Want help assessing your current AI visibility? It's something we actually specialize in. Get in touch via our contact us.
We can all sense that something has changed in how buyers conduct their research. But most B2B marketers have not caught up with it yet.
A CFO opens Copilot and types: "Which accounting platforms offer AI-powered forecasting?" A marketing director asks ChatGPT: "What are the best agencies for B2B lead generation?" A Head of IT asks Claude: "What project management software works best for a team of fifty?"
None of them went to Google first. And when the AI answered, it named specific brands. Yours may not have been one of them.
This is the problem that Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) exists to solve.
What AEO actually is
Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring your content, your brand presence, and your technical foundations so that AI-powered platforms cite and recommend you when buyers ask questions relevant to your business.
Just as SEO emerged to help brands get found in search engines, AEO has emerged to help brands get found in AI systems. It does not replace SEO. It extends it for an era where the answer, not the link, is the product.
When ChatGPT or Perplexity generates a response to a buyer question, it is not serving a list of links. It is synthesising an answer from sources it considers credible and relevant. Our job, as B2B marketers, is to be one of those sources.
Why this matters right now
Gartner projected that traditional search volume would drop 25% in 2026 as users shift to AI assistants. ChatGPT alone has over 800 million weekly active users. Around 60% of Google searches now end without a single click to a website.
The discovery layer is moving. Buyers are increasingly getting their answers inside the AI response itself, without ever visiting a vendor’s site.
That matters for two reasons beyond the obvious traffic one.
First, the intent behind AI queries is really high. When someone asks an AI for a recommendation, they are past the browsing phase. They want an answer they can act on. AI-referred traffic converts at higher rates than organic search precisely because the AI has already filtered and, implicitly, endorsed.
Second, buyers trust what AI tells them. Probably too much if you've ever had n argument with an LLM (I certainly have!). Research from Capgemini found that 73% of consumers globally trust content created by generative AI. When an AI says “I’d recommend Brand X for this use case”, that carries weight. It lands like expert advice, not an advert.
The brands that build AEO presence now will be the defaults AI recommends for years. Think of SEO in 2008. The companies that invested early still dominate today. The same compounding effect is available in AEO, but only for those who move while most of their competitors are not paying attention.
How AI answer engines decide what to cite
Before you can optimise for AI, you need to understand how it works. It is meaningfully different from traditional search.
Large language models like ChatGPT are trained on vast amounts of web data. What they know about your brand comes from that training: your content, mentions in publications, reviews, directory listings, third-party coverage. When a user asks a question, the model synthesises from everything it has absorbed, weighting sources it considers authoritative.
Retrieval-based systems like Perplexity work differently. They pull real-time information from the web when generating answers, making current content and domain authority more directly relevant.
Google’s AI Overviews blend both approaches, drawing on traditional search signals alongside AI synthesis.
The practical implication is that no single fix works across all platforms (oh, if only it was that easy). A robust AEO strategy has to account for all three models. But the underlying principles are consistent: AI rewards clarity, consistency, and credibility.
The five things AEO actually optimises
Content structure. AI systems parse content differently from humans. They break pages into individual passages and evaluate each one independently. Clear headings, direct answers at the top of each section, factual statements with specific numbers, and Q&A formatting all increase the likelihood of being cited. A page that states “our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime” is far more citable than one that says “we offer industry-leading reliability.” Specific beats vague, always.
Entity recognition. AI needs to understand what your brand is, which category it sits in, and how it relates to other things in its world. This means consistent naming across every platform you appear on, proper schema markup on your website, and presence on the platforms that define entities in AI systems: your Google Knowledge Graph entry, industry directories, authoritative databases. If AI cannot confidently place your brand in a category, it will not confidently recommend you.
Source authority. LLMs weight sources by perceived credibility. Coverage in respected industry publications, thought leadership on high-authority sites, mentions from recognised experts: these all increase the probability that AI treats your content as worth citing. What others say about you matters at least as much as what you say about yourself. Often more. This is why I think PR will make a comeback.
Factual consistency. AI cross-references information across sources. If your founding date, revenue figure, or product description varies between your website, your LinkedIn, your press mentions, and your directory listings, AI loses confidence in citing any of them. Inconsistency reads as unreliability. Fixing it is unglamorous work. It matters enormously. For us B2B marketers, those 'fact books' and 'core scripts' will be coming back in vogue.
Semantic alignment. AI categorises content using semantic relationships. Using the terminology, frameworks, and concepts your industry actually uses, and doing so naturally within authoritative content, strengthens the connection between your brand and the queries you want to own. Write for the buyer’s language, not your internal vocabulary.
How to get started
Step one: audit what AI currently says about you.
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Ask the questions your buyers actually ask. "What are the best platforms for [your category]?" "Which [your service type] providers work with [your target industry]?" "Tell me about [your brand name]."
Note where you appear. Note how accurately you are described. Note which competitors appear instead of you. This is your baseline. Do it across at least fifteen to twenty prompts that represent your real buyer questions. The gaps you find become your content and authority priorities.
Step two: map your target queries.
Build a list of twenty to thirty questions your ideal customers are likely to ask an AI assistant. Include category queries ("best X software for Y"), comparison queries ("X versus Y versus Z"), and recommendation queries ("which X should I use for this use case"). This is your AEO query universe: the questions you need to own.
Step three: restructure your existing content.
You do not necessarily need to create new content. You need to make what you have more legible to AI systems. Start with your most important pages. Lead each section with a direct answer. Add FAQ sections that use the exact language from your target query list. Replace vague claims with specific, citable statements. Use clear heading hierarchies. Make every section able to stand alone as a passage.
Step four: build your authority footprint.
Identify where AI systems go to assess credibility in your category. Industry publications. Analyst reports. Review platforms. Expert directories. Community platforms that AI crawls: LinkedIn, Reddit, relevant industry forums. Pursue presence on those consistently. Not volume. Consistency and quality. One well-placed byline in a credible industry publication does more for AEO than ten posts on your own blog.
Step five: fix your entity consistency.
Audit every place your brand appears online. Your website, your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn company page, your directory listings, your press mentions. Make sure your brand name, description, category, and key facts are identical everywhere. This is the kind of work that nobody wants to do but everybody benefits from.
Step six: measure and iterate.
Start tracking how your AI citation rate changes over time. Run your target query list monthly across the main platforms and record where you appear. Track whether AI referral traffic is showing up in your analytics. This will not be perfect attribution. It does not need to be. You are looking for directional signals: more citations, more accurate descriptions, more queries where you feature.
What good AEO looks like in practice
A page that states "our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime" is far more citable than one that says "we offer industry-leading reliability."
A FAQ section that asks "which B2B marketing platforms are best for companies with under fifty employees?" and answers it directly is far more useful to an AI system than a generic features page.
A founder with a consistent, expert-level presence in trade publications is far more likely to have their brand cited than one who only publishes on their own site.
These are not complicated ideas. But most B2B brands are not doing them systematically, yet! Which is the opportunity!
The honest caveat
AEO is not a one-time project. AI models update continuously. What works today may need adjusting in six months. The platforms themselves are evolving. Perplexity’s citation logic is not identical to ChatGPT’s, which is not identical to Google’s AI Overviews.
As marketers, we must build the habit. The brands that treat AEO as an ongoing discipline rather than a box to tick are the ones that will compound advantage over time.
Most companies have not even started yet. That window will not stay open indefinitely.
Want help assessing your current AI visibility? It's something we actually specialize in. Get in touch via our contact us.
We can all sense that something has changed in how buyers conduct their research. But most B2B marketers have not caught up with it yet.
A CFO opens Copilot and types: "Which accounting platforms offer AI-powered forecasting?" A marketing director asks ChatGPT: "What are the best agencies for B2B lead generation?" A Head of IT asks Claude: "What project management software works best for a team of fifty?"
None of them went to Google first. And when the AI answered, it named specific brands. Yours may not have been one of them.
This is the problem that Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) exists to solve.
What AEO actually is
Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring your content, your brand presence, and your technical foundations so that AI-powered platforms cite and recommend you when buyers ask questions relevant to your business.
Just as SEO emerged to help brands get found in search engines, AEO has emerged to help brands get found in AI systems. It does not replace SEO. It extends it for an era where the answer, not the link, is the product.
When ChatGPT or Perplexity generates a response to a buyer question, it is not serving a list of links. It is synthesising an answer from sources it considers credible and relevant. Our job, as B2B marketers, is to be one of those sources.
Why this matters right now
Gartner projected that traditional search volume would drop 25% in 2026 as users shift to AI assistants. ChatGPT alone has over 800 million weekly active users. Around 60% of Google searches now end without a single click to a website.
The discovery layer is moving. Buyers are increasingly getting their answers inside the AI response itself, without ever visiting a vendor’s site.
That matters for two reasons beyond the obvious traffic one.
First, the intent behind AI queries is really high. When someone asks an AI for a recommendation, they are past the browsing phase. They want an answer they can act on. AI-referred traffic converts at higher rates than organic search precisely because the AI has already filtered and, implicitly, endorsed.
Second, buyers trust what AI tells them. Probably too much if you've ever had n argument with an LLM (I certainly have!). Research from Capgemini found that 73% of consumers globally trust content created by generative AI. When an AI says “I’d recommend Brand X for this use case”, that carries weight. It lands like expert advice, not an advert.
The brands that build AEO presence now will be the defaults AI recommends for years. Think of SEO in 2008. The companies that invested early still dominate today. The same compounding effect is available in AEO, but only for those who move while most of their competitors are not paying attention.
How AI answer engines decide what to cite
Before you can optimise for AI, you need to understand how it works. It is meaningfully different from traditional search.
Large language models like ChatGPT are trained on vast amounts of web data. What they know about your brand comes from that training: your content, mentions in publications, reviews, directory listings, third-party coverage. When a user asks a question, the model synthesises from everything it has absorbed, weighting sources it considers authoritative.
Retrieval-based systems like Perplexity work differently. They pull real-time information from the web when generating answers, making current content and domain authority more directly relevant.
Google’s AI Overviews blend both approaches, drawing on traditional search signals alongside AI synthesis.
The practical implication is that no single fix works across all platforms (oh, if only it was that easy). A robust AEO strategy has to account for all three models. But the underlying principles are consistent: AI rewards clarity, consistency, and credibility.
The five things AEO actually optimises
Content structure. AI systems parse content differently from humans. They break pages into individual passages and evaluate each one independently. Clear headings, direct answers at the top of each section, factual statements with specific numbers, and Q&A formatting all increase the likelihood of being cited. A page that states “our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime” is far more citable than one that says “we offer industry-leading reliability.” Specific beats vague, always.
Entity recognition. AI needs to understand what your brand is, which category it sits in, and how it relates to other things in its world. This means consistent naming across every platform you appear on, proper schema markup on your website, and presence on the platforms that define entities in AI systems: your Google Knowledge Graph entry, industry directories, authoritative databases. If AI cannot confidently place your brand in a category, it will not confidently recommend you.
Source authority. LLMs weight sources by perceived credibility. Coverage in respected industry publications, thought leadership on high-authority sites, mentions from recognised experts: these all increase the probability that AI treats your content as worth citing. What others say about you matters at least as much as what you say about yourself. Often more. This is why I think PR will make a comeback.
Factual consistency. AI cross-references information across sources. If your founding date, revenue figure, or product description varies between your website, your LinkedIn, your press mentions, and your directory listings, AI loses confidence in citing any of them. Inconsistency reads as unreliability. Fixing it is unglamorous work. It matters enormously. For us B2B marketers, those 'fact books' and 'core scripts' will be coming back in vogue.
Semantic alignment. AI categorises content using semantic relationships. Using the terminology, frameworks, and concepts your industry actually uses, and doing so naturally within authoritative content, strengthens the connection between your brand and the queries you want to own. Write for the buyer’s language, not your internal vocabulary.
How to get started
Step one: audit what AI currently says about you.
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. Ask the questions your buyers actually ask. "What are the best platforms for [your category]?" "Which [your service type] providers work with [your target industry]?" "Tell me about [your brand name]."
Note where you appear. Note how accurately you are described. Note which competitors appear instead of you. This is your baseline. Do it across at least fifteen to twenty prompts that represent your real buyer questions. The gaps you find become your content and authority priorities.
Step two: map your target queries.
Build a list of twenty to thirty questions your ideal customers are likely to ask an AI assistant. Include category queries ("best X software for Y"), comparison queries ("X versus Y versus Z"), and recommendation queries ("which X should I use for this use case"). This is your AEO query universe: the questions you need to own.
Step three: restructure your existing content.
You do not necessarily need to create new content. You need to make what you have more legible to AI systems. Start with your most important pages. Lead each section with a direct answer. Add FAQ sections that use the exact language from your target query list. Replace vague claims with specific, citable statements. Use clear heading hierarchies. Make every section able to stand alone as a passage.
Step four: build your authority footprint.
Identify where AI systems go to assess credibility in your category. Industry publications. Analyst reports. Review platforms. Expert directories. Community platforms that AI crawls: LinkedIn, Reddit, relevant industry forums. Pursue presence on those consistently. Not volume. Consistency and quality. One well-placed byline in a credible industry publication does more for AEO than ten posts on your own blog.
Step five: fix your entity consistency.
Audit every place your brand appears online. Your website, your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn company page, your directory listings, your press mentions. Make sure your brand name, description, category, and key facts are identical everywhere. This is the kind of work that nobody wants to do but everybody benefits from.
Step six: measure and iterate.
Start tracking how your AI citation rate changes over time. Run your target query list monthly across the main platforms and record where you appear. Track whether AI referral traffic is showing up in your analytics. This will not be perfect attribution. It does not need to be. You are looking for directional signals: more citations, more accurate descriptions, more queries where you feature.
What good AEO looks like in practice
A page that states "our platform processes two million transactions per day with 99.9% uptime" is far more citable than one that says "we offer industry-leading reliability."
A FAQ section that asks "which B2B marketing platforms are best for companies with under fifty employees?" and answers it directly is far more useful to an AI system than a generic features page.
A founder with a consistent, expert-level presence in trade publications is far more likely to have their brand cited than one who only publishes on their own site.
These are not complicated ideas. But most B2B brands are not doing them systematically, yet! Which is the opportunity!
The honest caveat
AEO is not a one-time project. AI models update continuously. What works today may need adjusting in six months. The platforms themselves are evolving. Perplexity’s citation logic is not identical to ChatGPT’s, which is not identical to Google’s AI Overviews.
As marketers, we must build the habit. The brands that treat AEO as an ongoing discipline rather than a box to tick are the ones that will compound advantage over time.
Most companies have not even started yet. That window will not stay open indefinitely.
Want help assessing your current AI visibility? It's something we actually specialize in. Get in touch via our contact us.
Content
Mar 13, 2026
Content
