By Brian Mitchell, Managing Partner & CEO.
I’ve had more conversations in the past year with CEO’s, CMOs, CROs, and Chief Strategy Officers quietly alarmed by the same thing: traffic is down, inbound is shifting, and no campaign optimization is going to fix it. This isn’t a bad quarter. It’s structural.
The Front Door Just Changed
For twenty years, digital discovery ran through one pipe. Buyer has a problem → Googles it → clicks a link → lands on your site. That pipe is fracturing.
AI tools — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews — now intercept the journey before the click ever happens. They synthesize an answer. The buyer gets what they need and moves on. Your site never entered the picture.
For adtech and martech companies specifically, this hits where it hurts most: the research phase. The Head of Marketing at a mid-market DTC brand isn’t typing “best CDP” into Google anymore. She’s asking Perplexity: “What’s the right CDP for a $200M Shopify brand that needs better segmentation?” The AI names three platforms. If yours isn’t one of them, you may not make it to the RFP.
The buyer still has a problem. They’re just no longer coming to you to understand it. An AI already did that — and quietly built their shortlist.
SEO Isn’t Dead. Your Playbook Might Be.
The tactics that powered growth in our industry — high-volume keyword content, aggressive backlinking, technical optimization — still matter. They’re just no longer sufficient. A new discipline is emerging: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
The question shifts from “How do we rank number one?” to “How do we become the source AI systems trust and cite?” That means asking harder questions about your brand’s presence across the entire web:
- Are we cited in trade press and analyst reports?
- Do practitioners recommend us in the communities where AI training data lives — Reddit, Slack groups, review platforms?
- Is our executive thinking visible, attributable, and credible across multiple channels?
These questions blur the line between PR, content, and demand generation in ways most org charts aren’t structured to handle. That’s a leadership problem as much as a marketing one.
Brand Is Now a Performance Asset
Here’s the implication most executives in our space are least prepared for: brand authority is becoming a prerequisite for being discoverable at all.
AI systems favor brands with credibility signals at scale — not just backlinks, but recognition across the broader information ecosystem. News coverage. Analyst citations. Peer community endorsement. Thought leadership that gets referenced, not just read.
The irony is sharp. An industry that spent years demanding brand marketers prove ROI now faces a world where brand authority determines whether you show up in the AI-mediated moments that drive pipeline. Companies that treated brand-building as a luxury during the growth years may find it’s now table stakes.
The Counterintuitive Upside — and the Real Risk
Here’s what I tell clients who are fixating on traffic declines: the traffic you lose may be worth losing. When someone clicks through from an AI recommendation, they’ve already done the research, formed the shortlist, and thought through their use case. They’re evaluating, not browsing. For B2B companies with long deal cycles and expensive sales teams, that distinction matters enormously.
But the risk is real for parts of our ecosystem. Businesses built primarily on SEO-driven traffic — affiliate comparison sites, content-heavy media properties, early-stage research blogs — face compressing economics as AI absorbs the research journey they used to own.
The Question That’s Changing
For two decades, the defining marketing question in adtech and martech was: “Do we rank on Google?” The question is becoming: “Does AI recommend us?”
The answer will depend on brand credibility, authoritative content, and trusted presence across the places buyers now inhabit — not just your own domain. That rewards what the best companies in our space have always done: build genuine expertise and earn recognition through quality.
The companies that win the next decade won’t be the ones who mastered yesterday’s SEO. They’ll be the ones who built real authority — and had the leadership to start doing it before it became obvious.