In partnership with
Almost Friday, hang in there!
The most expensive problem in your marketing department this quarter might be a vocabulary disagreement.
Search Engine Land published research on 24 August showing that 81% of marketers still refer to their internal AI search visibility strategy as SEO. Not GEO, not AEO, not any of the acronyms the conference circuit has been selling for a year. SEO.
Then the split. C-suite marketers use "GEO" (28%) and "AEO" (17%) at roughly three times the rate of individual contributors (9% and 3%).
Read that as an org chart. The people approving budget and the people spending it describe the same work with different nouns. When your director asks for "SEO" headcount and your CMO has been told the company needs a "GEO capability", that is one request arriving as two, and the second looks like duplication.
70% would search for either "AI search optimization" (46%) or simply "SEO" (24%) when looking for help. The vendors optimizing for GEO and AEO are optimizing for terms their buyers never type.
And 36% named buzzword overload, with no clear explanation of what each term means, as their biggest frustration. Not the algorithms. The words.
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TALK ON THE MARKET
Hugh Bonneville, backing a campaign against AI voice cloning alongside Nicola Coughlan and Matt Lucas, reported by Variety on 28 August:
"My voice is unique, it's mine, it's part of my identity. So is yours. That's worth speaking up about."
Variety notes Bonneville added that his quote was handwritten, not created by AI.
That footnote is the news. A public figure now attaches provenance to his own sentence, unprompted, because he assumes the alternative will be suspected. Everything you publish arrives under the same suspicion now, whether you address it or not.
NUMBERS MATTER
300%. Sales of marshmallows and graham crackers lift by as much as 300% in peak summer-holiday weeks. Hershey is using AI to strategize and capture this insane peak as much as they can.
Seasonality at that amplitude is not a nuance you optimize around later. It is the plan.
Today’s partner highlight:
DAILY PROMPT
Create a concise stakeholder alignment brief for the following marketing initiative. This brief should secure buy-in from executives, department heads, and cross-functional teams by clearly articulating value, addressing concerns, and establishing shared success metrics.
## Initiative Details
- Initiative Name: [INITIATIVE NAME]
- Primary Objective: [WHAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE]
- Target Audience: [WHO THIS IMPACTS]
- Timeline: [START DATE TO END DATE]
- Budget: [TOTAL BUDGET OR RESOURCE ALLOCATION]
## Key Stakeholders
List the main stakeholders and their primary concerns:
1. [STAKEHOLDER ROLE/TITLE] - Concern: [WHAT MATTERS TO THEM]
2. [STAKEHOLDER ROLE/TITLE] - Concern: [WHAT MATTERS TO THEM]
3. [STAKEHOLDER ROLE/TITLE] - Concern: [WHAT MATTERS TO THEM]
## Current Context
- Business Challenge: [PROBLEM YOU'RE SOLVING]
- Market Opportunity: [WHY NOW]
- Competitive Landscape: [RELEVANT CONTEXT]
## Success Metrics
Provide 3-4 metrics that matter to different stakeholder groups:
- [METRIC 1 - WHO CARES]: [TARGET]
- [METRIC 2 - WHO CARES]: [TARGET]
- [METRIC 3 - WHO CARES]: [TARGET]
Generate a 1-page alignment brief that includes:
1. Executive Summary (2-3 sentences)
2. The Opportunity (why this matters now)
3. Stakeholder Value Proposition (one sentence per major stakeholder group)
4. Key Risks & Mitigation (2-3 risks with solutions)
5. Success Metrics & Accountability (who owns what)
6. Next Steps & Decision Points
Use clear, jargon-free language. Anticipate objections and address them proactively. Make it scannable with headers and bullet points.Use this the next time a request arrives dressed in a word half the room does not use. It forces a single written definition of what is being asked for, who owns it and what "done" looks like, which is the cheapest possible fix for a problem that currently costs you a duplicated budget line.
CMO CORNER
Every unclear expectation becomes a future bottleneck.
You can watch this form in real time. Somebody is asked to "improve our AI visibility". Nobody defines it, says what it is worth, or says who decides when it is done. Three months later, there is a subscription, a dashboard nobody reads, and an argument about whether it worked.
The 81% is evidence the definition step is being skipped at scale. Write down what you want true in six months, in whatever words your team already uses, and let the acronym sort itself out.
We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.
TOOL UPGRADE
Whatever you call it, three ways to stop depending on somebody else's answer box:
RankWell — best for publishing at a volume that gets you into the answers, without a content team you do not have. Try RankWell here →
Trycomp.ai — best for watching what rivals are publishing, so you find out you have been outranked before the quarterly review does. Try Trycomp.ai here →
Beehiiv — best for owning the audience outright, which is the only visibility strategy no model update can revoke. Try Beehiiv here →
→ We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.
LEARN THIS
If your team is producing mediocre output from good tools, the gap is usually input structure: Advanced Prompting for Marketers.
It is written for marketers rather than engineers, and the section on structuring inputs moves output quality more than any model switch. There is a direct line to today's story, since the discipline that makes a prompt legible is the same one that makes your positioning legible to a model.
→ We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more on AI marketing for free. Browse our learning resources for free.