For twenty years, marketers fought for real estate on Google’s first page.
Entire industries (SEO, link-building, content farms) rose and fell on the back of the 10 blue links.
That era just ended.
Google is quietly killing its own invention. The throne now belongs to AI Overviews. Generated answers at the very top of the page. Not only do they replace links, they already weave ads directly into the response.
This rewrites the hierarchy of visibility.
If your brand isn’t cited in the AI answer, you don’t exist.
If you’re optimizing for keywords, you’re fighting the wrong war.
If you’re not building for AI visibility, your competitors are.
The 10 blue links are gone. The new battleground is Answer Engine Optimization. Becoming discoverable, referenceable, and buyable within a model’s response.
The question is no longer “How do we rank?”
It’s “How do we get chosen?”
— Peter & Torsten
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Google Search Goes All-In on AI Answers (and Ads)
Google confirmed two major shifts for its flagship search product this week.
First, the company is strongly hinting that AI Overviews, the generative AI answers at the top of the page, may soon become the default experience. This pushes the classic "10 blue links" further down, cementing AI as the primary interface for user queries.
Second, Google began rolling out ads directly inside these AI-generated answers globally. These ads, labeled "Sponsored," are contextually integrated into the flow of the AI response. For example, a query for "best skincare for dry skin" might generate a paragraph comparing ingredients, with a sponsored mention of a specific brand’s moisturizer embedded within the text.
Why this matters for marketing leaders
Your organic search strategy is now secondary to your "AI answer" strategy. If your brand isn't cited as a source or featured in a sponsored placement within the AI Overview, you are effectively invisible for that query.
This forces a budget reallocation from traditional SEO toward a new "Answer Engine Optimization" (AEO) and higher ad spend to secure placement in this premium, high-intent digital real estate.
What to do next?
Instead of our usual bullet points, let us point you to this new video from one of our favorite podcasters, Lenny Rachitsky, about Answer Engine Optimization. It is a treasure trove of information and you should watch the whole interview.
Here are the three most important and immediately actionable takeaways:
Keyword research → Question research.
Traditional SEO focused on identifying a wide array of keywords that your customers might search for. LLM optimization is about coming up with as many (hundreds!) of questions you can potentially answer.
Create comprehensive content.
Build landing pages and help center articles that not only answer the main question but also address all potential follow-up questions. Don’t be afraid even to mention your competitors. LLMs value comprehensive pages.
Reddit and YouTube are your winners.
LLMs love to use info from these two platforms. The latter is straightforward with partnerships and affiliate marketing. Reddit is much harder. The platform is notoriously hostile to marketing content, making it difficult to control your brand narrative as tightly.
Remember, visitors sent by an LLM are very high-intent buyers. Webflow (a big website management platform) observed a 6x higher conversion rate from LLM traffic compared to traditional Google search traffic.
That’s not something you can afford to ignore.
This week in our Community
We hold multiple workshops every week for our community members.
This week, there are two highlights:
» Advanced prompting tactical workshop for marketers and marketing teams. We will teach our own method of context-based prompting that delivers consistent quality results, regardless of use cases.
» Winning your marketing team for AI. Our leadership workshop teaches you the AIM framework that helps CMOs convert their teams from AI curious to AI native & AI driven.
All our workshops are available only to members.
In addition to the workshops, members also gain access to:
» Strategic playbooks for leading AI-driven growth
» Self-paced courses on AI-powered marketing leadership
» Exclusive member resources and tools
The community is for marketing, creative, and growth leaders only. It’s paid and it’s invite-only.
Seedream 4.0 — The New Best Image Model?
At this stage, writing is AI’s bread and butter. The real battlefield today is image generation. Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, better known as Nano Banana 🍌 has been utterly crashing the competition since it was released. Its domination lasted about… two weeks.
The new challenger is Seedream 4.0, a model developed by ByteDance, creators of TikTok. Like Nano Banana, it excels at combining images, making it useful for product shots:
Unlike Nano Banana, it also plays nice with text and typography. Use it out of the box to generate infographics like this:
These new-generation image editing models require a very specific prompt, so please check the prompting guide beforehand. Seedream 4.0 is already available on fal, Krea, and Replicate (the latter is the best for a quick test).
Why it matters for marketing leaders
This is about reducing the cost and complexity of high-end product and commercial photography. The core strength of this new class of models is their advanced ability to combine and compose images realistically.
This allows your team to take an existing product shot and seamlessly place it into any imaginable background or scene, complete with accurate lighting, shadows, and reflections. It effectively replaces the need for expensive and time-consuming studio photoshoots for a huge swath of marketing and e-commerce creatives.
What to do next?
» Run a virtual photoshoot test: Task your creative lead with taking a standard product photo from your e-commerce catalog and using Seedream 4.0 to place it into three distinct lifestyle scenes (e.g., a busy urban environment, a minimalist home, a natural landscape). Evaluate the outputs for commercial viability.
» Create contextual ad variations: Have your performance marketing team generate five ad creatives that place your product in scenes relevant to specific, hard-to-reach audience segments. Test if this hyper-contextual creative outperforms your standard studio product shots.
» Challenge it with a multi-product composite: Provide the model with images of two or three complementary products. Test its ability to create a single, well-composed "bundle" or "kit" shot that looks like a real photograph, saving significant design and photography effort.
Claude Now Works With Files - And It’s a Huge Deal
Anthropic's Claude just got a new feature that's genuinely useful for marketers: it can now create and edit Excel spreadsheets, documents, PowerPoint slide decks, and PDFs directly.
You might think this doesn’t sound that interesting, but it is immensely powerful. You can feed Claude with messy, unstructured data — like raw notes from customer interviews, a chaotic list of brainstorming ideas, or conversion numbers, and get back a clean Excel sheet with complex formulas or the first draft of a presentation:
Click to watch the demo video
We tested the new feature using raw data from the Meta advertising dashboard, which includes performance data for campaigns, ad sets, and ad creatives. We then asked Claude to identify any missed optimization opportunities. Try it for yourself—the results are eye-opening.
Why it matters for marketing leaders
This isn't about creating files; it's about collapsing the entire "data-to-insight" workflow from hours into minutes. Your teams are drowning in unstructured data from ad platforms, customer interviews, and CRM reports.
The biggest bottleneck is translating that raw data into a clean, decision-ready format. This feature automates that painful middle step, turning a data analyst's multi-hour task into a single prompt.
What to do next?
» Pilot a performance reporting workflow: Have your demand gen lead export raw performance data from your main ad platform (e.g., Meta, Google Ads). Task them with using Claude to create a summary deck that identifies the top 3 underperforming ads and suggests concrete optimization steps.
» Automate the synthesis of qualitative feedback: Take the raw transcripts from your last 10 customer interviews or a messy collection of user feedback. Ask Claude to categorize the feedback by theme, identify the most common feature requests, and generate a summary document for the product team.
» Challenge it with a competitive analysis task: Feed the model a list of your top 5 competitors' recent press releases or blog posts. Ask it to create a spreadsheet comparing their messaging themes, product launch frequency, and target keywords.
» Re-evaluate your marketing ops backlog: Task your operations lead to identify three routine, manual reporting tasks that currently take more than two hours per week. Test if this feature can automate them, freeing up specialist time for more strategic work.
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NotebookLM: Your Team's New AI Brain
NotebookLM — a seriously overlooked tool for marketers — just got a big upgrade worth your attention. It is a fantastic platform to make your existing documents come alive.
You can feed it your dense market research, and it will generate a mind map or a podcast-style audio summary. Or, you can upload your onboarding guides, and it will create interactive quizzes for new team members. It stops your documents from just sitting there and turns them into something you can actually use.
This opens up some interesting possibilities, both for internal knowledge management and external content creation. Imagine a self-serve new-hire onboarding process by turning company and product information into flashcards, making training faster and more engaging. For external marketing, it’s a content machine.
That long whitepaper you published can instantly be turned into a debate-style audio clip for social media or a video summary in 80 (!) languages. Don’t sleep on NotebookLM — it is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal.
Why it matters for marketing leaders
This tool's primary value is in solving your internal knowledge gap. Critical information for your GTM teams—such as sales playbooks, onboarding guides, market research, and brand guidelines—is trapped in static documents that are hard to search and rarely engaged with.
NotebookLM transforms that dormant library into an interactive and intelligent resource. This means faster onboarding for new hires, more consistent messaging from the sales team, and a smarter, more informed marketing organization.
What to do next?
» Pilot an ‘Onboarding Assistant’: Task the hiring manager for your next marketing role to upload all relevant onboarding documents into NotebookLM. Instruct the new hire to use it as their primary resource for their first week, measuring the reduction in repetitive questions and getting their feedback on ramp-up speed.
» Activate a Sales Playbook: Have your sales enablement lead upload your most complex playbook or a set of competitive battlecards. Use NotebookLM to create a queryable Q&A guide and an audio summary of key talking points for the sales team to use for pre-call prep.
» Create a Centralized Research Hub: Consolidate your latest market intelligence reports and user interview transcripts into a single NotebookLM space. Announce it as the go-to source for the marketing team to ask strategic questions about your customers and competitors.
Learn about NotebookLM for marketers
We do weekly workshops for marketers inside our community. One of them will be about NotebookLM and how to use it with your marketing team.
In this workshop, you will get:
An explainer on why and how to use NotebookLM for marketing
A full demo on an example, so you can apply it to your own use cases
Option to ask questions
To join, you have to be a member.
Not a member yet?
Apply here → https://join.aireadycmo.com/
Rapid-Fire News
Small Headlines. Big Shifts.
» Adobe Automates GTM Workflows.
Adobe's AI Agent Orchestrator is now generally available, letting marketers automate multi-step campaigns across the Experience Cloud. This deepens Adobe's platform lock-in by moving from content tools to full process automation. We wonder if it’s too little, too late.
» Stable Audio for Enterprise.
Stability AI released Stable Audio 2.5, an audio generation model designed for commercial use. It offers higher fidelity, longer track generation (up to 5 minutes), and indemnification for enterprise clients. This makes it a legally safer option for creating custom soundtracks for ads and corporate videos.
» YouTube Rolls Out AI Dubbing.
YouTube is now offering AI-powered multilingual audio tracks to all creators in its Partner Program. The "Aloud" feature automatically dubs videos into other languages, drastically lowering the cost of international expansion. Your global content strategy just got a lot cheaper and faster.
» Google’s Veo 3 Adds Portrait Video.
Google’s top-tier video model, Veo 3, can now generate video in portrait aspect ratios (9:16). This is a direct shot at the needs of social media marketers on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. It eliminates the need to crop or edit landscape videos for mobile-first platforms.
» Albania Appoints an AI Minister.
In a world first, Albania has appointed a virtual AI, "Diella," as a minister to its cabinet. While a political experiment, it introduces a fascinating GTM concept: using AI for unbiased decision-making in areas like resource allocation or market selection.
AI is rewriting the rules of visibility, and search is only the beginning.
What you choose to keep, cut, or rewire in this shift will decide whether your team captures new opportunities or gets buried under someone else’s AI-optimized strategy.
Leaders making these calls can’t afford to go it alone.
That’s why we built the AI Ready CMO community: a space where marketing leaders learn, experiment, and adapt together.
Apply for your membership: join.aireadycmo.com
See you next week,
Peter & Torsten
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