🟣 Top AI Search News – The 4-5 Major News Stories of the Month
🟣 Top research & data – Studies/research that will help you
🟣 The AI Search tech corner – Tech for non-techies
🟣 Search Everywhere Optimization – Beyond Google
🟣 GEO Strategies – GEO strategies for the C-suite
🟣 GEO Tactics – Expert Field Tactics
🟣 SEO vs GEO – The naming war continues
🟣 AI Search Tools – The tools that matter (mostly free)

Let’s go 👇 .

AI Search Masterclass - Join Andy Crestodina (and me 🥳!!) Live at Content Jam 2026.

On April 22nd, I’m in Chicago for something special. I’m joining Andy Crestodina Andy Crestodina and Orbit Media Studios Media to lead a 4-hour deep dive on the most important topic in marketing right now: “AI Search: How AI Decides Who Gets Recommended”.

No fluff. Just 4 hours of tactics and strategy on how to ensure AI (Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity) actually know—and cite—your brand. It’s happening in the best city in the States, at the best lead-gen agency in the business. Are you joining us? 🙌.

Join us

🔥 Top AI Search News

The 3-5 game-changing AI Search news stories this month

🟣 Profound raises $96 million. GEO officially becomes an industry

This unprecedented investment for a startup barely 18 months old in the still-nascent GEO industry validates agentic web technologies as the critical infrastructure for tomorrow’s marketing. Following Adobe’s acquisition of Semrush, this funding round seals the deal. We are officially in the era of agentic marketing.

👉 Full details here

🟣 Advertising is coming to ChatGPT. And it’s outrageously expensive.

Sam Altman is positioning himself as Robin Hood — “AI must be accessible to everyone.” A rich sentiment, considering OpenAI committed $1.4 trillion to infrastructure over eight years, largely funded by Microsoft. From a business perspective, the model is hard to defend: $60 CPM, with no conversion tracking. You’re paying a high price for a promise that no one — not even OpenAI — can quantify. Quite a statement…

👉 Full details here

🟣 Cloudflare is trying to invent a two-speed web (at your own risk)

Cloudflare launches Markdown. And let’s be honest, it’s not exactly a groundbreaking invention. They’ve simply formalized—on a massive scale— a practice as old as SEO itself (which used to be categorized as Black-Hat and Google officially classifies as Spam ): showing one version of your site to humans, and another to machines. Before, the machine was Google. Today, it’s AI agents. Same game, new players. And Google’s disapproval? Not really a surprise either.

👉 Full details here

🟣 Bing does what Google refuses to do: show you how AI cites your content.

Pause. A search engine has just created the first official GEO measurement tool in history. This isn’t just a small piece of news. It’s institutional validation that GEO is a real discipline —with real metrics and a real dashboard. No longer just a trend among SEO geeks, it’s a measurable economic reality. And it’s a kick in the hornet’s nest of opacity that has reigned for the past two years over AI visibility… made by Google.

👉 Full details here + The 7 other AI Search news stories of the month to bookmark.

📊 Top AI Search Research & Data

Studies and data that are redefining the game

🟣 AI Mode only cites 12% of URLs that rank in traditional SEO — what those changes for your strategy.

It’s Moz’s February study that’s generating the most buzz in the community. The verdict is stark: only 53% of the domains cited in AI Mode correspond to Google’s organic Top 10. And according to Moz, only 12% of the URLs cited in AI Mode match the URLs that rank in organic SERPs.

In short: ranking well on Google is (really) no longer enough to be considered in AI Mode. They are two different games, with different rules.

👀 My 2 Cents:

What this confirms from a GEO perspective —> content depth, readability, and freshness matter more than traditional SEO metrics like traffic and backlinks for obtaining AI mentions and citations. And most importantly: AI Overviews and AI Mode cite different sources — only 13.7% overlap between the two. What does this mean in practice? I’ve already written about it, and I reiterate it in my masterclass: don’t manage your AI Mode visibility and your AI Overviews visibility as a single project. They are two distinct targets that require two distinct content approaches.

📎 Moz Blog

🟣 ChatGPT requests have doubled in length in 4 months

When you type a prompt into ChatGPT, it doesn’t send it directly to a search engine. Instead, it breaks it down into several independent mini-queries—query fan-outs (QFOs)—to retrieve specific information and construct its response. Peec AI has just confirmed this with 20 million QFOs: between October 2025 and January 2026, the average length of these queries doubled, increasing from an average of 6 words to 12. This trend was consistent across all countries and languages.

What remains unchanged, however, is the number of queries per prompt, which remains stable (between 2 and 3). ChatGPT doesn’t search more—it searches better. Each query becomes more precise, more contextual, more specific.

👀 My 2 Cents:

This is important for your AI Search strategy because the sources cited in AI responses are no longer those that match a generic keyword— they are those that answer a highly specific question. Broad-spectrum content is losing ground. Precision content—detailed product pages, in-depth FAQs, concrete case studies—is gaining ground. In practical terms: if your content doesn’t answer a very specific question, ChatGPT simply won’t find it.

📎 ChatGPT fan-outs have doubled in length in 4 months

🟣 The State of Content Marketing in the Age of AI: What the Numbers Say

First, some good news: 81% of marketers are optimistic about the future of content marketing in the age of LLMs; and 67% see AI as an opportunity, not a threat. This is a welcome change from the prevailing catastrophism of “AI will put us all out of work.” This is the conclusion of a joint study by Clutch & Conductor of 459 marketing professionals surveyed in January 2026. So, that’s that. Now, some of the figures are still quite thought-provoking.

• 25% of teams report that LLMs are now their primary audience. This figure rises to 32% in large companies (over 500 employees). AI is no longer a secondary channel—it has become a fully-fledged editorial target. And yet, 74% of organizations still primarily target human users or traditional search. The gap between awareness and action remains massive.

• 87% of marketers anticipate an increase in their content budget in 2026. The number one priority, for both teams and management, is reputation management (41%). It’s no longer about “generating traffic”—it’s about “controlling what AI says about us.”

• 52% of teams will increase their video investments for LLM visibility. YouTube is emerging as THE priority platform, both for reaching humans (70%) and for being cited by LLMs (71%). And 27% of marketers rely on proprietary studies and reports to improve their AI visibility—precisely because original data is what LLMs cite most often.

• Traffic remains the king of KPIs (41%) (unfortunately) — but Ann Handley makes it clear: traffic alone is misleading in the age of AI Search. It needs to be combined with a second metric: citations, conversions, brand lift, and returns. Because influence can now exist without clicks. And clicks are decreasing anyway, becoming much more qualified (that’s my own observation), and in fact, the next search directly addresses this topic 👇 .

👀 My 2 Cents :

This report confirms what I’ve been saying for months: the battle for visibility is now being fought on two fronts simultaneously —humans AND machines. Convincing humans that AI is disrupting the traditional fundamentals of content strategy; and enticing AI to recommend what we’re selling. Companies that understand this are restructuring their teams, budgets, and KPIs accordingly. The others continue to optimize for a world that will soon be obsolete.

📎 State of content marketing in the age of AI

🟣 AI doesn’t do SEO. It does closing.

1.96 million LLM sessions analyzed over 12 months (Nov. 2024 → Nov. 2025), across 6 different sectors (SaaS, e-commerce, finance, healthcare, legal, publishing). What AI traffic reveals about the future of search — and which pages convert.

• The surprising figure (which nevertheless says it all) – AI traffic represents only 0.13% of total sessions — or 1 visit out of 769. Negligible? Not at all. Cloudflare’s CEO quantified it: getting a referral click from OpenAI is 750 times harder than from the traditional web. What emerges from LLMs is therefore deliberate, intentional, and highly qualified.

• ChatGPT is crushing the competition— but watch your back. ChatGPT holds 84.2% of AI referrals, with 3.26x year-over-year growth. But Copilot is exploding at +2,419% (25x) and Claude at +1,180% (12.8x). Why this matters: Copilot lives in Microsoft Office. Claude in dev and pro environments. AI discovery will soon no longer be exclusive to ChatGPT—it will happen where people are already working.

• AI traffic doesn’t land randomly— it goes where people decide to buy. In terms of raw volume, search and blog pages capture the most sessions. But in terms of penetration rate (the percentage of total traffic that comes from AI), the hierarchy is quite different: “Industry” pages reach 1.14% penetration (9 times the average), “Tools” pages 0.95% (7 times), and “Pricing” pages 0.46% (3.5 times). The site average remains at 0.13%. What this means is that AI isn’t sending casual browsers. It’s sending buyers in the final comparison phase.

• The Pricing Page: AI’s New Playground - 40,756 AI sessions landed on pricing pages over 13 months — often on a single URL per site. This is one of the clearest purchase intent signals in the dataset. When someone asks ChatGPT “how much does [product] cost?”, they arrive on the pricing page with the decision practically already made.

• E-commerce explodes during the holidays (+67% in November) – AI penetration in e-commerce jumped 67% in November 2025, rising from 0.11% in October to 0.19%. Year-on-year, this represents a 10.5x increase (from 0.02% to 0.21%). A clear signal: consumers are using AI for their product research when the stakes are highest. Black Friday, Christmas – AI visibility becomes critical precisely where purchasing decisions are made.

• YMYL sectors lead adoption – the legal sector is experiencing 11.9x growth, finance 2.9x, and healthcare 2.4x. These are the “Your Money or Your Life” categories – where decisions have real-world consequences. This makes sense: AI excels at synthesizing and comparing complex information. That’s precisely what users in these sectors are looking for.

• Each sector has its own discovery journey. In SaaS, 41.9% of AI traffic lands on search pages, then blog (19.9%), then pricing (16.4%)—a classic search path. In e-commerce, 41.1% lands directly on product pages. In healthcare, 38.8% lands on “About” pages—a credibility check before any engagement. There’s no one-size-fits-all geo-optimization strategy. The type of page to prioritize depends entirely on your industry.

• Podcasts > Video (for now) - Podcast pages reach 0.58% AI penetration (4.5x the average), while video pages remain at 0.12% (close to the average). Why? Podcasts have transcripts that AI can parse. Video remains difficult to process natively—but with the evolution of multimodal capabilities, this will change quickly.

👀 My 2 Cents:

AI traffic is small but precise—it lands on decision pages, not discovery pages. This is no longer visibility SEO. It’s conversion-driven GEO. The three priority actions for 2026, according to this study, are: 1) Prioritize industry and search pages —they capture over 40% of AI traffic; 2) Optimize pricing pages for AI buyers —make them transparent, scannable, and comparable; 3) Structure content to answer the question, “What should I use?” —AI is a recommendation engine, not a ranking engine. This is precisely what Airbnb is doing and observing .

📎 2025 State of AI Discovery Report: What 1.96 Million LLM Sessions Tell Us About the Future of Search

In my GEO masterclass, I help you redefine your content strategy to move from producing volume (to cover keywords) to a strategy of “source coverage” and relevance engineering. The next session is at the end of March; you can join the waiting list here 👇👇 .

Join the waitlist

🔧 The AI Search Tech Corner

AI Search for non-techies - 1, 2 or 3 words “SEO tech” explained in basic English 😉

🟣 Robots.txt

• Definition - The robots.txt file is a simple text file, placed in the root directory of your website, that tells web crawlers what they are allowed to read on your site. Two lines of code. A colossal impact.

• The context – In the age of AI search, these bots are no longer just Google’s. They also belong to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Copilot. And if your robots.txt file blocks them – often due to a conservative IT configuration inherited from the past – you simply don’t appear in their search results. CNET has disappeared from ChatGPT’s results. GoodRX is invisible on Perplexity. The reason? Not a hack. Not a sanction. Just a closed door.

• The analogy – Imagine you open a gourmet restaurant. You have the best chef in France, a sublime menu, a magnificent dining room. But someone has locked the door and turned off the sign. No one can get in. No one knows you exist. Your robots.txt file is that door. Open or closed. There’s no in-between.

• The nuance you need to know – this is the strategic part: there are two distinct types of robots at OpenAI, and the same logic applies elsewhere:

• GPTBot → the training robot. It collects your content to feed future models. You can legitimately block it if protecting your intellectual property is a priority.

• OAI-SearchBot → the indexing robot. It indexes your content to cite it in real time in SearchGPT responses. If you block it, you disappear from the results. Period.

The good news —> you can block one and allow the other. Protect your IP address and remain visible. It’s the best of both worlds.

👀 My 2 Cents:

This week, here is one business decision to make. Just one action: type yoursite.com/robots.txt into your browser. Check if these agents are blocked: OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Bingbot. If any of them appear in a “Disallow” line—you have a problem. Escalate it immediately to the CMO/CDO level. Not to IT alone. IT implements. You decide. Letting a developer block “all unknown bots” as a security reflex in 2025 means letting your competitors steal the most qualified traffic on the market. This isn’t a technical detail. It’s a strategic mistake.

🌐 Search Everywhere Optimization

Optimizing to be listed by Google is no longer enough

🟣 YouTube surpasses Reddit as a source of AI citations – YouTube now appears in 29.5% of Google AI Overviews — ahead of Reddit. The reason is simple: transcripts, metadata, chapters. YouTube is natively readable by LLMs. A recent audit by Brainlabs for an enterprise client found YouTube cited as the primary source in nearly 60% of AI Overviews. Double the average. What LLMs prioritize: Videos of 10 to 20 minutes, fewer than 100,000 views, titles of 8 to 12 words, with high information density. And above all: answers to real questions. A final implication—and this one is explosive for influencer marketing: creator partnerships on YouTube don’t appear in the metadata. LLMs read the transcripts. A creator who naturally mentions your brand in a video becomes a GEO source. The brand deal is now an SEO asset.

👀 My 2 Cents:

If your brand doesn’t have a structured YouTube presence, you’re not appearing in a growing share of AI-powered search results. YouTube is no longer just a “social media” channel; it’s an AI-powered visibility infrastructure. If you haven’t already, you need to get on board.

📎 Digiday — Why YouTube has become key for brand GEO strategies

🟣 75% of revenue generated via LinkedIn by just 2 content formats - Brendan Hufford demonstrates that with 2,241 posts and 18.2 million impressions, just two types of content generate 75% of his revenue: problem-naming (e.g., “checkbox marketing”) which gives a voice to frustrations, and actionable visual frameworks (70/20/10 Content Bet) used practically in meetings. This radical analysis criticizes the pressure on content quantity at the expense of strategic impact and genuine enthusiasm.

📎 Brendan’s LinkedIn post

🟣 Being #1 on Google is no longer enough (we know that) – welcome to the multi-layered era of search (we know that too), but… – Anna York exposes the harsh reality of the new search landscape: a brand ranked #1 saw its traffic plummet because a single keyword now activates four competing layers of visibility (AI Overviews, paid ads, Maps, organic). This fragmentation transforms traditional SEO into “Search Experience Optimization,” where dominating a single layer no longer guarantees success. Her message is strategic: winning brands no longer simply optimize for ranking; they dominate all four layers simultaneously to capture attention wherever it is.

📎 Anna’s post on LinkedIn

🧠 AI Search Strategies for Decision-Makers

Strategic insights for executives

🟣 Traffic down 25%: what you need to explain to your CEO (so they don’t panic) - Gaetano DiNardi , B2B SaaS growth advisor, shares the conversation he wishes he’d had sooner. Nine points. I’m focusing on the four that matter most to your executive committee.

• Rankings up, clicks down: Take a breath. It’s normal! Top 1-3 positions are up 25%. Clicks are down—just like everywhere else. This is the new post-AI Overviews balance, not an SEO issue. It’s structural, not temporary.

• Look at where the traffic drops. In the example he gives, he shows 4,000 lost clicks from knowledge base articles and a customer login page. Not from a conversion page. Important distinction.

• The SEO dark funnel is a reality. LLMs recommend brands without sending traffic. This is what’s called “the great decoupling.” Expect to see branded direct results—homepage and solution pages—rise in GA4 without clear attribution. This isn’t a bug. It’s the new buyer’s journey.

• The game-changing statistic: 84% of B2B buyers use AI to discover suppliers (vs. 24% last year). 68% start with an LLM before going to Google. AI discovers. Google validates. This isn’t just a trend in the AI web; it’s the new “agentic” web.

👀 My 2 Cents:

A dashboard without narrative context is dangerous. And that context today can’t be the same as it was three years ago. Your SEO teams need to learn how to tell this new story. Or someone else will tell it for you—badly.

🟣 Discover question mining: a system that transforms customer uncertainty into a strategic advantage - Josh Grant presents his concept of “question mining” as the new Go-To-Market framework for the AI age. The principle: systematically capture real buyer questions (sales calls, support, Reddit, website searches) and then transform them into canonical answers that can be reused everywhere (website, sales, geo-optimization, positioning). The best sources? Your lost sales calls, your repetitive support tickets, your industry’s Reddit threads. Not your SEO tools. And since LLMs trust third-party sources five times more than your own website—Reddit, media, reviews—the question isn’t just what to answer, but where to showcase your answers.

👀 My 2 Cents:

AI rewards clarity, not volume. Winning teams don’t publish more content; they “own the explanation” those shapes buying decisions everywhere but on their website. The question to ask your teams: “What are the 10 real questions that are blocking our prospects—and do we have a clear, public answer for each one?” If not, someone else is answering for you. I really enjoyed this “Strategic Guide” content, which redefines marketing as a discipline of narrative appropriation. And it gives a fresh perspective to your content strategy: no more traditional content, and no more traditional platforms either.

Stacked: The AI-Driven GTM Playbook

🟣 ChatGPT searches in English. Even when you don’t.

Peec AI analyzed over 10 million ChatGPT prompts. The result: in 78% of non-English sessions, ChatGPT supplements its search with English-language sources. 43% of all its “fan-outs”—the subqueries it generates in the background to build its response—are performed on the English-language web.

Specifically: a German user who asks in German for the best German software companies receives a list… without a single German company. Allegro, the undisputed leader in e-commerce in Poland, doesn’t appear when a Pole asks for the best shopping platforms. In Spanish, for a question about cosmetic brands, ChatGPT reformulated the query by adding the word “global” on its own.

Why? English-language content has more backlinks and more citations. ChatGPT interprets this as authority. The English-language web represents 50% of available content. Less risk, more sources.

👀 My 2 Cents:

Dominating your local market is no longer enough if you’re invisible in English. It’s not about systematically translating your website. It’s about strategically appearing on the English-language sources that ChatGPT considers authoritative in your industry: media outlets, lists, and comparison sites. If these sources don’t mention you in English, you’re invisible to half of all AI searches—even in your own country.

📎 Peec AI — ChatGPT searches in English, even when you don’t

🟣 Google indexes and ranks new sites in 3-4 weeks: the 6-month timeframe is outdated - Max Roslyakov debunks the myth of “6 months to see SEO results” by demonstrating that with Google’s current indexing speed, a new site should show signs of traction (entering the top 20-50) within 3-4 weeks of starting content and link-building efforts. When will we see transparency from agencies and rapid validation of strategies...?

📎 Max’s post on LinkedIn

🟣 LLMs do not “favor” anything: understand the difference between prediction and information retrieval.

Britney Muller debunks a common misconception about how LLMs work by explaining the fundamental distinction between statistical token prediction and information retrieval via RAGs. This technical yet accessible post reminds us that optimization should target traditional search engines and presence in training data (via third-party media coverage), rather than simply claiming to “optimize for AI” directly. In other words, your SEO fundamentals are necessary—but no longer sufficient.

📎 Britney’s LinkedIn post

⚡ GEO Tactics Pulse

GEO tactics from the field, tested and shared by experts

🟣 Google is improving link visibility in AI Overviews and AI Mode. On desktop, a pop-up appears on hover displaying the site name, favicon, and a short description. Link icons are also becoming more descriptive and visible on mobile. Background: A Pew analysis revealed that users clicked on a link in AI Overviews in only 1% of visits, and the click-through rate (CTR) of the first organic result dropped by 32% after the rollout of AI Overviews. Google is iterating. It’s not a done deal yet—but it’s a sign that publisher pressure is starting to have an impact.

👉 To Do: take care of your favicon, your domain name and your meta description — these are now your first arguments for clicks in the AI interface.

📎 Search Engine Journal

🟣 Opting out of AI Overviews: no “off” button for a long time — here’s what it means - In February, Google officially confirmed that allowing publishers to opt out of AI Overviews is a “huge engineering undertaking.” The message is clear — don’t expect a quick fix. You don’t have an on/off switch. It’s better to optimize for good rankings than to try to avoid them. Three strategic signals to remember: 1) Traffic isn’t decreasing — it’s redistributing itself to more diverse sources. This is data confirmation of the Search Everywhere Optimization challenge: the traffic is still there, but it’s no longer going to the same players. The winners are those who have diversified their points of presence. The others have bet everything on Google alone.

And the real, quiet, explosive news: Google is preparing a feature in Gemini that will prioritize links to publishers with whom the user has an active subscription—with a rollout planned for later in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Direct translation: your subscriber base becomes an AI visibility lever. Audience loyalty is no longer just a business issue—it’s a GEO issue.

📎 Search Engine Roundtable

🟣 How to research your Personas - the new keyword research of the LLM era.

In Google, you start with keywords. In LLMs, you start with pain points. Queries are longer, more contextual, more conversational—they describe a problem, not a search term. The 3-step method: 1. Identify your persona’s real pain points—not the terms they type, but what keeps them up at night. 2. Dive into your internal documents: sales call transcripts (the goldmine), closed/won data, ICP records. 3. Build a precise query profile: who is this person, what are their responsibilities, their objectives, their decision-making process?

👉 To Do: The words a prospect uses to describe their problem in a sales call are likely the same ones they use when asking a lead manager. Use them to structure your content. Your sales calls are your best keyword research for the age of AI search.

🟣 The killer news - “List” and “listicle” content is losing ground in AI citations. Opinion blogs are taking over.

The data is clear and consistent: blogs and opinion pieces have jumped from 23% to 34.2% of AI citations. Lists, on the other hand, have fallen from 35% to 27.3%. Blogs are now the most cited content category by LLMs—ahead of lists. And this isn’t an isolated signal: Lily Ray confirmed the exact same trend in traditional Google Search. Self-promotional lists are being re-evaluated simultaneously in both classic SEO and AI Search. Same direction. Same story.

👉 To Do: If your content strategy relies heavily on “Top 10 lists” and other listicles, it’s time to rebalance. LLMs prioritize content that expresses a point of view, demonstrates expertise, and takes a stand. A well-argued opinion blog now outperforms an exhaustive list—in both Google and ChatGPT.

📎 Is Google Finally Cracking Down on Self-Promotional Listicles?

🟣 LLMs cite 44% of content from the top 30% of the text: the era of the “Bottom Line Up Front” – Kevin Indig reveals an analysis of 18,012 verified ChatGPT citations that overturns 20 years of SEO dogma. The result: 44.2% of citations come from the top 30% of the text, with a “ski jump” effect thereafter. Information at the bottom of the page (90-100%) represents only 6.9% of citations. LLMs favor the journalistic “Bottom Line Up Front” structure: definition/immediate answer at the top, details below. Burying key information deep reduces the citation probability by 2.5x. A radical reversal of the “ultimate guide” paradigm with long introductions.

🟣 How to Choose the Right Prompts to Monitor Your AI Visibility - Ahrefs has just published the definitive guide to prompt tracking. The key takeaway: don’t track individual prompts. Group them into topic clusters and analyze aggregated trends. The volatility of AI responses makes any prompt-by-prompt analysis unreliable. The best sources to identify what to track include your questions that already rank well in Google Search Console, Google’s “People Also Ask” section, Reddit discussions on your topics, and pages on your site that are already generating traffic from LLMs. Last but not least, and this one is crucial: verify if what the LLMs are saying about your brand matches reality. Consider pricing, features, and competitive positioning. Ahrefs discovered that ChatGPT was indicating that their prompt tracking tool didn’t exist—even though it had just launched. They had to create specific content to correct the error.

👀 My 2 Cents:

A tracker is only valuable if you have an action plan behind it. Identify the sources most frequently cited in your responses, build relationships with them, and correct inaccuracies about your brand. Otherwise, it’s just a dashboard for the sake of a dashboard.

📎 Ahrefs — How to Choose the Best Prompts to Monitor Your AI Search Visibility

🟣 Building on the idea that “prompt tracking” is the best way to monitor your visibility, there’s also “prompt research”: the new keyword research in the age of AI Search.

Semrush makes a clear distinction: most prompts sent to AI generate explanations, not recommendations. However, your brand visibility only matters when the AI compares options and identifies a winner. That’s what a BOFU prompt is. “What’s the best project management tool?” → educational. “Which project management tool is suitable for a team of 10 people with a limited budget that integrates Slack?” → here, the AI makes a recommendation. This is the only moment that matters for your visibility.

👀 My 2 Cents:

Previously, there were seven steps to designing a content strategy; now, you can say you have four: 1) define your personas based on their constraints (budget, risk, context), 2) identify the product attributes that trigger AI recommendations, 3) use keyword research as a source of natural language, and 4) then generate clusters of BOFU prompts via LLM. The guiding principle is the golden rule: 10 well-chosen prompts per product are enough to determine whether the AI recommends you—or ignores you.

📎 Semrush — How to Do Prompt Research for AI SEO

🟣 Your AI doesn’t know your customers. Teach it. 5 prompts to generate your AI Personas - Andy Crestodina (Orbit Media) makes a simple observation: a generalist AI produces generic marketing recommendations because it has been trained on the average web user. If you don’t teach it who your ideal customer is, it will give you answers that apply to everyone—and therefore to no one.

👉 To Do: Create an “AI buyer persona”—a detailed profile of your ideal customer that you inject into every marketing prompt. No age, no hobbies. What matters: their concrete challenges, their fears, their decision criteria, what motivates them to take action. Once created, this persona becomes a reusable knowledge block. You can upload it to any LLM to audit a web page, generate CTAs, predict how your buyers search for your AI solutions, or challenge a sales pitch.

👀 My 2 Cents:

Ask your AI persona to list the 25 prompts it would use to search for a service provider like you in ChatGPT. Then test these prompts. Does your brand appear? If not, you know where to focus your geo-optimization efforts.

📎 Orbit Media — How to Create AI Personas: 5 Prompts for Smart Marketing Alignment

🟣 LLM SEO: Unexpected Content Formats That Make a Difference - Vijay Jacobs shares a client case study: 10.5 million impressions and 622,000 clicks in 12 months for a SaaS, with SEO becoming their primary revenue stream. What’s interesting here isn’t the numbers—it’s what he says about the formats. Two original ideas to remember for your LLM content strategy: 1) AI-powered podcasts as a backlink lever. Generate podcast episodes using AI, syndicate them at scale on podcasting platforms, and reap a massive number of authoritative backlinks. LLMs index transcribed audio content. It’s an underutilized format, and therefore faces little competition. 2) “AI-powered knowledge files.” Create structured documents specifically designed for LLMs to recognize and recommend your brand. The idea: not to wait for AI to “discover” your brand by inference — directly provide it with the raw material to understand and quote it.

👀 My 2 Cents:

This post confirms a fundamental trend: optimizing for LLMs is no longer simply about “writing well for Google.” It’s about thinking in terms of the formats that LLMs consume, understand, and render. Structured knowledge files—llms.txt, highly detailed FAQ pages, industry-specific glossaries—perfectly fit this logic.

📎 Vijay Jacobs on LinkedIn

In my GEO masterclass, I help you redefine your content strategy to move from producing volume (to cover keywords) to a strategy of “source coverage” and relevance engineering. The next session is at the end of March; you can join the waiting list here 👇👇 .

Join the waitlist

🤔 SEO vs GEO: The Great Debate

The naming and paradigm war continues

🟣 Yet another explanation of the differences between AEO, GEO, and SEO

Chris Donnelly explains that the majority of businesses still optimize solely for SEO, ignoring the fact that the game has changed: visibility is now fragmented into three layers. SEO (appearing in traditional search results), AEO (being featured in Google’s answer boxes and short AI responses), and GEO (being cited in the detailed AI responses of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude). According to him, brands that optimize for all three simultaneously structure their content for indexing, build authority for citations, and strengthen their SEO foundations.

📎 Chris’s post on LinkedIn

🟣 The verdict seems to be in: The acronym GEO crushes all the others…

One website had the brilliant idea of measuring what no one else was really measuring: which of these acronyms—GEO, AEO, AI SEO, LLM SEO, LLMO—is actually used by the industry? Not in opinion pieces. On real social media platforms: YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, X, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Quora.

→ Result over 12 months of data: GEO dominates at 53%, followed by AI SEO at 22%, AEO at 17%, and LLM SEO and LLMO together do not exceed 7%.

→ Even more striking: GEO is at the top on every platform without exception. Not a single one where another term surpasses it.

Here are some interesting nuances for you, decision-makers:

• LinkedIn is the focus of the debate — with over a million mentions in total. It’s where marketers clash over naming.

• AI SEO performs particularly well on YouTube, at 37% — content creators prefer the most “searchable” term.

• LLM SEO and LLMO exceed 10% only on Reddit and X — the domain of technicians, not decision-makers.

📎 aiseogeoaeo

🛠️ AI Search Tools & workflow

Tools for taking action (priority given to free tools)

🟣 Backlinko Launches Free Tool to Leverage Reddit’s SEO Dominance - Leigh McKenzie announces the launch of a free tool from Backlinko that solves an emerging SEO problem: Reddit dominates Google’s first page, but marketers don’t know which threads to engage with. The tool identifies keywords where Reddit already ranks, threads with high organic traffic, relevant subreddits, and even suggests well-timed non-commercial comments. This initiative recognizes a new reality: Reddit has become an essential search platform, and the tool democratizes access to this often-overlooked SEO opportunity.

👉 Backlinko’s Reddit SEO Tool

🟣 Glippy: The Audit Tool to Optimize Readability for LLMs and AI Agents - Jan-Willem Bobbink announces the completion of Glippy, an analysis tool that evaluates over 80 factors impacting LLM crawler capabilities, AI readability, and agent readiness. Covering everything from basic robots.txt to advanced HTML semantic analysis and structured data, the tool promises a systematic approach to AI optimization. While awaiting Google approval of the Chrome extension, a desktop application is in development for agencies requiring massive multi-domain analyses, illustrating the increasing professionalization of the AEO sector.

👉 Willem’s post on LinkedIn

🟣 Alertmouse: the smarter version of Google Alerts - Launched in late 2025 by Rand Fishkin, Alertmouse is what Google Alerts should have remained: simple, reliable, and truly useful. The principle? You enter the terms you want to monitor (your brand, a competitor, a topic), and Alertmouse sends you a clean, prioritized daily or weekly email digest of all mentions found on the web—including Reddit and social media. What sets it apart: where Google Alerts generates noise or returns very little, Alertmouse filters, categorizes, and prioritizes mentions. No AI under the hood, no VCs—just a well-designed tool, by humans, for humans.

👉 Why this is relevant to your GEO strategy: Monitoring mentions of your brand on third-party sources (media, forums, Reddit) is no longer optional—it’s the core of the strategy. These are the mentions that LLMs use to determine if you’re a credible authority in your industry. Pricing: Free (1 alert)—paid plans starting at $10/month.

👉 alertmouse.com

🟣 OpenSEO: the free alternative that threatens the Semrush-Ahrefs duopoly thanks to third-party APIs - Corey Northcutt, co-founder of Orbit Media with Andy Crestodina, presents OpenSEO, one of the many free alternatives to Semrush and Ahrefs that have recently emerged, made possible by the DataForSEO API. He explains how Ahrefs and Semrush have long charged for their APIs to stifle competition, but that solutions like DataForSEO now allow for the creation of competitive interfaces at a lower cost. His team still uses the two established tools but finds DataForSEO irreplaceable for large companies, opening up the debate on the evolution of SEO SaaS.

👉 OpenSEO

📅 Bonus - Agenda: Content & AI Search conferences not to be missed in 2026 in the US

For those who want to step away from their screens and connect with the American AI Search community, Ahrefs has just published a list of 12 must-attend content marketing conferences for 2026. Key dates:

• Content Jam — April 22-23, Chicago. Day 1 kicks off with a 4-hour workshop led by Andy Crestodina… and me 🙋‍♀️ . Limited to 70 people. We ‘ll be meeting by Lake Chicago and having dinner with the women in my AI marketing community and the other speakers from the event.

• Social Media Marketing World — April 28-30, Anaheim. 1900 attendees, zero sales pitches guaranteed — they display it and apply it.

• INBOUND — September 16-18, Boston. HubSpot’s flagship event. 200+ speakers, 150 countries represented.

• Content Marketing World — October 5-7, Denver. 3400 participants, THE leading conference for global content marketing.

• Ahrefs Evolve San Diego — October 12-13. Intentionally intimate format: 500 participants max, practitioners on stage, no theory.

👉 The full list is available on the Ahrefs blog.

👋 That’s all for this month! Thanks for reading. I’ll see you again at the end of March/beginning of April in the same format. Until then, your opinion on this edition would make me… 🤸 ‍🤸 .

AI Search is changing at breakneck speed. I’ve been tracking it nonstop for 3 years and I have A TON to share.

Problem: after months juggling formats (bi-weekly, weekly, thematic), languages (French, English), and platforms (Substack, LinkedIn)... I was running everywhere. And you didn’t know where to find me anymore.

So, reset.

Starting today, The AI Content Strategist becomes THE newsletter on AI Search. It’ll be dense. I’m sharing my daily curation of everything I track across two continents from the best SEO, content, and marketing communities.

The essentials. Decoded. Actionable.
Dense, direct, useful (I hope!!).
Twice a month.

Why this change?

Because AI Search has eaten marketing. It’s no longer a tech, SEO, or editorial topic. It’s a C-suite issue. My conviction from 15 years of content marketing and 3 years of AI Search is becoming reality. Fast. Hard.

The content is getting denser. I’m getting denser too.

Here are your new sections:

🟣 Top AI Search News – The 4-5 major news items of the month
🟣 Top Research & Data – The studies/research that will help you
🟣 AI Search Tech Corner – Tech for non-techies
🟣 Search Everywhere Optimization – Beyond Google
🟣 GEO Strategies – GEO strategies for the C-suite
🟣 GEO Tactics – Field tactics from experts
🟣 Must-Read – THE essential content
🟣 SEO vs GEO – The naming war continues
🟣 AI Search Tools – Tools that matter (mostly free)

Welcome to The (new) AI Content Strategist.

Ready? 👇

👋 I’m Karine. I help you adapt your content strategy to AI Search and GEO through a masterclass and an AI Marketing community. You can sign up for both here

Join the waitlist

🔥 Top AI Search News

The 3-5 news stories that really changed the game this month

🟣 ChatGPT Launches Advertising: OpenAI Crosses the Rubicon

OpenAI officially announces advertising is coming to ChatGPT for free and “Go” tiers. Ads will appear in conversations as contextual sponsored suggestions. OpenAI promises ads will be “clearly marked” and “respectful of user experience.” Progressive rollout planned over the coming months.

👀 My 2 Cents:

This is huge. It’s clunky. But not for the reasons you think. Until now, ChatGPT’s advantage over Google was... no advertising. We chatted with our favorite bot without interruption, confusion, or intrusion. Google walked on eggshells to avoid driving users toward a “clean” competitor. And we appreciated the freshness and real alternative.

Well, that’s over. OpenAI falls in line. And subtly just gave Google a pass that could really seal the match. ChatGPT no longer has this commercial neutrality advantage. And the race for Ads in AI search is officially on. Was free AI Search a healthy parenthesis before what’s coming? Should we prepare budgets to take positions now in the era of paid AI Visibility?

Quite possible.

But just as Google won the Search battle against Yahoo! by introducing “natural” results in its search engine back then (SEO was born like that), it’s very possible Google will win the new AI Search battle this time against ChatGPT thanks to... personal intelligence integrated into Search (we dive into that right here 👇).

🟣 Yahoo Launches Scout, Its Own AI Answer Engine

Speaking of Yahoo! The brand we thought was finished officially enters the AI Search race with Scout, an answer engine combining web search and generative artificial intelligence. Scout promises conversational answers with source citations, positioning similar to Perplexity.

Barry highlights this is Yahoo’s return to web search after abandoning the field to Bing in 2009—an unexpected comeback made possible only by generative AI, which allows creating a competitive search engine without the titanic infrastructure traditional search required. Rand Fishkin tested it.

👀 My 2 Cents:

And yes... yet another AI engine to consider in your visibility strategy—but also, for those who weren’t convinced AI Search was THE big AI Marketing transformation, this confirms AI Search is becoming the industry standard, not just an experiment. All major players (Google, Bing, Perplexity, OpenAI, and now Yahoo) converge toward the same model: generative answers + source citations.

• 🔗 Introducing Yahoo Scout, a New AI Answer Engine and Barry Schwartz’s commentary on Search Engine Land.

🟣 Google Deploys Personal Intelligence: A New AI Mode in Search for More Useful Answers

Google introduces a new personal intelligence mode in Search designed to deliver more relevant and customized answers. The major insight is the shift from searching for general information to personalized assistance that relies on user context (our interests, obviously our browsing history, past interactions - I discuss this in more detail below) to refine results. This mode notably allows remembering specific preferences to avoid repeating them with each query, marking a key step toward a search engine acting as a proactive personal assistant.

👀 My 2 Cents:

This is also huge. And this time, we all understand the reasons. I have 4 major observations.

1. It’s officially the end of the “universal SERP” (what we called Google’s “black box”). Personal intelligence breaks the mirror: two users will never see the same page again. If Google pulls from your Gmail and photos to respond, tracking tools (Semrush, Ahrefs) become blind. It becomes impossible to do SEO in a probabilistic system using private data. There’s now no choice but to be present in training data. You can’t “rank” in someone’s private mailbox. As a result, traditional positioning SEO (1st, 2nd place) dies in favor of citation probability.

2. We’re truly moving from “navigation” to “delegation.” Behavior changes radically: the internet user no longer searches for a link to compare, they ask AI to decide for them. In fact, it’s the acceleration of Zero-Click. AI “assembles” the answer instead of “retrieving” sources. Conclusion: your content should no longer be destinations, but ingredients. If your brand isn’t exploitable data for AI, it doesn’t exist in the synthesized answer.

3. Entity and authority: the two pillars of your content strategy. Since keywords are losing their appeal versus user context, two pillars emerge: Your brand must be designed as an entity: If AI sees receipts or interactions with your brand in the user’s private data, it will systematically favor you. And optimization becomes pointless if your brand isn’t reliable and a real authority.

4. My take as a newsletter fan? Newsletters (and everything that’s first-party data) will become more than ever the star content because they’ll allow respecting the user’s “personal orbit.” But the ultimate irony will be that you’ll no longer need to be “read by humans,” but to be “ingested by the agent.” Ultimate paradox.

🔗 Personal Intelligence in AI Mode in Search: Help that’s uniquely yours
🔗 Glenn Gabe’s commentary on the subject

🟣 Claude Launches Cowork

Anthropic officially deploys Cowork, allowing Claude to execute complex tasks directly in the browser. Unlike previous AI assistants limited to conversation, Cowork can navigate sites, interact with web tools, analyze data in real-time, and automate multi-step workflows. Lenny Rachitsky tested it and he’s blown away.

👀 My 2 Cents:

The game-changer: zero code, zero API keys, zero manual manipulation. You describe the task, Claude executes it end-to-end. AI automation for search optimization shifts from theoretical to operational. In the tools section I share a LinkedIn post detailing plenty of practical uses for your GEO.

• 🔗 The announcement on Anthropic’s blog and the Official Cowork Guide from Anthropic

• 🔗 Access the Cowork App directly

📊 Top AI Search Research & Data

The studies and data redefining the game

THE research worthy of your attention this month is this study conducted by Conductor among more than 250 marketing leaders from American companies (500+ employees) mapping how organizations are investing in AEO/GEO in 2026: allocated budgets, adopted technologies, content strategies, challenges encountered, new success metrics, and skills necessary to remain visible and competitive in a search ecosystem now dominated by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

For once, it validates what I’ve been shouting for months: GEO isn’t a trend, it’s a structural transformation of digital marketing. Judge for yourselves:

• 12% of marketing budget in 2025 for a discipline nearly nonexistent 18 months ago

• 94% are increasing investments in 2026 (signal of acceleration, not slowdown)

• 97% positive impact on the marketing funnel

Major strategic insights:

• SEO and GEO aren’t competing, they’re complementary. SEO remains #4 marketing priority for 2026, GEO becomes #1.

• Massive internalization (93% build in-house capabilities). Clear proof companies consider AEO/GEO as a sustainable competitive advantage, not an outsourceable tactic.

• The shift from volume metrics to quality metrics is THE most important mutation (and probably the best news from this study): conversions > traffic + brand mentions > rankings + sentiment > positions. The winning combo for 2026.

• New professions emerge: AI Strategists, AI content strategists, GEO data analysts, Prompt engineers, Structured-data experts.

• What’s still missing: Clear standards on ROI measurement and data quality. Pain point #1 (data quality) reveals the technology ecosystem is still immature.

🔗 The State of AEO / GEO in 2026: CMO Investment Report

🔧 AI Search Tech Corner

AI Search for non-techies - 1, 2, or 3 “SEO tech” terms explained in basic language 😉

🤫 Between you and me - Why this section? Because here we are. With AI Search and GEO, technical SEO is no longer “just” the devs’ business, it becomes a business decision. So you don’t need an MIT degree to identify the technical decisions to make on your site. However, you must understand the fundamental technical concepts that are GEO components. In my masterclass, one of my sections is dedicated to this topic.

🟣 The Term: Schema Markup (or Structured Data)

Raw technical definition - Schema Markup is a semantic metadata layer added to HTML code. It relies on the shared vocabulary of Schema.org. It’s what transforms raw text into a relational database.

In clearer terms... - It’s the standardized language (often using a format called JSON-LD) that translates a website’s visual content into organized data machines can understand.

The context where it’s used - Today, Google and answer engines like Perplexity or ChatGPT no longer just list links. They synthesize answers. To be cited as a source by an AI (GEO - Generative Engine Optimization), your content must be “liquid.” The risk? If AI doesn’t explicitly understand who you are and what you sell, it ignores you or, worse, “hallucinates” (invents) information about you.

The analogy - Imagine your website is a book written in a complex language. Schema Markup is like slipping a universal ID card between each page that says: “This is the price”, “This is the warranty”, “This is a verified customer review”. It’s the official “handshake” between your company and artificial intelligence. You no longer let AI guess your business, you dictate the facts.

Example:

• Without Schema: A page displays “4.5” and “120€”. AI hopes it’s a rating and a price.

• With Schema: The code explicitly says: Rating: 4.5/5 and Price: 120€.

Result:

The company gets “Rich Snippets” (stars, prices, stock displayed directly in Google) and becomes a reliable source for voice assistants and chatbots seeking a precise answer to a purchase question.

Your business decisions to make

Sure, you may not have to code, but you must validate three decision levels:

• Budget Prioritization: No longer see technical SEO as maintenance, but as building the company’s Data Infrastructure.

• Reliability Requirement: Require that each product or service launch be accompanied by its digital “twin” in structured data to guarantee brand accuracy on AI.

• “Entity-First” Vision: Decide that the company must be recognized as an authoritative Entity in its field, not simply chase positions on volatile keywords.

👀 My 2 Cents:

In the AI world, ambiguity is profit’s enemy. Schema Markup is your best lawyer to remove any ambiguity about your offer’s value. It’s a €€ decision, not a developers’ decision. I address these topics from a business angle in my GEO masterclass. The next session in English in May. You can join the waitlist here 👇👇.

Join the waitlist

🌐 Search Everywhere Optimization

Optimizing to be referenced by Google is no longer enough

🟣 Social networks are dead... Sunny Lenarduzzi says it bluntly: social platforms systematically kill organic reach, and building your business on rented land is a losing bet. Between the algorithm suffocating your posts and total dependence on platforms’ changing rules, the model is broken. Her recommendation: pivot to what you truly control—your email audience, your proprietary community, your indexable content. Social networks become distribution channels, no longer your main asset. Time to take back control.

🟣 ...Or not. Google massively favors social networks. Chris Long observes exactly the opposite: social sites (LinkedIn, Twitter, Threads) are exploding with +100% SERP visibility. Twitter jumped from 26M to 33M organic sessions per month just in December. Meanwhile, traditional media got crushed in December’s core update (Barry Schwartz). Google now pushes social features way higher—”What people are saying” appears earlier and bigger, X threads pop up in Top Stories. Google’s endgame is clear: turn search results into a mashup of AI, user-generated content, and video. Traditional media? Getting squeezed out (Nectiv).

🟣 LinkedIn launches “vibe coding” certifications. LinkedIn will allow displaying your vibe coding expertise directly on your profile via dedicated certifications. Vibe coding—creating apps without coding via AI prompts—officially becomes a recognized professional skill. If your marketing team or execs haven’t explored this yet, this is the signal they should. The #1 professional platform validates this skill as a career differentiator.

🟣 LinkedIn hates links, but you can still drive traffic. Rand Fishkin confirms: LinkedIn’s algorithm despises links. Passionately. Even the old “link in comments” trick fails now—LinkedIn hides the comment too. But traffic, signups, and motivated visits are still possible with the right moves. His #5MinuteWhiteboard shows how to sidestep the blockade and keep winning despite the hostile algorithm.

🟣 Substack: the winning hybrid of blog, social network, and community. Social networks are algorithmic platforms that only boost you if you game them with platform-specific content. Communities are the new hype—they work because real people make real connections. Then there’s Substack, sitting right in the middle. One of a16z’s biggest wins, a hybrid oddball mixing the best of all three: better than a blog, better than a social network, better than a community. With Google already obsessed with Reddit and LinkedIn, the question becomes: what about Substack articles and notes? That’ll become AI training candy too. And now this gem of a guide drops to help you nail SEO and AI SEO on Substack.

🟣 Digital PR + Social Search: the 2026 power combo. Discoverability doesn’t run through Google alone anymore. People search on TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube before they even think about a traditional search engine. Digital PR must now create content optimized for these social platforms—not just backlinks for old-school SEO. The winning move? Mix traditional media mentions with a strong social search presence. Your press releases, studies, and media placements need to live where your audience actually searches—reformatted for each platform’s quirks. Brands still treating PR and social search as separate? Losing 50% of their discoverability upside.

🧠 AI Search Strategies for the Boardroom

Strategic insights for decision-makers (strategies that go through the C-suite)

🟣 Perplexity explains how its AI Search really works. In this exclusive Search Engine Journal interview, Perplexity pulls back the curtain on its engine. Key points:

Perplexity combines real-time search and LLMs to generate answers, but unlike ChatGPT, they run a live web search for each query rather than relying solely on training data.

Their system evaluates source freshness and credibility in real-time.

For ranking, they favor sources with editorial authority, clean structured data, and recent content.

Major strategic insight: Perplexity always cites sources, which (according to them) drives referral traffic back to publishers—the opposite of Google AI Overviews, designed to trap users inside Google’s walls.

👀 My take: Two things matter here. First, Perplexity can become a real acquisition channel—if your content is structured, fresh, and authoritative. Second, and more important: AI visibility isn’t a single battlefield. Each engine has its own ranking logic. Your strategy can’t be 👉 “be visible in AIs” (that’ll mean nothing soon) but rather name and prioritize the platform where you want to be visible.

🟣 Google uses user data for ranking—and that changes everything. Marie dissected the latest Google trial revelations and found gold: Google massively integrates user behavioral data into its ranking systems. Clicks, time spent, bounce rate, navigation patterns—all of it directly influences rankings. This contradicts years of Google’s official line downplaying user signals. The evidence is piling up.

👀 My 2 Cents: Optimizing for crawlers is dead. Your content must engage humans—make them stay, click, explore. Pages that generate positive behaviors (long reads, low SERP returns, deeper site navigation) climb. Pages that disappoint (quick bounce, instant Google return) tank. For AI Search, this logic intensifies: LLMs learn from user interaction patterns to refine recommendations. Your content must answer real questions, not just check SEO boxes. Though yes, the technical foundation still matters.

🟣 Building your brand—Seth Godin reminds us what a brand really is. Cut through the noise and the #1 priority for AI visibility boils down to two words: be known. Marketing translation: build your brand.

Seth Godin nails it in this short: a brand isn’t a logo or a style guide—it’s the bundle of associations, emotions, and expectations people carry when they think about you. In a world where LLMs pull from the entire web to build recommendations, only brands with memorable, consistent, and differentiated presence break through. Technical optimization matters, sure. But without brand equity? You’re invisible. AIs recommend what humans already know, like, and talk about. Brand-building isn’t separate from visibility anymore—it’s the foundation of discoverability.

👀 My 2 Cents: For once, I don’t have one. I love everything.

🟣 The real competitor to e-commerce SEO isn’t AI—it’s ads. Aleyda Solis points to an underestimated trend: in e-commerce SERPs, the drop in zero-clicks comes from the explosion of ads, not AI Overviews. On the 5000 top “jeans” queries: multiplication of ads at the top, decrease in organic results. Result: “recovered” clicks go to ads, not organic. In product verticals, it’s ads “eating” clicks, not AI.

👀 My 2 Cents: Your paid media budget becomes even more critical than your SEO in certain product categories with strong commercial intent. If you target less competitive terms but within your semantic field, combining both will even be possible.

🟣 Optimize for the follow-up question, not the first one. Eli, author of Product-Led SEO whom I interviewed about his book, explains the strategic error in GEO/AEO is optimizing for the initial query when the real value is in the conversation that follows. In conversational interfaces, users ask a general first question, then refine with 3-5 increasingly specific and qualified follow-up questions.

Example: “best CRM” → “best CRM for teams under 10” → “does it integrate with Slack?” → “what’s the pricing?”.

It’s in these follow-ups that a prompt’s real commercial intent reveals itself and decisions are made.

👀 My 2 Cents: Stop obsessing about ranking for high-volume generic terms. Focus on being the answer to level 2, 3, 4 questions of the conversation—those where the user is really evaluating and comparing. The generally very qualified part of the prompt (and need). Your content must as much as possible anticipate the complete conversational journey, not just capture initial attention. Brands winning in AI Search won’t be those appearing first (cf. Rand Fishkin’s study I cite 👆👆 saying exactly the same thing) — they’re those staying relevant throughout the conversation until the purchase decision.

⚡ GEO Tactics Pulse

Field-tested GEO tactics shared by experts

🟣 Chunking: Google says no, engineers (continue to) say yes. Google claims breaking your content into small pieces to please AIs (chunking) is useless. Nothing new under the sun, we understand Google doesn’t want Spam in its search results. Which, incidentally, doesn’t prevent results from still being stuffed with AI garbage content. So others continue thinking chunking is intelligent content engineering for modern retrieval systems, not an algorithm hack. Despite Google’s wishes, machines read in chunks.

🟣 SEO Poisoning arrives. Researchers identified “Haxor” campaigns diverting search results to distribute malware. If black-hats can manipulate Google, they’ll target LLMs next. Your reputation in AI answers becomes a security issue, not just marketing.

🟣 Is traffic still the right KPI? Ahrefs shows how to grow traffic from zero in 2025. But in a zero-click world where AI answers without sending anyone anywhere... is this really what we should measure? #AskingTheQuestion.

🟣 “Exact AI ranking” tools are scams. The GEO tech industry is already worth 2 billion dollars post-Semrush acquisition. Result: an avalanche of tools promising your exact position in ChatGPT. Rand Fishkin demonstrates it’s bullshit. AI rankings change with each prompt. The only reliable metric: your visibility percentage across hundreds of prompts, not a position #1 snapshot. You have the details here.

🟣 Black-Hat GEO already exists. Some brands boost their AI visibility metrics with mass-generated listicles. It works... for five minutes. Then their SEO traffic collapses because Google still controls the index (here’s a use case). Google has already won the AI Search race. Manipulating ChatGPT at Google’s expense is self-sabotage.

🟣 The only 3 types of content that work in AI Search. Ryan identifies three archetypes that systematically perform in answer engines. I validate this approach 10000% (the post). It’s the one I recommend in my masterclass.

• Exploit data nobody else has access to (yours!)

• Position yourself early on emerging topics

• Don’t fear AI-assisted content

In my GEO masterclass, I help you redefine your content strategy to shift from volume production (to cover keywords) to a “source coverage” strategy and relevance engineering. The next session is in March, you can join the waitlist here 👇👇.

Join the waitlist

🟣 Stop ignoring zero-volume keywords. Steve demonstrates that ignoring “zero volume” terms misses entire intent clusters worth thousands of monthly searches. He built a custom bot to correct this gap. Volume tools lie. Semantic context matters more than volume data.

🟣 Content Strategist ≠ Content Engineer. Josh perfectly explains the difference. Strategists think about what to say. Engineers think about how machines will parse it. You need both. Choose only one and you lose.

🟣 Visual Fan-Out - to help you out. Google AI Mode now decomposes images into objects, attributes, styles, and intents, then launches parallel searches on all components (WordLift). You’re no longer optimizing pages for keywords. You’re optimizing objects for contexts. An image triggers multiple discovery journeys simultaneously. Welcome to spatial search optimization.

🟣 Your website represents only 15% of your AI visibility. AirOps analyzed thousands of AI Search results: 85% of brand mentions come from external sources—press articles, Reddit, third-party roundups, partner sites. The SEO playbook of the last 20 years is inverted.

• → Before: create content on your site → rank on Google → capture traffic.

• → Now: LLMs synthesize the entire web and form an opinion about your brand from everywhere except your .com.

If your brand only exists on your site, you’re invisible in 85% of conversations that matter.

How to take action?

Develop an “away game” content strategy (partnerships, earned media, external contributions), prioritize mentions in answer bodies rather than simple source citations, and create differentiated middle-funnel content rather than generic informational content already in training data.

🟣 A great way to find the questions people really ask LLMs. Lauren shares a brilliant Reddit technique to identify users’ real prompts: type any question about sentiment on a topic in Reddit’s search bar (ex: “what questions are doctors asking about AI scribes”), and Reddit automatically synthesizes answers from 10+ relevant subreddits, categorized by themes. You can even ask follow-up questions to refine. No more hours manually digging through subreddits. Bonus: it works for ultra-specific niches too (medical specialties, particular sentiments, etc.).

📚 THE Must-Read of the Month

THE content everyone’s talking about

This “official AEO and GEO playbook” guide is the first actionable guide from a major AI platform. Microsoft Advertising just dropped “From Discovery to Influence”: 16 pages explaining how their system really works and what brands need to do to show up in Copilot and Bing AI.

Key takeaways from this guide. Microsoft:

• Splits GEO from AEO. GEO = making content discoverable, reliable, and authoritative in AIs. AEO = making sure AI assistants find, understand, and present your answers effectively.

• Explains how Copilot really works for shopping and reveals the “reasoning phase.” They detail the three data levels to master (crawled data, product feeds/APIs, and live website data). The conclusion is clear: AI agents navigate, click, fill forms, and complete purchases. Without a functional site, the sale dies—even with perfect feeds and crawled data.

• Proposes three actionable strategies: mandatory structured data, intent-enriched content, and verifiable trust signals.

👀 My 2 Cents:

This is the most actionable guide any AI platform has published to date. Period. Microsoft isn’t theorizing. They’re documenting their actual system. Required reading.

🤔 SEO vs GEO: The Great Debate

The naming and paradigm war continues

🟣 No, SEO and GEO aren’t the same - Andrew sounds the alarm on a phenomenon he’s observed for a year: “SEO gurus” who spent months dismissing GEO now admit it’s a new system with new tools — while desperately trying to squeeze their SEO skills into this new framework. Once you realize AI is the biggest online influencer, you reallocate budgets quickly to try influencing it in your favor. This isn’t SEO evolution — it’s a fundamentally different system. We’re shifting toward “AI-first” interaction in search.

👀 My 2 Cents: The LinkedIn post that feels good (I admit).

🟣 “GEO = good SEO sold more expensive” - Piet drops a scathing critique: what’s sold today as “revolutionary GEO” is nothing but good SEO we should’ve been doing for 10 years. He dissects GEO guides and concludes: citing sources, adding statistics, structuring content... it’s exactly what Google recommends via E-E-A-T since 2014. His main argument? Agencies just rebranded the fundamentals with a new acronym to create urgency (and charge more). The real problem isn’t optimization — it’s the collapse of traffic and clicks. And GEO doesn’t change that.

👀 My 2 Cents: Piet is right... and wrong. Yes, fundamentals are the same. Yes, many agencies do opportunistic repackaging, they replace the “S” in SEO with “G” for GEO in their LinkedIn profile and call it done. But we already know to watch out for those. By focusing on these few scams, Piet still misses the essential: the context, objectives, internet structure, and its business model have radically changed.

Before, we optimized to be found by our final audience. Now, we optimize to be cited and recommended by an AI. It’s not the same battle. Classic SEO made you visible in a list of 10 blue links. GEO makes you the single recommendation in a ChatGPT conversation.

We’re shifting from positioning logic (ranking) to selection logic (being chosen).

All this isn’t (just) good old SEO rebranded — it’s a new playing field where off-site authority, brand equity, third-party mentions, and conversational quality matter more than ever. So yes, keep doing “good SEO” because it remains a solid foundation. But if you don’t understand that AI has fundamentally changed who decides your visibility (a conversational algorithm vs a ranking engine), you’ll miss the turn.

🟣 “Forget the acronyms. Become an AUTHORITY, period” - The final word probably goes to Mordy! He (rightly) denounces the obsession with fragmenting visibility (SEO, GEO, AEO, LLMO…) as if you needed different authority for each platform. In reality, the only sustainable strategy is building global brand authority. By optimizing channel by channel, teams lose sight of the essential: becoming a real reference in their field. If a brand is credible and unavoidable, all algorithms will eventually recognize it. The challenge isn’t optimizing for each system. It’s being an authority all systems can’t ignore.

👀 My 2 Cents: FINALLY someone saying things clearly. While we fight over the right acronym, we lose sight of the essential: authority isn’t divisible by channel. It’s transversal. Universal. Indivisible. Want to appear in ChatGPT? Become a reference cited everywhere. Want to rank on Google? Same battle. YouTube? Same. AI won’t search for “the best GEO-optimized content.” It’ll search for what everyone already considers THE reference. Calm down on tactical optimization for algorithms. Build real authority. The rest will follow.

🛠️ AI Search Tools & Workflow

Tools to take action (priority to free tools)

🟣 The vibe coding guide for those who know nothing. Danny Sullivan (yes, THE Google Search Liaison) just discovered vibe coding. He shares his total beginner experience and created a detailed vibe coding guide with screenshots of the complete process to create a TV/movie watchlist app. So stop feeling guilty. If he can do it, we all can (his guide).

🟣 Visual Fan-Out Simulator: (literal French translation, so you don’t yell at me... Contextual Visual Deployment Simulator). Andrea Volpini (whom I already mentioned 👆) created this simulator = a tool that transforms an image into an explorable context graph. This simulator:

• Analyzes an image → identifies objects, attributes, intentions

• Automatically generates all potential follow-up questions

• Deploys answers in parallel → like an organic mind map

• Anchors each branch with verified sources (products, guides, references)

• Maintains initial context across all depth levels

Why is it useful? This tool makes visible how AI anticipates user needs and structures information contextually. You “see” how Google’s AI Mode really works, not as a linear search engine.

🟣 Scrunch + Noble: automate AI citation placements at scale. The killer partner duo = Scrunch identifies citation sources LLMs pull for your key prompts (total citations, competitor mentions, influence scores by domain). Noble automates everything else—outreach, negotiation, content writing, payment, reporting. You approve content, they handle execution. Transform insight into large-scale placement without tedious manual prospecting work. Then watch your visibility climb in Scrunch.

🟣 Claude launches Cowork & Chrome Extension to automate SEO/GEO/AEO—for free. Anthropic deploys browser workflows allowing Claude to execute SEO and AEO tasks end-to-end without manual intervention. Demonstrated capabilities: audit 50+ URLs for broken schema in minutes, crawl competitor sites to identify internal linking gaps, connect directly to CMS to write meta-tag updates, monitor Core Web Vitals on staging site. In this post, you have other very concrete usage examples for your GEO. It can even manage your Google Ads campaign for you.

👋 That’s all for this month! I’ll see you in two weeks in this same format. If you’d like to give me your feedback on this new style, that would be awesome!

👀 Master the Economics of GEO in 90 Minutes. Don’t let AI Search redefine your visibility without you. Join me for a strategic masterclass: decode the shifts of 2026 and learn how to reallocate your Content and SEO budgets for maximum impact. Next Masterclass in May. Join the waitlist to stay tuned 👇👇.

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I’m obsessed with how AI changes Search, Content, and marketing. I do believe that AI is no longer optional for content strategists. This newsletter is your guide to leveraging it effectively. Thanks for being a part of this journey with me!

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What you will find in this week’s newsletter

• 🔊 AI news on my radar: Going is cleaning up its SERPs. They want to promote useful content and fight spam.

• 💎 AI Content strategy “how-to” gem: Google SGE, pillar page, topical authority, keywords research, tone of voice, and more.

• 📚 AI Content strategy insights & resources: Google De-Indexation Data Study.

• 🛠️ The AI Content Strategist Toolkit: My curated selection of AI tools and GPTs to power your content strategy from idea to execution.

• 📍Bookmark this: More noteworthy AI news – still relevant to content, but slightly broader in scope.

Reading time: 10 min.

🔊 On my radar

My selection of AI news impacting content strategy, search, and AI

This past week saw Google’s biggest algorithm update since the Panda update, which eradicated content farms. Google’s goal is to make finding helpful information easier. SEO experts agree this was one of the most significant updates in years. This core update focuses on two main pillars:

• Improved quality ranking: Algorithms are being tweaked to prioritize the most useful and original content available. This will help reduce the visibility of copied or unoriginal material.

• New and improved spam policies: Google is cracking down on spam to improve search experience. This includes addressing issues like expired websites being used to spread spam, and spam sites abusing obituaries for traffic.

Here are the most important insights for you:

🗞️ Mainstream Media

Pretty rare, for the first time in years, Google talks to mainstream media about its spam update. Their way of fixing the communication failures of the past months.

• The Verge: Google is going to squash more spam and AI in Search Results (🔗 Here).

• Wired: Google is finally trying to kill AI clickbait (🔗 Here).

• Fast Company: Google is taking new steps to fight the onslaught of spammy websites (🔗 Here).

📚 Reliable resources

• Google blog: New ways we’re tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search (🔗 Here).

• Google’s FAQ: Page to help website owners and marketers with this update (🔗 Here).

• Google: Google updated its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (🔗 Here)

• Search Engine Roundtable: Google March 2024 Core Update Ranking Changes Have Begun. Barry Schwartz did a terrific job checking the volatility of the SERPs through several SEO tools and regrouping the top commentaries on the topic (🔗 Here).

• Search Engine Land: 6 insights on manual actions taken by Google to remove websites (for some, overnight!!). Roger Monti emphasizes that Google is wasting no time in removing low-quality sites from the search results. This has reached some historic levels since Panda and Penguin updates (🔗 Here).

‘We expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%’.

Elizabeth Tucker, Director of Product, Search at Google.

📍 Top comments from SEO experts

• Barry Schwartz: This is part of a massive move from Google, since integrating AI deeply, Google is now sharing tons of social media content within SERPs. It started with LinkedIn and Reddit. Now, Google may show your social media posts if you add your social media profile links to your Google Business Profiles (🔗 Here).

• Gael Breton: Double standards: Google is giving 2 months for large publications to remove spam from their sites. For small businesses, they deindex them overnight. Ugh. (🔗 Here).

• Lili Ray: She is keeping track of 200 sites hit and she noticed that the biggest losers had been wiped off Google. She adds: “I think Google has removed the worst offenders algorithmically this week and even with pure spam penalties in some cases. The content is very generic, bland, low-quality, often pure AI content, stock photos, ads everywhere, etc. (🔗 Here).

• Aleyda Solis: Not only Reddit but also Quora and Medium are dropping in organic search visibility (🔗 Here). Same observations by Lily Ray: ‘It is still possible that Reddit’s exponential SEO growth is coming to an end. I’m seeing Reddit lose visibility for various high-volume keywords. (🔗 Here). Both use the same SEO tool, Sistrix.

• Marie Haynes: This tweet will explain to you why Reddit is relevant for Google (🔗 Here).

• Glenn Gabe: I’ve already had multiple people ping me about sites being completely deindexed. And those sites have a ton of AI content, some with terrible UX, aggressive ads, copied content, and more. And the scale of content is big (🔗 Here).

🧩 The missing piece

What’s the connection between massive spam, overwhelming presence of Reddit in SERPs, Google’s acquisition in Reddit and the Core update from this week?

Google is battling a surge of spam, fueled in part by AI-generated content. Reddit, a discussion-rich platform, is both a source of helpful information and a target for spammers. Google’s investment in Reddit likely aims to improve spam detection and surface quality content, while its recent algorithm update targets the overall issue of AI-powered spam techniques.

👀 My 2 cents

Generative AI has completely transformed content strategies. We’re now working with a whole new set of ‘ingredients’ (tactics) to achieve success: SGE instead of SEO, newsletters instead of social media, Forum instead of commentaries, Communities instead of platforms, Topic clusters instead of websites, Live and raw content instead of “clean one”, etc. Yes! No matter how old you are in content marketing, we’re all getting back to school. So let’s be humble. And learn from each others.

🔮 What does that mean for us, AI content strategists?

• AI for content creation, yes or no: Using AI to create content won’t automatically hurt your website’s ranking in Google updates. Depends on what we call “creating”. Using AI to brainstorm content ideas, finding the right outline of a blog post, creating personas or rephrasing content is all good. Using AI to create content from scratch and at scale, no matter how good the prompt is, is not.

• Focus on quality: Google’s focus is on content quality, not how it was produced. Spammy, unhelpful, low-value content is the problem, regardless of whether it’s AI-generated or not.

• Don’t trick Google: Follow Google’s content quality guidelines to ensure your content remains valuable to users.

• Be useful: If you use AI heavily, prioritize the quality and helpfulness of your content. Have a human expert edit it. Provide a point of view. Personalize it by challenging the status quo. Share personal stories. Anything that can make your content look like “you”.

• Be UX-focused: Being useful means providing your user with a nice online experience. Design is crucial and 100% part of your content strategy. My friends Frank Prendergast and Jim McLeod are both my go-to people when it comes to Design and the intersection with AI.

• Be transparent: Disclose your use of AI tools or how you used AI.

💎 AI Content strategy “how-to”

SEO and content strategy tips & insights from Top Experts

• Understanding how SGE works: A fantastic 5-minute whiteboard Friday to understand how Google SGE’s answers are calculated and what it means for how marketers can potentially impact the results (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Rand Fishkin.}

• How to optimize for SGE? SGE is a search engine that uses LLMs to generate predictive responses. The presence of your product/service in the LLM’s training data is crucial. SGE allows you to see the training data that Google uses. Ensure you are included in this data to maximize your chances of being mentioned by SGE (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Chris Long.}

• How to get ready for SGE (again): 8 ways for content strategists to get ready with Google SGE (🔗 Here).

  ^{From me.}

• How to use social for customer service: 25 effective ways to enhance your social media customer service, including ways to leverage UGC and chatbot use for instant responses (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Brooke Sellas.}

• Tone of Voice: Crushing your tone of voice will be crucial to creating differentiating content. Here is a 7-step list of tips to make your reader stick to your content (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Tim Denning.}

• Topical Authority: How to earn topical authority, including a great zooming on what is an authoritative author and a brief history of authority in Google SERPs. One of the best posts I read on this topic. (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Zoe Ashbridge.}

• Pillar page: Zooming on the 4 types of content pillars and a 5 steps framework to create your content pillar and build topical authority (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Julia McCoy.}

• Keyword research: How much does it cost to rank for a single keyword? Great post highlighting how we underestimate both the cost of SEO and Content production for a single keyword and the ROI of the project (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Garrett Sussman.}

• Analytics & GA4: Google Analytics URL Builder helps you track and how to track campaigns in Google Analytics 4 and tells you which campaign is successful (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Amanda Gant.}

• Thought Leadership Content: How can we distribute our thought leadership content using SEO? The question occurs when you coin a new term that no one is searching for! Brian Dean did this with its Skyscraper Technics. The solution is bridging the gap between the existing online conversation (SEO keyword) - and introducing new concepts that change the conversation (thought leadership) Great framework (🔗 Here).

  ^{Ashley Faus.}

Join the waitlist

📚 AI Content strategy insights & resources

Recently published research paper, industry benchmark, or helpful guide

📊 The research

Google De-Indexation Data Study- by Originality.ai

• The update impacted about 1,500 sites in their dataset.

• In total, 2% of the monitored sites were impacted by the update

• 100% of these websites had some type of AI content

• 50% of the websites had 90% or more content written by AI

• The vast majority of those websites had a Domain Rating of 20 or under

• At least 1,446 Google Manual Actions have been applied since March 5th (to websites such as Mediavine, Raptive, and Ezoic (out of 79,000 sites looked at). These sites are completely deindexed…

• Cumulative traffic loss of 20 million visitors per month. 3 websites were getting over 1 million organic visitors a month.

• Sources - The Full Report 👉 Google March 2024 AI Content Manual Action Update - List of deindexed sites (🔗 Here).

• Sources - The full list 👉 To see the full list of the 837 websites deindexed by Google, check it (🔗 Here).

📈 The Chart & Stat

Across the 10,000 search results, the ‘Discussions and forums’ feature was present in 7,702 (77%) of them and linked to 766 individual forums.

Reddit and Quora were listed 18,095 times. These two domains have more than 3X the presence of every other site combined.

The increasing popularity of Reddit, along with Google’s recent core update targeting spam, has led to a resurgence of a classic form of user-generated content (UGC): discussion forums. While major platforms still use forums, many brands have abandoned them as part of their marketing strategies.

Glenn Allssop wanted to know if forums can rank well. He analyzed 10,000 keyphrases where product reviews ranked highly. He answered the following questions: How many individual sites does Google promote them? Do any other sites besides Reddit dominate the results? Do forums on subdomains or subfolders tend to rank better? Are the top-ranking forums owned independently or by media goliaths?

• Sources 👉 Check the full research on Detailed’s blog (🔗 Here).

📝 The quote

Keywords research is just market research for the 21rst Century

Brian Dean - Founder of Backlinko & Exploding Topics

Sources 👉 Excerpt from the blog post (🔗 Here).

🛠️ The AI Content Strategist Toolkit

Tools and GPTs you can use for your content strategy

Tops GPTs - To help you with your Research

• Consensus Your AI Research Assistant. Search 200M academic papers from Consensus, get science-based answers, and draft content with accurate citations (🔗 Here).

  ^{By Consensus. app.}

Tops AI Tools

• Ahref: They released a new feature: forecasting search volume. Tim Soulo made a demo (🔗 Here).

• Ddevi: an AI Lead Generation assistant. It has several features: create websites and landing pages, Instagram reels, or even sales and support chatbot or bookkeeping. But the one interesting in the context of today’s issue is that it can help you monitor keywords to find leads and outreach using AI in Facebook groups, Linkedin, and Reddit (🔗 Here).

• Check.Factiverse.ai: I don’t believe that much in AI tools that supposedly can detect AI-generated content. If they working efficiently, Google wouldn’t have released its core update about Spam. But Factiverse is interesting because it helps you fact-check if your AI-generated content is accurate - or not. It helps you quickly find evidence and fact-check any text (🔗 Here).

• Bluedothq.com: An AI-powered Chrome extension for Google Meet (🔗 Here).

• AIcarousel.com: A social media carousel maker and generator for LinkedIn, Instagram, and Tik Tok (🔗 Here).

📍Bookmark this

Other AI marketing news with an impact on Content Marketing, Search, and AI

• Why Walmart’s quick success in generative AI search should have Google worried (🔗 Here).

• Inside Reddit’s long, complicated relationship with Open AI’s Sam Altman (🔗 Here).

• Open AI says Elon Musk wanted full control of the company (🔗 Here).

• Meet the Arc Browser – The Reason I Uninstalled Google Chrome after 15 years (🔗 Here).

• Perplexity is poised to become the latest AI start-up to hit unicorn status - Report (🔗 Here).

• AI prompt engineering is dead (🔗 Here).

🟣 I’m Karine. I help you adapt your content strategy to AI Search and GEO through a masterclass and a community focused on AI marketing. The next session of my GEO masterclass in english will be in May. Want to join?

Join the waitist

I’m obsessed with how AI changes Search, Content, and marketing. I do believe that AI is no longer optional for content strategists. This newsletter is your guide to leveraging it effectively. Thanks for being a part of this journey with me!

Subscribe now

What you will find in this week’s newsletter

• 🔊 AI news on my radar: Open Source v/s Not open? Data training and cost…

• 💎 AI Content strategy “how-to” gem: Topical Authority, email marketing, SGE, review mining, length of content, and more.

• 📚 AI Content strategy insights & resources: SGE snippets research, how Google Search Engine (still) works, and more.

• 🛠️ The AI Content Strategist Toolkit: My curated selection of AI tools and GPTs to power your content strategy from idea to execution.

• 📍Bookmark this: More noteworthy AI news – still relevant to content, but slightly broader in scope.

Reading time: 10 min.

🔊 On my radar

My selection of AI news impacting content strategy, search, and AI

Google’s related:

• Google released Genie, a new generative interactive environment, a foundation world model trained from Internet videos that can generate an endless variety of playable worlds from synthetic images, photographs, and even sketches (🔗 Here).

• Google is paying independent publishers to test an unreleased generative artificial intelligence platform, which allows them to produce content using public data sources and potentially threatens the commercial foundations of digital publishing (🔗 Here).

• Chrome’s new AI feature can help you write on the web (🔗 Here). But this tool is said to be incentivizing the production of AI-generated slop (🔗 Here).

• Google released a laptop-friendly open AI based on Gemini technology that can be used to create content-generation tools and chatbots (🔗 Here).

• Google brings Stack Overflow’s knowledge base to Gemini for Google Cloud (🔗 Here).

• Alphabet drops during renewed fears about Google’s AI offerings (🔗 Here).

• Calls for Google CEO’s resignation intensify. Despite his past successes, Google’s bureaucratic culture under Pichaï’s leadership is now under scrutiny (🔗 Here).

• About Google’s bureaucratic Culture, you can see it live in this moving post (🔗 Here).

• That being said, meanwhile, Sergin Brin - himself - spoke very openly at the “AGI house” in San Francisco about the future of search, google’s business model based on Ads (🔗 Here).

About others:

• Elon Musk sues Open AI for abandoning its mission to fit humanity. And its legal case is hilariously bad (🔗 Here).

• Open Source v/s closed source - or a mix of both. The problematic apparently at the core of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Open AI. Well explained with a nice zooming on the impact of the differences (🔗 Here).

• But the real deal is more about how those big tech companies are using our data to train their models (🔗 Here).

• We now know how many news websites are blocking AI’s crawler? (🔗 Here)

• Tumblr and Wordpress are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI to train AI Tools (🔗 Here).

🧩 The missing piece

Open-source (or not) isn’t really the heart of the debate around generative AI. The true battleground is the data and content these models are trained and learn from. As Sergei Brin says, ‘Training costs are definitely high, and that’s something companies like us have to manage. However, I think the long-term utility is far greater.’

Over the past 18 months, big business moves, including recent lawsuits, were all about controlling data – preventing scraping or securing content creator deals. This impacts everyone, from Reddit users to journalists to future influencers. It’s a high-stakes game, especially for Google, as they balance the need to compete with OpenAI while protecting their Search-based advertising model

👀 My 2 cents

As a young lawyer, my mentor had a cynical view of the legal system. ‘People go to court for two reasons,’ he’d say, ‘to get justice or to mess with someone.’ Lawsuits hold the potential to seriously disrupt, especially when a company is raising money. Even a case with questionable merit can tank a funding round if the stakes are high enough. It appears Elon Musk’s grounds for suing OpenAI fall into the questionable category. Regardless, this will certainly make life difficult for the Open AI team, notably Sam Altman. On top of the NYT lawsuit, he’s rumored to be pursuing a whopping $7 trillion in funding.

🔮 What does that mean for us, AI content strategists?

Your Marketing Plan (starting yesterday!!):

1) Develop your topical authority through one-of-a-kind content: Build a unique Content Hub while partenering with your industry’ influencers. Such content is for LLMs to be trained on (and develop your brand).

2) Create and develop your own community: This place is for your to develop deep connections (and ultimately, customers?). This one should stay “confidential” (whatever that means, in an AI-generated world).

3) Time to resurrect a dinosaur – build a forum! Yeah, we also thought Google killed those off with that whole Panda thing ages ago. But hey, they’re somehow back! And once Google gets tired of all that Reddit spam, your squeaky-clean forum will totally dominate the search results.

💎 AI Content strategy “how-to”

SEO and content strategy tips & insights from Top Experts

• Email marketing: If you’re not investing in your own email marketing list, you’re making a bad choice. (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Rand Fishkin.}

• SGE: How will google SGE impact SEO tools? (🔗 Here)

  ^{From Mordy Oberstein.}

• Length of content: “Keep it short. People won’t read long content.” Creators undervalued long-form content. They shouldn’t (🔗 Here) and (🔗 Here)

  ^{From Liz Willits & Jay Clouse.}

• Long-form content (again): A 37-step checklist for reviewing long-form content, from blog posts to guides.

  ^{From Erika Varangouli.}

• Google Perspective: One of the biggest and most important changes in Search related to SGE: Social proof integrating into Search. Great explanation, tips, and a 7-step SEO checklist (🔗 Here).

  ^{From John Lincoln.}

• Google Ads data for SEO: 5 ways to leverage Google Ads data for your SEO (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Chris Long.}

• Copywriting: A table with 100 captivating power words and phrases for headlines, organized into five columns for easy reference (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Chase Diamond.}

• Zero-click Search: 96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% (🔗 Here)

  ^{From Tim Soulo.}

• Topical authority: What does an SEO-driven B2B content strategy look like? A 7 step-process (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Andy Crestodina.}

• Review Mining: How to do review mining and understand your buyers with limited time (and budget) (🔗 Here).

  ^{Kathlyn Bourgoin.}

Join the waitlist

📚 AI Content strategy insights & resources

Recently published research paper, industry benchmark, or helpful guide

📊 The research

Danny Goodwin from SEL wrote a research post about how Google Search works based on an analysis of the notes taken from questions asked to the VP of Search, Pandurang Nayak, VP of Google Search.

• Sources - The Full PDF 👉 Witness audition of Pandurang NayaK, VP Search @Google (🔗 Here).

• Danny Goodwin’s (Search Engine Land) analysis 👉 (🔗 Here).

• My summary 👉 (🔗 Here).

📈 The Chart & Stat

85.5% of SGE snippets link to one or more domains from the top 10 organic results.

How often do SGE responses appear in Search? What is the average length of the text in SGE answers? How many links do SGE snippets contain? Do SGE snippets contain links to domains from the TOP 10 of organic search results? Which sites are included in SGE snippets? SERanking did great research about SGE answering all those questions.

Graph showing the general distribution of links in SGE responses

• Sources 👉 Check the full report SERankings (🔗 Here).

• Summary 👉 Wrap-up of the key findings (🔗 Here).

📝 The quote

Topical Authority is the new page rank.Today, content must be designed for keyword clusters that share the same intent — otherwise known as topics. This is supported by the fact that search engines show nearly identical SERPs for the keywords within a topic

Ethan Smith - CEO @Graphite & Reforge.

Sources 👉 Excerpt from a LinkedIn post and report (🔗 Here)

🛠️ The AI Content Strategist Toolkit

Tools and GPTs you can use for your content strategy

Tops GPTs - To help you build your topic cluster

• Semantic SEO Specialist The ultimate resource for Data-Driven Semantic SEO, Topic Clusters, Topical Authority, SILO structures, and mort. +100 conversations. (🔗 Here).

  ^{By Todd O’Rourke.}

Tops AI Tools

• Aimply Brief: Create a daily newsletter just for you (🔗 Here).

• Cartoonifier: Turn any selfie into a cartoon (🔗 Here).

• TheGigaBrain: A Search Engine to find useful answers from online communities. GigaBrain scans billions of discussions on Reddit and other online communities to find the most useful posts and comments for you (🔗 Here).

• ExplainLikeI’m5: Explain complex topics. Helps you create a Mind Map on complex topics (🔗 Here).

• AI Metaphor.ai: An AI Metaphor generator (🔗 Here).

📍Bookmark this

Other AI marketing news with an impact on Content Marketing, Search, and AI

• Memos: Open AI Execs reject Elon Musk’s claims (🔗 Here).

• Mistral, the French LLM, makes waves with deals across Tech giants including Microsoft, and IBM(🔗 Here).

• Gen Z prefers to research brands on social media over Search Engines (🔗 Here).

• Anthropic launches Claude 3, the next generation of Claude (🔗 Here).

🟣 I’m Karine. I help you adapt your content strategy to AI Search and GEO through a masterclass and a community focused on AI marketing. The next session of my GEO masterclass in english will be in May. Want to join?

Join the waitlist

After 18 months of tracking AI’s marketing influence, this newsletter is evolving to specialize in AI’s impact on content marketing, content strategy, search, and SEO. Here is why I’m making this shift:

• AI is changing everything: The AI revolution is transforming marketing at lightning speed. To provide the best insights, I need to specialize.

• I’m adapting to the evolution of marketing: Next-gen content strategy demands both creativity AND data-driven insights. Content marketing can no longer rely solely on the creativity or talent of former journalists or writers. Today, data analysis, search optimization, understanding chat trends, and leveraging AI tools are essential for any effective content strategy.

• You asked for it! Your enthusiasm for my past content on AI, search, and content strategy was clear – obviously, this is what you want more of.

• I’m passionate about this: I love exploring how generative AI (re)shapes content marketing, content strategy, search, and chat. This focus lets me combine my skills with what I find most exciting.

Welcome to The AI Content Strategist’s newsletter!

Thanks for being a part of this journey with me!

🧩 Karine.

If you’ve been forwarded this newsletter, you can subscribe here 👇👇👇

Subscribe now

What you’ll find in this newsletter

• 🔊 AI news on my radar: My weekly roundup of AI developments shaping content strategy, search, chat, and SEO. I’ll connect the dots to spark insights for your content approach.

• 💎 AI Content strategy “how-to” gem: My picks of the best how-to blog posts, LinkedIn discussions, and other content from leading SEOs, marketers, and content experts.

• 📚 AI Content strategy insights & resources: A thought-provoking stat, research finding, or quote to deepen your understanding of the field.

• 🛠️ The AI Content Strategist Toolkit: My curated selection of AI tools and GPTs to power your content strategy from idea to execution.

• 📍Bookmark this: More noteworthy AI news – still relevant to content, but slightly broader in scope.

Reading time: 10 min.

Join the waitlist

🔊 On my radar

My selection of AI news impacting content strategy, search, and AI

• Google has expanded its partnership with Reddit (🔗 Here).

• Google introduced a new state-of-the-art open model, Gemma (🔗 Here), and on the same day, Google One AI Premium which is Gemini accessing Google Docs, Sheets, and more (🔗 Here).

• Perplexity partners with Vercel, opening AI Search to developer Apps (🔗 Here).

• Perplexity (again) just developed its podcast. Daily episodes with deep dives into tech, science, and culture, all drawn from their “Discover” feed and created in partnership with ElevenLabs’ voices. Brilliant! (🔗 Here).

• Arc Search, the new iPhone App combining browser, search, and AI (🔗 Here) is getting better bookmark and search results, thanks to AI (🔗 Here).

• Open AI is working on a web search product, partly powered by Microsoft Bing (🔗 Here).

• Brave Leo, the AI browser assistant now features Mixtral for improved performance (🔗 Here).

• Gemini-powered chat comes to Google Ads (🔗 Here).

• The power of Google AI comes into the new Samsung Galaxy (🔗 Here).

• Another BIG Google update happening …? (🔗 Here).

• Google SGE testing and development is ongoing, and growing (🔗 Here).

• Google is making changes to its Google Assistant (🔗 Here).

🧩 The missing piece

Browsers, Search engines,s or LLMs? The war to lead the next-gen internet is launched. The exponential rise of AI has triggered the shift towards a completely revisited internet. The way we are accessing, consuming, and creating information is being deeply disrupted. The way we’re gonna interact with each other (and sell to each other…) too - hello AI Agent.

👀 My 2 cents

Meanwhile, Google’s rapid pace of innovation since Google I/O signals a shift (albeit a gradual one, given its size) from an advertising-based model towards paid subscriptions for AI-powered products. Since they have no clue yet, which products will succeed, they are experimenting and testing like crazy… Search will certainly the main product affected by those testings.

🔮 What does that mean for us, AI content strategists?

Google may no longer remain the main gateway to the internet. As a consequences, “ranking on Google” should probably not be part of your top marketing goal anymore. The rise of AI-powered language models suggests that discovery is becoming just as important as traditional search. Yup. Discovery (in LLMs) could very soon be the new Search. Get used to it.

💎 AI Content strategy “how-to”

SEO and content strategy tips & insights from Top Experts

• AI Search Engines: In 2023, you had 6 types of AI search engines you wanted to integrate into your content strategy (🔗 Here). Now you have 23 (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Roger Monti & Chuck Price.}

• Backlinks: “Internal Google documents revealed during their antitrust trial show how Google relies heavily on user signals to evaluate content quality.” Yes! Links and clicks are still what Google is all about (🔗 Here)

  ^{From Barry Adams.}

• Backlinks (again): The 20 types of backlinks that (still) matter the most (🔗 Here). And a nice survey about their diversity (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Jenny Romanchuk & Aleyda Solis.}

• Blog Traffic: How to prepare your marketing team for the paradigm shift in non-organic blog traffic? A great post to use smartly for the shift towards communities (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Alton Zenon III.}

• Quality Content: When is a content good enough to go live and bring results? To get your answer, create your content MVP! (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Erika Varangouli.}

• SEO Tools: 28 SEO tools to use every day. My top 3 are on that list too (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Zoe Ashbridge.}

• Topical authority: what is it, why is it crucial, and how to measure it? This post is an absolute must-read (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Ethan Smith.}

• YouTube SEO: An awesome 70+ step checklist for YouTube SEO (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Lazarina Stoy.}

• Marketing Personas: Top 8 prompts to build your marketing personas (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Andy Crestodina.}

• Keywords strategy with Reddit: Reddit ranks for everything now. So if you need keywords for your blog content strategy, this tweet will show you how to steal them from Reddit (🔗 Here).

  ^{From Keval Shah.}

📚 AI Content strategy insights & resources

Recently published research paper, industry benchmark, or helpful guide

📊 The research

Cyrus Shepard, who works part-time as an SEO and part-time as a Google quality rater, examined 50 sites that either lost or gained significant organic traffic across Google updates between August and December 2023. The selected site saw traffic changes ranging from -67% to +5,595% over this period.

Sources 👉 Winning & Losing Big Google Updates: 50 sites case study (🔗 Here).

📈 The Chart & Stat

71,03% of Perplexity’s traffic is Direct AND 12,18% of clicks are sent to Google…

I’m fascinated by Perplexity.ai‘s meteoric rise! Back in March 2023, I recognized its unique blend of search and chat capabilities. Naturally, I was curious: where were they getting their traffic, and where were they directing it?

Sources 👉 SemRush - Traffic stats for January 2024 [Excerpt].

📝 The quote

Topic clusters can be your best friend. Done right, they will bring huge results. Build quality clusters and be patient

Jeff Collins

Sources 👉 Excerpt from top 10 SEO quotes (🔗 Here)

🛠️ The AI Content Strategist Toolkit

Tools and GPTs you can use for your content strategy

Tops GPTs - To help you build your topic cluster

• SEO Topical Map Maker You just mention your main niche topic and language and it provides you with a table of 30 subtopics. +1000 conversations 4.6* ratings (🔗 Here).

  ^{By Julian Goldie.}

Tops AI Tools

• Zenfetch: Terrific to help you document your content strategy. Zenfetch helps you leverage all the information you’ve saved including articles, PDFs, and YouTube videos (🔗 Here).

• ReadPilot The perfect tool to wrap up your Topic Clusters… Read Pilot analyzes online articles and generates Q&A cards for you (🔗 Here).

• PlayPhraseMe: Help you find video clips using quotes from movies and TVs. Awesome to fill your content from very unique short video clips and make it differentiative (🔗 Here).

• Tedsmrzr: One of my favorites. Convert TED Talks into short summaries (🔗 Here).

• Voc.ai: A SaaS platform that utilizes AI to provide global customer insights, and product research and revolutionize customer service. Works with all types of reviews but especially with Amazon’s reviews. They also have launched their own GPT (🔗 Here).

📍Bookmark this

Other AI marketing news with an impact on Content Marketing, Search, and AI

• Google uses AI to detect fake online reviews faster (🔗 Here).

• Us Patent Office: AI is all well and good but only humans can patent things (🔗 Here).

• U.S. Justice Department hires first Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (🔗 Here).

• Amazon announces Rufus, a new generative AI-powered conversational shopping experience (🔗 Here).

• Google explained what went wrong With Gemini’s AI Image Generation (🔗 Here).

• Jason Spero, VP, Global Business at Google, speaks at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2024 about reimagining marketing in the age of AI (🔗 Here).

🟣 I’m Karine. I help you adapt your content strategy to AI Search and GEO through a masterclass and a community focused on AI marketing. The next session of my GEO masterclass in english will be in May. Want to join?

Join the waitlist

I’m obsessed with how AI changes Search, Content, and marketing. I do believe that AI is no longer optional for content strategists. This newsletter is your guide to leveraging it effectively. Thanks for being a part of this journey with me!

Subscribe now

📍THE news that needs your attention

To wrap up this (other) crazy month in AI, actually, two news to combine.

• OpenAI’s first developer conference - Among new models and developer products announced at DevDay GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, DallE 3 API but most of all, GPTs (AI Agents).

• Google in talks to invest in AI startup Character. ai - Founded by former Google employees Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, Character.ai allows people to chat with virtual versions of celebrities or anime characters, while creating their own chatbots and AI assistants. This investment is Google’s response to Open AI’s launch of its GPT models.

The short of it:

👋 Say hello to your new buddy, GPT (also known as AI agent), because he is here to stay!

November 2022 will be marked by the launch and massive adoption in just a few days of ChatGPT 3.5. November 2023 will remain marked by the release of GPT, the famous AI agent predicted to be the future of course - but not until several years... And yet, here we are (already). In less than a year, OpenAI, despite the recent melodrama surrounding its enigmatic leader and founder, has confirmed its leadership in the transformation of the Internet thanks to generative AI.

Google is certainly reacting, but remains largely on the defensive, seemingly unable to completely thwart – let alone control – the impact of generative AI on the Internet. This situation increasingly calls into question, at least in the public eye, Google’s position as the “gateway to the Internet” for 25 years.

The war is in full swing. It could well be won by the one who takes the lead in developing the AI ​​agent. If that is even possible.

Source: About Open AI (🔗 Here) and about Google (🔗 Here).

👩🏻‍💻 A few of my fact-based thoughts (in no particular order)

• My favorite definition of an AI agent - A software that uses AI to pursue a specific goal. It does this by breaking down the goal into tasks, tracking its progress, and interacting with digital resources and other agents when needed (🔗 Here).

• Tech v/s Usage - If the recent melodrama surrounding OpenAI has demonstrated anything, it’s that the ‘AI war to win the internet’ will be decided by a balance between two pillars: Technology and Usage. On the backend, it’s a true technological battle. On the front end, users will determine the winner. Meanwhile, marketers are witnessing a major revolution in their field, one they can either lead or be overwhelmed by.

• Open AI saved by personal branding? Sam Altman, OpenAI’s charismatic leader, demonstrated in just a few days that he has an active, massive, and loyal following of developers ready to support him wherever he goes, who love him. Sam Altman is the standout personal brand behind OpenAI’s success (🔗 Here) and during this melodrama, his personal brand probably saved the company.

• The end of the browser? From a marketing perspective, what we’ve been witnessing since Nov. 2022 is a Seach v/s Chat war. However, the real battle has deeper roots: it could signify the end of browsers as a gateway to the internet and the emergence of GPTs as their replacement.

• AI agents will dramatically impact marketing - As AI Agents will become the primary means for making most purchases, they will inevitably compel marketers to devise new strategies to influence them (🔗 Here). Beyond this, marketers will need to learn how to guide brands in reshaping their marketing strategies around AI agents. These agents will transform not only how we market to our customers but also how brands must market themselves.

• From a market of multitudes of niches to a market of multitudes of AI agent persons? In the book that elucidated internet business model, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated ‘how the era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place, something new is emerging: a market of multitudes.’ The ‘market of multitudes’ referred to the market of niches. Today, we’re entering a market of a multitude of AI agents, which might essentially represent a merger between an individual and their most significant topic of interest also known as… a personal brand.

This is not about Search v/s Chat anymore. It’s about who will lead the race of AI agents. And the truth is, each of us can have (and “be”) an AI agent…

🤕 While OpenAI is thriving, is Google sleeping?

Midjourney - Google’s despair.

• Google still leads - Initially, despite all the speculation, Google does not seem to be challenged in its monopoly at all. As Danny Goodwin points out, ‘Any impact of ChatGPT on Google’s search dominance is overblown at this point, given that ChatGPT only accounts for 2% of Google’s monthly traffic’ (🔗 Here).

• Google is fighting back - Google is actively countering competition by enhancing Google SGE with new features and through various strategic acquisitions and investments. Since May 2023, Google SGE has indeed undergone almost monthly improvements (🔗 Here). Additionally, Google is responding through major and significant acquisitions. Its recent substantial investment in CharacterAI is particularly noteworthy, as it positions Google to effectively respond to the threat posed by GPTs in the realm of AI agents (🔗 Here).

But…

• What about the overall search experience? Despite the improvements in SGE, the overall search experience is becoming increasingly confusing for users. This trend has been noted even by former Google employees, who have observed similar issues in the latest evolutions of sub-products like Google Maps (🔗 Here).

• Google (and SEOs) accused of having ruined the Internet… - In its primary business domain, Search, Google is facing significant challenges and has even been accused of ‘ruining the Internet’. A recent post from The Verge that went viral caused a stir in the SEO community (🔗 Here). The impact was so pronounced that Danny Sullivan, who seldom blogs, felt compelled to provide a detailed response and justification (🔗 Here).

• Google Gemini, not for now… - During The OpenAI Dev days, the company unveiled ChatGPT Vision, marking a shift towards multimodality for ChatGPT. According to tech researchers, this development offers tremendous capabilities (🔗 Here). In what might be a coincidence or a sign of strategic concern, Google has delayed the release of Gemini, its purported next-generation multimodal Large Model, which was expected a few days ago (🔗 Here).

• Will Google be able to keep its browser dominance? This one is a big deal. Google is under scrutiny from justice authorities regarding its deal with Apple during the antitrust trial. This trial has revealed the extent to which Google relies on browsers to maintain Search as the ‘gateway to the internet.’ As Sundar Pichai noted, ‘We realized early on that browsers are critical to how people navigate and use the web.‘

  Google paid $26.3 billion to be the default search engine on various browsers, platforms, and devices, with the largest portion going to Apple. Google’s flagship product, Search, generated $146 billion in 2021, meaning that Google spent approximately 18% of its search revenue on these deals. What implications could AI agents have for browsers, potentially signaling their decline?

🧠 What does that mean for us, humble humans?

• ‘AI Agent’: a burgeoning marketing term? So many different words and expressions are used to qualify this AI Agent: Autonomous agent, Custom Agent, GPTs, Copilot, or virtual agent. To name just a few. With this diversity, isn’t there a unique opportunity for you to coin your own term? AI and AI agents are at the forefront of a new era of the internet, a fresh ‘AI Real Estate’ landscape where every position is for grabs. The race is only beginning. Have you considered what your unique position could be?

• … loads of new marketing opportunities - Every new term in marketing opens the door to millions of business opportunities. Seth Godin often recounts his experience during the early years of the internet when he overlooked its potential success and missed the chance to purchase valuable domain names (like business.com, which was available for just a few dollars). Let’s learn from this lesson!

  Once you’ve identified the ideal purpose for your AI Agent (based on your primary interest or need of your customers), have you considered securing a domain name that aligns with your chosen GPTs, or any other AI agent, and your main topic? This is important both in the context of an AI marketing space (where there’s already an OpenAI GPT marketplace) and for your website.

• It’s not about Chat v/s Search anymore - It’s about zero-click marketing and thus, personal branding. This will be a full topic for another edition of this newsletter but right now, think of this: the way we seek information will fundamentally change. Imagine not using a browser to search for answers, but instead directly chatting with an AI agent about a specific topic. Once you enter the chat, you’re likely to remain engaged, typing (not clicking) the names of people or brands mentioned in your AI bot’s responses. For marketers, this represents the future of the job: figuring out how to ensure that your name or your brand’s name appears in those AI agent conversations.

• Tasks v/s goals - AI agents differ from conversational AI by focusing on goals rather than tasks. When you’re engaging with ChatGPT, you’re confined to the chat interface. You have to keep providing prompts to achieve your desired outcome, which is often referred to as a ‘chain of prompts.’ In contrast, with an AI agent, you define a goal instead of a task. The agent then determines the necessary tasks to achieve this goal and works on your behalf. This approach allows for the breakdown of tasks into subtasks and enables progress tracking, ultimately leading to the accomplishment of the set goal. For marketers, isn’t this the ideal tool? After all, isn’t defining SMART goals the most critical part of our job, with the rest of the strategy revolving around tactics and elements?

• AI Agent as your brand ambassador - With AI Agent, once you’ve established your goal to achieve, the Agent will take “initiatives” on your behalf. It continues to operate for you even when you are not actively engaged in conversation with it. The Agent will also notify you about new findings that align with your goals and may interest you. GPTs can serve as exceptional ambassadors for your brand, whether through sharing specific types of content you want to disseminate (keep reading to understand why GPTs are the new blogs) or by acting as a digital identity that works on your behalf. This woman already created her digital twin (🔗 Here)!

• AI Agents are the new platform - AI agents will be the new marketing platform. You’ll have the capability to construct and integrate all of today’s leading marketing elements and tactics around it: content creation, topic clusters, blogs, and influencer marketing, but with a different approach to distribution.

It’s not gonna be about distributing as large as possible, it’s gonna be about distributing as well targeted as possible, in the most personalized manner.

• GPT for communities - This also implies that once you develop a GPT, it becomes a powerful tool for your community to utilize. It also means that what’s coming next is multiagents, aka, GPTs and bots that talk to each other. It’s digital teamwork on steroids (🔗 Here).

AI Agents are the most exciting marketing opportunity - as long as you have content!!

One thing is sure. If Agent AI is the new platform, you won’t make any good use of it without content. If you don’t have some… no worries. The whole AI Agent concept began with Generative AI just a year ago. Currently, with ChatGPT at the forefront, Generative AI is the most powerful tool that marketers have ever had for creating vast amounts of content in mere minutes. Start with this!

🎯 THE insight from LinkedIn

This post from Bill Gates - AI is about to completely change how we use computers.

The short of it:

‘In the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that’s far beyond today’s technology (…).

Agents will be the next platform’ (…).

I don’t think any single company will dominate the agent’s business--there will be many different AI engines available. Today, agents are embedded in other software like word processors and spreadsheets, but eventually, they’ll operate on their own.

Although some agents will be free to use (and supported by ads), I think you’ll pay for most of them, which means companies will have an incentive to make agents work on your behalf and not an advertiser’s. If the number of companies that have started working on AI just this year is any indication, there will be an exceptional amount of competition, which will make agents very inexpensive’.

Bill Gates.

Sources: Check Bill Gates’ full post (🔗 Here).

🧠 What does that mean for us, humble humans?

• AI Agent as a (marketing) tool - Do you recall how, a few years ago, creating tools for your website was a highly effective content strategy? Brands like Zillow, Animal Z, and Moz (with its Moz Bar) are prime examples. So many other B2C or B2B brands developed these tools which were seen as alternatives to gated content for collecting email addresses or gathering some customer data. Now, AI agents are being viewed similarly. However, they offer additional capabilities: they can take action, be updated with the content you provide, and proactively engage by suggesting, summarizing, and updating based on your interests (🔗 Here).

• GPTs could also be a blog (soon) - My bold prediction 😉 is that GPTs could potentially replace traditional blogs. The details of how would you start with this could fill an entire newsletter (I’m brimming with ideas right now). But for now, consider this: just as influencers have risen to prominence using a blog as their website’s homepage, in the future, anyone with a particular interest could create a one-page website centered around a bot. This bot could represent a digital version of the individual, or function as a top-notch ‘AI Assistant,’ ‘Sage,’ ‘Researcher,’ etc. – the possibilities are endless.

• Niche Blog? GPTs represent the AI equivalent of niche blogs but with some incredible additions, supercharged by Generative AI. These are niche blogs to which you can assign a specific purpose (a set of instructions) and endow with additional knowledge – not only your own, in any format (visual, written, audio, PDF, etc.), but also insights from your competitors (mm…). Imagine a niche blog that can also actually take action! GPTs are blogs supercharged by AI.

• Are GPTs the new App Store? Not sure. Will you become a millionaire if your GPTs rank #1 on the OpenAI marketplace? Probably not. And that’s ok (🔗 Here). But should you leverage a new form of content or service on your website to augment the generous amount of content you already offer? (🔗 Here). Consider using them as your personal assistant to help accomplish various tasks.

🧩 AI Marketing Corner

Topic: AI Agents (GPTs) are the new blog!

🤗 1 tactic (from me):

GO create your own GPT. Right now!!

🛠 Your AI Agent toolbox

• Alternative to GPTs - You need a ChatGPT plus subscription to create your own GPTs but currently, all new subscribers are placed on a waiting list. My friend Spencer Crandall (🔗 Here) made a great demo of how to create an AI Agent with another similar CustomerGPT. ai (🔗 Here).

• GPTs Collection - Already a GPTs Directory or marketplace - from OpenAI. The already famous GPTs marketplace… As of today, it boasts precisely 20 305 GPTs. Check it out (🔗 Here).

• 14 main categories for GPTs - The Rundown already categorized GPTs and came up with 17 categories from image generation, to food, design, finance to social media (🔗 Here).

• THE best guide to create your GPT- Simon Willison’s blog is an absolute gem. He was the one who uncovered details about Google’s moat several months ago, a topic I discussed in a previous issue of this newsletter (🔗 Here). Now, he offers what I consider to be the best content for creating your own GPT models, along with some excellent examples of his work (🔗 Here).

• GPTs for SEO & content marketing - This great post from Search Engine Land will show you how to create your own custom GPT and how to use it now, in SEO, to determine E-E-A-T (🔗 Here). Aleyda Solis’ GPTs have the same purpose and they’re both a hit (🔗 Here).

• One of my favorite GPTs for Design - OK… I’m biased. This one has been developed by my friend. Interesting, isn’t it? Don’t you think what I just did (recommending you, especially the GPTs developed by my friend/community) is exactly how those GPTs will spread and work for your marketing 😉 ? This ChatGPT collage bot 2 was created by my friend Frank Prendergast (🔗 Here). It enables you to create vintage-style collages like this one 😍.

Please Create a vintage collage of what the internet will look like when all websites and blogs have been replaced by AI bots.

🤓 THE content that is worth listening to:

This fantastic episode of Mark Schaefer’s podcast where he interviews Paul Roetzer, the CEO and founder of the AI Marketing Institute.

👉 The Marketing Companion - Interview of Paul Roetzer (🔗 Here).

‘ GPTs is basically a custom ChatGPT. With the GPTs you can customize ChatGPT for specific uses. But really, it gives non developers the ability to build tools. So for us, marketing strategists, we start thinking of all the knowledge that you’re codified for all these years that are sitting in documents, and these processes and frameworks. Now, you can turn that into a tool (…) and it is not overly complicated to play with it and build this tool’.

Paul Roetzer - For the Marketing Companion.

🟣 I’m Karine. I help you adapt your content strategy to AI Search and GEO through a masterclass and a community focused on AI marketing. The next session of my GEO masterclass in english will be in May. Want to join?

Join the waitlist

👋 Welcome to the AI Content Strategist

I’m obsessed with how AI changes Search, Content, and marketing. I do believe that AI is no longer optional for content strategists. This newsletter is your guide to leveraging it effectively. Thanks for being a part of this journey with me!

Subscribe now

📍THE news that needs your attention

Adobe created a symbol to encourage tagging AI-generated content - This new icon is part of its initiative to provide transparency in AI-generated work.

The short of it: This seemingly unimportant news actually represents a significant development—a rising trend called ‘watermarking.’ This trend has been adopted by major brands and platforms currently transitioning to AI, including Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Adobe (among many others). More importantly, watermarking is a growing sub-topic within a broader subject: the detection of AI-generated content. This topic, as of now, is undeniably one of the most crucial aspects of AI and the transformation it will bring to today’s world.

Source: (🔗 Here)

📝 Most recent updates about watermarking

Watermarking has been widely deployed over the past few months.

• Adobe’s initiative is part of a larger one led by the Coalition for Content Provenance and authenticity (🔗 Here).

• OpenAI says new tool will detect images made by Dall-E (🔗 Here).

• Meta just revealed that they will introduce invisible watermarks in AI-generated images (🔗 Here).

• Google DeepMind beta-launched SynthID, a tool for watermarking and identifying AI-generated images (🔗 Here).

• Digimarcs adds copyright information to digital data (🔗 Here).

That being said, as of today, watermarking is not functioning effectively. Recently, a research team found it’s easy to evade current watermarking methods and even add fake watermarks to real images (🔗 Here).

Watermarking identifies AI-generated images, but the larger issue of AI-generated content also includes other types of content: written, audio, and video.

Watermarking identifies AI-generated images, but the larger issue of AI-generated content also includes other types of content: written, audio, and video.

🌎 Detection of AI-generated content: what’s at stake?

Nothing else than a new definition of the words REAL and TRUTH.

So far, in a pre-AI world, there has been a strong connection between truth and content. Remember those popular sayings?

• “Words may fly away, but writings endure.” (written content)

• “I only believe what I see.” From the French Philosophe Saint Thomas d’Aquin. (video and/or visual content)

• “Words are weapons” or “words possess a creating power” (audio content).

In an AI-driven world, these no longer hold true.

According to the SEC, AI could cause a financial crash within a decade (🔗Here). In itself, generative AI is accelerating disinformation (🔗Here).

Simply put, It introduces ‘fake’ into every one of our homes, which ultimately makes it a potential deal breaker in the balance between the world forces.

Peace hinges on justice, and justice relies on truth.

AI compels us to completely redefine what is real and what is not, what is true and what is not. Our future ability to detect AI-generated content is indeed a matter of peace or war. A matter of life or death.

Anyone who follows the latest and most devastating news in the Middle East can attest to this…

🔮 Solving the AI content detection problem?

There are basically 3 ways:

• Through technology. As of now, technology is not efficient enough to truly detect AI content. That will probably be quickly fixed.

• Through regulations. This is happening now worldwide, the most recent initiative being the No Fake Act (🔗Here) and the European initiative taken this past week regarding the Israël-Hamas conflict (🔗Here). But it won’t do miracles. Those who want to behave ethically with AI will always do so. The problem will be: what about those who don’t intend to use AI ethically? Will any law ever be able to track, find, and sanction them?

• Through private initiatives. Halfway through the 2 above, this one is right now the most efficient. Large brands like Google will invite private entities to behave AI ethically, especially during the coming Presidential election (🔗Here).

👉 At an individual level, this presents an opportunity for anyone to cultivate a personal brand. Keep reading to know why and how.

🧠 What does that mean for us, humble humans?

• AI content is threefold - Written, audio, and visual. Each of these content types faces significant threats from AI, whether through copywriting, plagiarism, fake news, bias, disinformation, or propaganda. These threats have given rise to an entirely new set of lexical fields that challenge the concept of “truth” as we once knew it. This includes phenomena like deep fakes, synthetic media, or voice cloning.

• AI Content is undetectable - It’s a fact verifiable multiple times. As of today, AI content is undetectable (🔗Here). AI experts like Ethan Mollick demonstrated it in many ways (🔗Here). Even OpenAI shut down recently its AI-written content detection tool (🔗Here) and is now trying to implement one in its visual content generation tools (Here). Each AI content detection tool works approximately the same way: they won’t detect what is meant by AI or not, but they will detect what might be authentically written by a human or not. Authentic is the opposite.

• Artificial v/s authentic - AI content detection tools, whether it’s for writing, audio, or video content, use human factors present or not present in the content, to determine whether or not it’s human or artificial. Your best bet is to be “you”.

• Truthful = Authentic = Trustful - Until today, the word truth is defined as “the body or real things, events, and facts”. Real things, events, and facts that we, as humans, can either see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. AI is affecting at least 2 of those human senses. Starting now, it won’t be that much about what you can see or hear; it will be about what you will trust, check, and to whom you will attribute.

👉 A great marketing opportunity for you: Establishing your own set of AI ethics rules for your brand (whether corporate or personal) in relation to your content creation is going to be a significant advantage. Keep reading to see where I’m going with this.

🎯 THE insight from LinkedIn

This post from Paul Roetzer - The rise of synthetic media is a predictable disaster because the average person will not be able to know whether what he/she will see online is real or not.

The short of it:

• Traditional media are not that much of a reliable source of information anymore. Whether it’s because they’re partial - No media is “neutral” anymore, and bias is everywhere - or because synthetic media are here to stay.

• Social media are unable (voluntarily or not) to control what is shared on their platform. They became a worldwide distribution channel - and to some extent the one motivation - for some terrorists around the world to create evil on earth, to create shareable content by taking pictures or videos of it and exporting it into every single home to spread terror, chaos, nightmares, traumas, and influence decisions.

Sources: Check the full post (🔗Here).

🧠 What does that mean for us, humble humans?

• Become your own “journalist” - In an AI-generated content era, traditional media are no longer an unquestionably reliable source of information. Here lies an opportunity for anyone to create their own reliable content. Reliable = authentic.

• Create authentic content - Your truth. Be bold. Be divisive. Be straightforward. Challenge the status quo. Make yourself accountable. Take responsibility for your opinion. Be so good that you’ll be the source of another content creator.

• Be truthful - Aka transparent. Share your sources. Request consent from your sources. Give them credit (always). Disclose how and when you used AI to create it. Medium’s CEO took those sorts of Guidelines for its own platform (🔗Here).

• Become obsessed with fact-checking - Claims need to be backed by citations. An initiative that was taken this past week by Wikipedia, which started using AI to improve verifiability (🔗Here). Traditional media are trying to do so too. Associated Press is using it widely these days regarding the Israël-Hamas situation (🔗Here). Their goal? to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online (🔗Here).

• Favor raw content - Raw? Raw content consists of unedited videos shot directly from a GoPro, captured spontaneously in a vlog-style format. ‘Raw content’ doesn’t imply a lack of forethought or research. Instead, it refers to live or unpolished content that doesn’t strive for excessive perfection, sophistication, or neatness. It’s clean, smart, yet casual.

• Keep control over social media - Not only through protecting your personal data but also by refraining from using social media both as a source to be informed, and as a way to spread your ideas.

• Distribute ultra-selectively - Save its very first distribution to a tight group of trusted and selected people that will serve as your first tribe, not only to spread it (or amplify it) but as to vouch for its authenticity and the accuracy of THE truth.

• Consistency as a component of Trust - To get people to trust your content, you’ll have to get them to trust you. We trust people who are consistently digging into their topic in the long run... We won’t trust those who will be skipping from one topic to another. Sprint v/s marathon. Your ability to do all of the above will depend on your ability to consistently stay focused on your topic.

🧩 AI Marketing Corner

Topic: Personal branding → Authenticity → Trust → The hierarchy of needs pyramid for creating authentic content.

🤗 1 tactic (from me):

Truth leads to trust. In an AI era, what is accurate is reliable.

Trust is at the core of any decent marketing strategy, and content creation is the only way to build trust - or to destroy it.

We are entering a new era of content creation.

The one in which AI will assist us to create better content than ever - but better will be different than what we know so far. We need to change our worldview of what is ‘good content’.

For your content to be considered authentic, it will need to cover some basic requirements for it to be trusted. Kind of a hierarchy of basic needs, like in the Maslow pyramids, applied to an AI content strategy framework.

Here is how I see it:

🛠 6 AI Content Detection tools

❌ Don’t use those tools to get a 100% accurate answer “yes” or “no” it’s AI or it’s not.

✅ Do use them as a set of clues that informs you about the level of authenticity of content, and thus, its credibility and the level of trust with which you can grant its author.

Here is a short list for you:

• Copyleaks - Mostly a plagiarism detection tool, it uses advanced algorithms to analyze text and identify similarities with other content on the web. They can detect AI-generated content in 30 languages with a claimed 0.2% false positive rate, which they claim is the lowest of any platform.

• Originality. ai - They argue that they can avoid AI content detector false positive and offers an API for integration with other tools and platforms.

• Writer. ai - A well-known in the AI-generating text space. It’s an AI-powered writing assistant that can help content creators generate high-quality content more quickly and efficiently. They also offer a content detection tool that can help you identify AI-generated content within an article.

• Content at scale - As the others, they’re not gonna tell you what is made by AI, they will provide you with a “human content score” that is a mix of “predictability, probability, and pattern” scores. Those scores tend to outline the reasoning behind the overall rating which is valuable.

• ZeroGPT -The one I tested more than the others. Here is a short video with my feedback and some fun tests made with the marketing leader Mark Schaefer and some of his big hits content 😉 (🔗Here).

• In 7 min my testing of GPTZero with

🤓 THE content that is worth your reading:

This insightful inquiry was made by Wired, retracing the story and evolution behind the creation of an AI-generated content tool, ZeroGPT

👉 The AI Content Detection Race is on (🔗Here).

“(…) It also previews a possible paradigm shift in how we relate to digital media.

The whole endeavor of detection suggests that humans leave an unmistakable signature in a piece of text—something perceptible—much the way that a lie detector presumes dishonesty leaves an objective trace. Provenance relies on something more like a “Made in America” label. If it weren’t for the label, we wouldn’t know the difference.

It’s a subtle but meaningful distinction: Human writing may not be better, or more creative, or even more original. But it will be human, which will matter to other humans.

Wired.

🟣 I’m Karine. I help you adapt your content strategy to AI Search and GEO through a masterclass and a community focused on AI marketing. The next session of my GEO masterclass in english will be in May. Want to join?

Join the waitlist

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📍THE news that needs your attention

Amazon announces $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic - to compete with Microsoft and Google in cloud AI space.

The short of it: In itself, the emphasis isn’t solely on Amazon’s development (even though it’s obviously a smart move). However, Amazon’s equity investment in Anthropic stands out, symbolizing the new phase of AI we are entering. This is occurring concurrently with the decline in ChatGPT usage and its integration into numerous apps and marketing software that we, as marketers, use daily. We are transitioning into the second phase of the AI era: the execution phase.

Source: (🔗 Here)

🧠 What does that mean for us, humble humans?

• We are entering a second phase of the AI era: The structuring of the AI market. As is typical, this structuring is occurring through mergers & acquisitions among big tech monopolies and major AI tech platforms. The hype around AI tools should start to subside, and the AI tools market will likely structure itself around three main trajectories: disappearance, merger & acquisition, or growth.

• AI Tools’ hype should slow down:

  • Disappearance: AI tools developed casually by tech enthusiasts on Sundays through GitHub may not endure long. 78% of GenAI start-ups are early-stage or haven’t raised any equity funding (🔗Here).

  • Mergers & acquisitions: The current AI leaders are poised to be absorbed by Big Tech. Clearly, Amazon’s investment in Anthropic is one of the most significant moves so far this year.

  • Growth: Some emerging contenders who succeed in fundraising might propel themselves to the forefront to become the next major players. The Generative AI software “Writers” which recently raised $100M Series B is one of the most recent examples of this trend (🔗Here).

• We, as marketers, are trapped: AI is being integrated ubiquitously within the MarTech ecosystem we operate in, including in marketing software, major tech platforms, and brands.

👉 I’ve compiled a list of the 63 common marketing platforms that most marketers use, which have already incorporated AI capabilities (🔗 Here).

• Marketers need to answer 2 questions:

  • Which aspects of their job will benefit the most from AI?

  • Once identified, what are the main tasks they need to undertake to integrate AI into their daily jobs?

👉 This boils down to one crucial question: How should they allocate their time between two main tasks: selecting the right AI tools and training to master their use?

🎯 THE insight from social networks

This post from Allie Miller - and incidentally, this provides a comprehensive breakdown of the topics and main questions executives should focus on to ‘transition to AI.’ If you can’t afford Allie’s courses, posing those questions to Perplexity.ai is a viable alternative. It will certainly teach you a lot as well ;).

The short of it: The AI Hype is leveling off. Now it’s about execution.

Sources: Check the full post (🔗 Here).

🧠 What does that mean for us, humble humans?

• Stats show a decline in ChatGPT. 29% down since this past May (🔗Here).

• Awareness of the benefits of Generative AI is being raised (🔗Here).

• Executives across various industries should prioritize integrating AI, treating its incorporation as a high-level priority, akin to a ‘board of directors’ decision. However, this execution is hindered as budgets have yet to accommodate this shift and transition (🔗Here).

💡 A Sample Framework to Help You Integrate AI :

In any business, transitioning to AI involves brainstorming and restructuring around the idea of adopting AI. Just as we once worked on digital transformation when the internet truly became significant, businesses today need to organize and make the shift to AI.

This is the approach I use to assist digital marketing agencies implementing AI within their organization:

• Establish an ‘AI Task Force’ or a ‘Think AI’ committee: Typically consisting of at least two individuals who have an interest in and/or some background in AI. At some point, anticipate the growing need to hire or appoint a ‘Head of AI‘ or a ‘Head of AI Marketing‘...

• Prompting Library: After identifying the aspects of your business and the related tasks that can be optimized by GenAI, creating a dedicated prompt resource center for the company is now essential. This goes hand in hand with training on prompting. At least one person within the company must become the ‘prompt person.’

• AI Tools Observatories and/or R&D for AI Software Acquisition: Testing and learning about AI tools should be a priority for at least one or two individuals within the business. It might be wise to consider acquiring 1 or some AI tools that enable the scaling of major tasks.

• GenAI Guidelines & Principles: Consider how you and your team use Generative AI responsibly. Establish what is permissible and what is not. These considerations need to be addressed upfront, and everyone in the company needs to be on the same page.

• Becoming an Ethical AI Company: Reflect on what it means for your business to be ‘AI-Ethical.’ This AI code of conduct should be integrated into your overall Terms and Conditions and should be upheld by your team.

• Secure Your Data/Content from AI: Those in AI leadership must consider and explore ways to protect your data and content. Exploring blockchain capabilities could be one of those ways.

• Create Your Community: Primarily within your business, at least to start. This AI team cannot operate in isolation. An intra-community should serve as the cement, connecting and disseminating all the AI research, testing, brainstorming, and implementation among each member.

🧩 AI Marketing Corner

Topic: Adapt + Focus + Practice… and MASTER!

🤗 1 tactic (from me):

Roll up your sleeves and based on what you’re doing the most at your job, start training yourself to truly MASTER the few platforms you’re currently using the most after having identified their new AI features.

To save you some time, here is a short list of the new features I’ve identified in some of the most commonly used marketing software.

🛠 THE Marketing + AI tool you should master for your marketing:

Practice what you preach.

Instead of spending hours testing new random tools (which, let’s be honest, are listed in nearly every basic AI news curation newsletter out there) I’ve adapted to the trend I’m discussing in this issue and shifted my focus to deliver deeper into certain commonly used tools AND some emerging ones that are clearly gaining wide adoption.

New AI features in:

• Canva - They have integrated several AI-powered features to improve the design workflow and make it more approachable for users. Here are some of my favorites. Using it daily now. Some are an absolute breeze to use.

  • AI Image Generators: Gives you several AI image generators, including Text to Image, DALL·E by Open AI, and Imagen by Google Cloud, that allow you to create unique images from a simple text description

  • Magic Write: AI text generator and writer that allows you to brainstorm, generate short-form and long-form text, expand writing, and create outlines.

  • Magic Design: Their free online AI design tool offers drag-and-drop design tools to create any design quickly. For me, who sucks at design, this one saved me hours of work (and $$).

  • AI-Powered Templates: Cool features too. It uses machine learning to suggest design elements and layouts based on your content.

  • Background Remover: This allows you to remove the background from an image automatically. SOOO useful.

  • Color Palette Generator: Suggests color palettes based on your branding and content.

  • Font Pairing Suggestions: Suggest font pairings based on your content.

  • Photo Straightener: Automatically straightens crooked photos. Life saver…

  • Image Cropper: Suggest the best crop for an image based on your content.

  • Design Element Suggestions: Suggest design elements based on your content.

New crazy features in some widely used tools:

• Spotify - just announced a new AI feature: a new AI-powered translation and speech generation pilot for podcasts. A partnership with OpenAI will let podcasters replicate their voices to automatically create foreign versions of their show. They will replicate (🔗Here).

My favorite one was discovered thanks to my dear friend Scott Scowcroft:

• Castmagic - A pure gem. Just download your video. Click on the “AI Content” tab and let the magic (for real!) happen:

  Get in a few seconds ideas of titles, a list of main keywords, speakers bios, introduction, timestamped overview, main questions asked, key topics and sub-topics, a clip-finder that gives you quotes and hooks, Reel scripts, Twitter threads ready to use, LinkedIn posts, Newsletter, and Threads for Instagram. An absolute social media manager’s dream coming true (🔗 Here).

📝 THE Generative AI landscape

There are many landscapes out there that offer a vision of the most important tools to be used daily.

My issue with most of them is that they seem to be based on the fees the content creators received to promote some of them. I tend to think that the most “objective” ones are those based on the level of funding they’ve received. Based on this idea, I find this landscape of the top 250 Generative AI start-ups, updated as of today from Dealroom.co, to be pretty cool.

👉 The +250 Generative AI Landscape from DealRoom co (🔗 Here).

🎙 THE podcast episode worth listening to:

This episode from Gartner 👉The AI Hype cycle 2023: Generative AI reaches the peak of inflated expectations (🔗 Here).

“With so much chatter about generative AI, some early adopters may have already moved beyond the peak of inflated expectations and the next phase of the hype cycle…. This cycle begins with the technology trigger of some kinds of something that people start paying attention to, and then all of a sudden, there’s galvanized attention, a very steep slope up to what is called the peak of inflated expectations. That’s the point where this technology is. Everything can do everything, solves all the problems that we’ve ever seen. And then you start to get a bit of a dose of reality, and what happens after the peak of inflated expectations is you then hit the trough of rough disillusionment.

Afraz Jaffri - Director Analyst, Gartner.

🎁 THE LinkedIn Live Episode about Google SGE

I host a Monthly LinkedIn Live with Andy Crestodina. This past week, we discussed with 2 top SEO experts who are literally testing Google SGE on a daily basis: Eli Schwartz and Wil Reynolds.

The main topic of this amazing conversation: how will we optimize content to “rank”/”appear” in Google SGE results?

👉 Some (awesome) answers (🔗 here).

👋 Welcome to the AI Content Strategist

I’m obsessed with how AI changes Search, Content, and marketing. I do believe that AI is no longer optional for content strategists. This newsletter is your guide to leveraging it effectively. Thanks for being a part of this journey with me!

Join the waitlist

I’m obsessed with how AI changes Search, Content, and marketing. I do believe that AI is no longer optional for content strategists. This newsletter is your guide to leveraging it effectively. Thanks for being a part of this journey with me!

Subscribe now

📍THE news that needs your attention

AAlphabet 2023 - Q2 Earnings Call from July 25th, 2023. With Sundar Pichai, Philipp Schmidt, and Ruth Porat.

The short of it: Google reminds its shareholders that they are in their seventh year as an “AI-first company” and emphasizes its continued leadership in AI and excitement about the evolution of Search. This evolution is characterized by Google Search Generative Experience (“SGE”).

During the call, someone at Morgan Stanley asked Sundar Pichaï “How does he think about the timing for more broadly integrating generative AI into Search?”

Sundar Pichai’s answer was crystal clear:

“We’ve constantly been bringing in AI innovations into Search for the past few years. And this is the next step in the journey. But it is a big change (...) it really gives us a chance to no longer be constrained in the way search was working before, allowing us to think outside the box. And so you will see us continue to bring it to more and more users, and over time, this will just be how search works. While we are taking deliberate steps, we are building the next major evolution in Search.

Sundar Pichaï

A few days later, on August 4th, after several months of beta testing with a select number of SEO experts since their Google I/O event, Google opened its new Search Product, the Search Generative Experience, to anyone in the United States with a Gmail account (🔗 here).

SGE is here to stay.

🔎 Few takeaways to keep in mind:

• Google as an “AI-First Company” …: On Nov. 30th, 2022, OpenAI essentially stole Google’s thunder on the broader “AI topic.” Not only did they offer the first serious alternative to search in the past 20 years of Google’s dominance, but they also took a pioneering stance on the topic of “AI open to everyone” (aka AI in Open Source).

  These “two legs”- “Chat” from a user’s standpoint and “Open Source” from a developer’s standpoint—are now shaky, and Google intends to address that ASAP. It’s likely no coincidence that Sergei Brin has returned to Google’s business operations to work on Gemini, which is presented as Google’s own groundbreaking LLM (🔗 here).

• Making “AI helpful to everyone”: Google established 4 strategies to implement this “vision” (e.i, to win the AI + Chat war). In other words, 4 battlefronts.

1. Product Enhancement: They’re integrating AI into all of their products, starting with a focus on Search.

2. Fostering Creativity and Productivity: They’re venturing into conversational AI with “Bard” to compete against tools like ChatGPT, Claude 2, Perplexity AI, and Lama2.

3. Facilitating AI Innovation: By leveraging Google Cloud’s advanced infrastructure for AI, they aim to empower developers and reclaim the lead in the open-source space, challenging platforms like Hugging Face and GitHub (remember the “we have no moats” story - 🔗 here).

4. Ethical AI Development: Google partners with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft on the Frontier Model Forum to champion responsible AI practices, marketing themselves as the web’s most ethically conscientious data scraper 🙄…(🔗 Here).

• Incorporating AI into all their products … especially in Search: Google will NOT leave the playing field open for OpenAI and its “Chat”. Google intends to remain the gateway to the internet: “SGE is conceived as a new experience, another jumping off point for exploring the web. Period.

Sources: Listen to the YouTube video (🔗 here).

🧠 What does that mean for us, humble humans?

Google is navigating a fine balance, striving to both maintain Search as the primary gateway to the internet and introduce a Chat feature that bridges “them” with us.

👉 Name it: Google Search Generative Experience.

Google calls SGE, “Search supercharged” (supercharged by generative AI). What does that mean? A few important things:

• AI-generated mashed-up content: SGE results pages are now officially made of amalgamated content.

• Google’s own answer: When you “Google” something, instead of a single link to a website page that likely answers your query, Google now presents an answer, its own answer. Pretty well summarized by Joe Pulizzi (🔗here).

• Citation or no citation? This answer will be made of mashed-up content, compiled from different web pages and sources Google is scraping (the entire idea of Generative AI), but those sources no longer need to be cited, nor will Google probably cite them. The current testing of SGE shows that sometimes they do cite something they don’t (🔗here).

• So what’s the BIG change? Instead of using AI to improve their Search Engine to better detect our search intent and provide us with the best link to the page that will answer our query, they are now merging Generative AI into their Search Engine to provide us with their own answer.

• Top-of-the-funnel content is no longer a brand opportunity: Google will now be taking it for itself, leaving SEO to mid-funnel. That means your content should focus mostly on 2 things: your personal brand, even if you’re an employee, AND your process, your best practices, your methodology, your “own stuff” - whatever makes you different in the way you do your job.

Conclusion: Bad and good news.

The bad one: SEOs and content marketers who keep having as a marketing goal to generate traffic through backlinks to a page optimized around keywords will have to rethink their job.

The good one: Those “answers” could contain your brand… And actually, when they do, the visibility offered at the top of SERPs is pretty outstanding. Kind of like online billboard visibility on top of Google Results.

🎯 THE insight from LinkedIn

This (as always) deliciously bright post from Ethan Mollick.

The short of it: “Too many organizations think that having LLMs work with their data is the key to making AI valuable. And so they build chatbots that can answer questions about previous work, like some sort of internal Google Search (…). The real key is finding prompting approaches that let AI leverage their best practices.

Sources: Check the full post (🔗 here).

What does that mean for us, humble humans?

Connect Ethan Mollick’s post with the rise of SGE and think of the following:

• Your unique value proposition: If web content associating your brand with your main topic is widespread, Google will prominently feature you in their AI-Generated answers and allocate significant space for you in their “AI-Generated box”. Ask yourself: how can you achieve “widespread” recognition in an AI-relevant way? How do you plan to leverage AI to provide unique value to your customers based on your “only I”?

• Think processes, methodologies, framework: To make sense of this, meditate on how AI can enhance or scale the methodologies, processes, and unique positioning that genuinely define you, not just the content that claims so. Will you use AI in the same ways that many others are increasingly adopting, like creating a chatbot that acts as a personal Google search? Or will you use AI to enhance your processes, methodologies, and unique value propositions, and then create content that reflects those personal-branded values as Kahn Academy did?

• Create content about this and repurpose it like crazy. Search, supercharged by AI, pushes SEO to be more social than ever. It’s now a fact. The good news is that AI is making it easier than ever to repurpose content for all social media platforms. Make good use of it.

• Replace SEO with AIO: Artificial Intelligence Optimization. Get used to it… We are creating content to now be optimized for artificial intelligence mostly: a new kind of Search Engine supercharged by AI. And with Google being more powerful than ever, you’ll probably won’t be able to avoid it (🔗 here).

💡 Some examples and ideas to do that:

• AI Personal Assistant: Use AI to create your personal assistant and market it. The hype around this idea of a personal assistant is far from being abandoned. I already talked about it (🔗 here). It’s actually hotter than ever and easier and easier to get your own.

• Avatar: Create an avatar for “him/her” or him/her and you as a team.

• “Content about your AI-processes”: Use AI to help you set up processes you imagine and create content about it.

Example: Andy Crestodina is doing a fantastic job at exactly this. He wrote one of the most famous books about Content Marketing and he is revisiting each of the tactics he developed in his books by using AI. Doing so, he is creating new processes and methodologies for very traditional digital marketing tactics like this incredible post about “AI-powered web page audit and optimization: SEO and conversion in 8 prompts” (🔗 here).

• Personal branding: Focus on building your personal brand. Whether you’re an employee or not, it shouldn’t prevent you from doing so. It’s actually the opposite.

Example: Amanda Natividad did just that while being an employee at Sparktoro, Rand Fishkin’s new start-up. And guess what? She created great content about it (🔗 here).

🧩 AI Marketing Corner

Topic: Personal branding, AI-personal assistant, Avatars

🤗 THE tactic (from me):

Don’t mix up the good AI and the bad one 😉.

Don’t use AI to create “Average Informative” content about your product (BAD AI). Use AI to demonstrate how “Awesomely Innovative” you are in whatever it is you are doing for a living, and in the processes you imagined to be good at it (GOOD AI).

• Be sure of your topic. List your subtopics.

• Pick one, focus like hell on it, and master it like no one else.

• Create your “speech/process/methods” on it.

• Market it like crazy everywhere.

• Find the right AI tools to help you both automatize the process and/or create a personal assistant for it.

Few AI tools to help you test that 👇👇.

🛠 4 AI tools for your marketing:

Some ideas of tools to help you test and try what’s described above

• Doppl- Create your own personal digital Artefact. It helps you create the most accurate AI simulation of you. Didn’t test it yet. On the waitlist. But definitely a must-try (🔗 here).

• FineTuner.ai- Platform to help you build AI Agents at Scale with no coding skills. An all-in-one solution to build sophisticated AI agents, fast-tracking your path to market, and scaling your intelligent solutions without any coding (🔗 here)

• AskGenie- Create your own ChatGPT agent trained on your own data (🔗 here).

• Avaturn– Turn people into realistic avatars (🔗 here).

📝 THE content that is worth your reading

This article from Venture Beat, featuring an interview with the Analyst and Start-up investor, Jeremiah Owyang: Forget SEO, why AI Engine Optimization might be the future (🔗 here).

“Unlike SEO, AI Engine Optimization is not about waiting for a crawler to come to a website. Now, marketers will likely want two things (…): One is to create an API that feeds in real-time information to foundational models.

Secondly, marketers will want to take the same corporate API with all of its product information and use it to train its own branded AI that would interact with consumers and buyers, whether that’s on a website or an app. (…) That would also interact with the buyer side agents that are starting to emerge”.

Jeremiah Owyang

THE LinkedIn Live event you don’t want to miss!!

To talk about all the major changes coming with Google SGE, I partnered with Andy Crestodina to launch monthly Live Discussions. Each month, we will be hosting live discussions with SEO and Content Marketers experts.

This coming August 28th, we are hosting a fantastic panel with Aleyda Solís and Barry Schwartz.

🟣 I’m Karine. I help you adapt your content strategy to AI Search and GEO through a masterclass and a community focused on AI marketing. The next session of my GEO masterclass in english will be in May. Want to join?

Join the waitlist

I’m obsessed with how AI changes Search, Content, and marketing. I do believe that AI is no longer optional for content strategists. This newsletter is your guide to leveraging it effectively. Thanks for being a part of this journey with me!

Subscribe now

📍THE news that needs your attention

Actually… 2 pieces of news this week – that you may want to read together.

• An article from the NYT displaying that the comedian Sarah Silverman has joined a class-action lawsuit against Open AI (and Meta) accusing the companies of training their A.I. models using her writing without her permission.

• A post from Gizmodo spotted the recent update from Google on its privacy policy to disclose that its AI services (Bard, Cloud AI & others) may be trained on public data that the company has scraped from the web.

The short of it: Generative AI is going to be the center of the largest and longest ongoing copyright trial of the century. And it just getting started…

“Our privacy policy has long been transparent that Google uses publicly available information from the open web to train language models for services like Google Translate. This latest update simply clarifies that newer services like Bard are also included” says Christa Muldoon, Google’s spokesperson”.

(…)

This is an unusual clause for a privacy policy.

Typically, these policies describe ways that a business uses the information that you post on the company’s own services.

Here, it seems Google reserves the right to harvest and harness data posted on any part of the public web as if the whole internet is the company’s own AI playground.

Sources: Read the NYT article (🔗 here) and the post from Gizmodo (🔗 here) - and for the pictures (🔗 here) too.

🧠 What does that mean for us, humble humans?

• AI-Generated Garbage Content. Whoever wins the Chat v/s Search war, the internet is becoming saturated by AI-generated content. What will happen when all the next generation of content is fully made of AI-generated garbage content?

  More and more content is scraped to expand the level of content and data tthat hose bots are trained on. Just as an example, not later than this past week, OpenAI partnered with Reuters to train ChatGPT on their data … (🔗 here).

• Chat is slowly getting over Search. OpenAI’s present and future competitors are flourishing: Google’s Bard updated last week, Perplexity.ai, now Anthropic’s Claude, and soon the French Mistral.ai. To name just a few “big ones”.

• Copyright lawsuits will multiply like hotcakes. But no matter their number and publicity, they won’t prevent the upcoming wave. And in any case, it will take a lot of time before these proceedings lead to effective regulations.

• What should you focus on? Creating content to install your topical authority and become known (also) outside of Search engines or even ChatBots.

On your “content creation” TO-DO-LIST:

Focus on insights – not information. Google calls it information gain and even filed a patent on what they named “information gain score” (🔗 here) , a concept discovered by Bill Slawski (🔗 here).

Consider content as a commodity, so focus on content that will provide your audience with an experience - yours!

Focus your content creation efforts on 1 special type of content that AI can’t compete with you on – at least for now - And just keep reading this to know which one it is 😉.

🎯 THE insight from LinkedIn

This video from Rand Fishkin.

The short of it: “This is what tons of marketers will need to do: associate their brand with topics and concepts all across the web so that the LLM picks them up and so Search Results include them”.

Sources: Check the full post (🔗 here).

What does that mean for us, humble humans?

AI-Generated content is not AI-assisted content.

• AI-generated content will kill “Search Content”: Some types of content will soon not be worth the effort anymore: listicles, ranking, how-to content, etc. Those are easy content for AI to reproduce. Will Wikipedia still exist in a few years…?

• AI-assisted content can help you create better-quality content: Quality content is your differentiating factor.

• Topical authority should be your obsession! Forget topical authority for SERPs. Create content to build topical authority on your niche to become known and build trust under your name/your brand’s name.

• Focus on thought-leadership content.

🧩 AI Marketing Corner

Topic: Thought leadership content

🤗 THE tactic (from me):

What are the main features of thought leadership content? It’s a type of content that showcases your unique expertise and perspective through the following elements:

• Your creativity/ideas (your brain),

• Your story (owned lived experience),

• Your personal assumptions and opinions (analyze the status quo and challenge it in your own way),

  • The personal context you can add to some data in your industry,

• Your network (adding expert quotes within your content),

1 type of content cumulates all those advantages: Original Research Content focused on market research.

🛠 5 AI tools for your marketing:

Tools to do market research, primary research, and collect insights:

• GapScout - Helps you identify gaps in your industry and identify emerging trends by providing you with data mining Reviews from Amazon, Capterra, G2, Trustpilot, and WordPress Plugin Repo. (🔗 Here).

• OpinioAI – A research platform that uses AI language models to help researchers source relevant insights, data, and opinions through creating a conversation with your personas (that the tool helps you create). They aimed at offering an alternative to costly polls, surveys, and interviews. You can make several tests for free. I tested it. Offers decent results for a very first draft. Not yet at its full potential, and should be compared with a thorough use of ChatGPT + with the right prompts. (🔗 Here).

• Narrative BI – A generative analytics platform that automatically turns raw data into actionable narratives. You can connect it with no code to Google Analytics4, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and soon HubSpot. Once connected, it generates a feed of personalized data narratives and notifies you about the anomalies and unusual patterns in your data. And you can receive them automatically on Slack… (🔗 Here).

• Notably - When used for Market Research, it helps identify consumers’ underlying needs and preferences. Especially, it helps with conducting focus groups and analyzing group sentiment to determine the viability of a new service or product. Works also for Focus groups, In-depth interviews, survey responses, and competitive analysis. (🔗 Here).

• Remesh – Helps you organize and lead online focus groups at scale, interact with them through real-time conversation via their platform, and generate automatic reports with all insights and data based on the surveys. It allows you to organize your participants into custom segments anytime before, during, and after a conversation (🔗Here).

📝 THE tutorial to understand ChatGPT Code Interpreter

ChatGPT Code Interpreter is THE hottest news of the past few days.

This video wraps up the top 10 things you can do with it and how to do it in less than 13 minutes, including, guess what… the ability to analyze data with just a few clicks AND even make predictions 😉 (🔗 Here).

👩🏻‍🎓THE cohort course that is worth your attention (and your $$?)

This Maven Course “Original Research Masterclass for Content Marketers” (🔗 here).

A Cohort-based course to learn exactly how to incorporate original research into your marketing strategy (…). Research is a proven tactic to increase traffic, backlinks, social mentions, earned media, and thought leadership.

Amber Erickson.

🟣 I’m Karine. I help you adapt your content strategy to AI Search and GEO through a masterclass and a community focused on AI marketing. The next session of my GEO masterclass in english will be in May. Want to join?

Join the waitlist

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📍THE news that needs your attention

This research from The Verge, Vox Media, and the research consultancy firm The Circus polled more than 2,000 Americans on their thoughts, feelings, and fears about AI.

The short of it: On the surface, the AI Paradox seems obvious - it arises from the simultaneous recognition of AI’s immense benefits and the challenges it presents. A closer look reveals a more nuanced reality.

AI offers vast perspectives - and an overwhelming presence:

• AI Appears to be literally everywhere: in our daily Apps, in the news, and in the constant media discussions.

• AI is scary: Nearly 75% of people believe that AI will have a tremendous impact on our society, both in dramatic ways (38% agree that AI could wipe out humanity) and in improbable ways (56% believe people will develop emotional relationships with AI 🤔, and 64% do not oppose the production of sentient AI 😳).

• AI will be big: The AI market, on a larger scale, is poised to become the largest market growth ever recorded.

• AI is not yet fully here: BUT… as of today, the reality is that the number of people who have actually tested AI is extremely low: 58% of U.S adults are familiar with ChatGPT, but only 14% of them have used it.

Sources: Read the full post (🔗 here) and other stats (🔗 here).

🧠 What does that mean for us, humble humans?

Most of us are currently experiencing a double AI fear:

• The fear of the end of the world (in short: AI will ultimately destroy humanity)

• The fear of the end of the month (in short: AI tools will replace us and we will all soon be out of jobs).

Both fears paralyze us.

Food for thoughts to overcome this:

• We’re scared of what we don’t know. We don’t know what we don’t use. Taking action is the best solution to overcome fear.

• As explained in The Verge’s research, the gap between the fear of the “AI unknown” and the lack of “AI practice” is characterized by AI tools, especially the generative ones that can create content almost by themselves (and without us!).

• Nobody really knows what an AI tool is. However, we can distinguish between AI integrated into the daily apps we use without even noticing it (Amazon, Google, Photoshop, Hubspot, etc.) and the new AI tools hype that has emerged since ChatGPT was released as open source.

• Nothing we’re currently experiencing is entirely new. In fact, it’s pretty common in the technology landscape. In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore studies how tech products move through the product adoption curve (innovators, early adopters, etc.). With AI tools, we’re just at the beginning of this curve.

• These AI tools are booming, just like during the internet bubble at the very beginning of Web 2.0. We will soon enter a “correction period” like in the stock market (cf. the post below from a top expert on that topic).

On your TO-DO-LIST: Overcome your fear. Take action. Try a selection of targeted AI tools. Rethink your content creation workflow based on your testing. And just keep reading this newsletter to get 1 marketing tactic to start with 😉.

🎯 THE insight from social networks

Read carefully this (reassuring) post from the a16z superstar of Tech & Content-related start-up, Andrew Chen.

The short of it: “The abundance of new AI apps creates excitement, but eventually, the party will end”.

Sources: Check the full post (🔗 here).

What does that mean for us, humble humans?

From an investor’s standpoint, Andrew Chen’s recommendations make sense: Developing an AI App is one thing. Focusing on retention and low churn is another, but compulsory, one for sustainable growth.

Now, from a marketer’s standpoint and based on months of testing numerous AI Tools on a weekly basis, those observations might help you cut through the AI tool’s noise and quickly choose the one relevant to your marketing tasks.

• Pro v/s random: Making the difference between the well-thought-out and improved AI tools that required a bunch of engineering skills (and money!) v/s the one developed on a Saturday night by an AI geek excited to make some experiments with ChatGPT on Github is pretty fast - and easy.

• Pricing: While testing them, you’ll quickly discontinue using the AI tools that become excessively expensive with very low Return On Investment (ROI) compared to the others. Some are simply not worth the money.

• AI communities: By following certain AI Influencers on social media and joining specific AI groups and communities, within a few weeks, you’ll quickly be able to identify the few % of AI tools that are frequently mentioned. These are usually the ones (backed with seed money or VC’s money) that have been tested and “approved” by the community, in contrast to those that are mentioned only once, often without being genuinely tested, and are likely to disappear quickly.

Want to identify which AI influencers and AI communities to follow? Check out my AI wiki (🔗 here).

🧩 AI Marketing Corner

Topic: Video Content

🤗 THE tactic (from me):

• Pick the 1 content format that you’re working on the most on a daily basis. Let’s take video content as an example.

• Pick 1 AI tool marketplace (platform) friendly enough for you (keep reading).

• Allocated just 1 hour to make a selection of the ones that seem the most relevant…

• … or try the one I’ve tested for you (below):

🛠 5 AI tools for your marketing:

AI-powered video creation tools:

• WaveVideo - Live streaming studio, video editor, thumbnail maker, video hosting, video recording, and stock library combined in one platform (🔗 Here).

• Designs.ai - Create logos, videos, banners, and mockups with AI in 2 min (🔗 Here).

• Wowto.ai - Create “how-to” videos in a few clicks. (🔗 Here).

• Reachout.ai - Create a new way for email prospecting: Video prospecting. A video personalization platform where you can offer your product through video and email (🔗 Here).

• y2mate. com - To help you download audio and video from YouTube. This tool is my favorite one to get the written transcript of a YouTube video I found relevant (🔗Here).

📝 THE AI Marketplace:

Among the ones I like the most: The AI Marketing Directory (🔗 Here).

🤓 THE content worth your reading:

This essay, from Shelly Palmer (🔗 here).

“With generative AI, the traditional demarcations between roles like “strategist”, “copywriter”, or “data analyst” start to blur. Everyone in the team interacts with the AI, guides it, and uses its output. This changes the dynamic of the team and how it functions”.

Shelly Palmer.

Share the newsletter

🎁 THE solution to get rid of your AI fear!!!!

Subscribe to my (free) webinar to dive deep into AI marketing. In 30 min, you’ll get:

• 🧩 The fundamentals of AI and its main concepts

• 🧩 The basics of ChatGPT and prompting

• 🧩 Access to a selection of real-world use cases for AI in marketing

• 🧩 The full list of all the marketing tasks AI can help you achieve

• 🧩 A selection of top AI Marketing resources: top prompts guides, Prompt marketplace, AI newsletters, AI tools directories, AI communities, AI influencers, top reports, and blog posts

• 🧩 A focus on the main actions you can take now, to anticipate the coming shift from SEO to SGE (Search Generative Experience)

• 🧩 A selection of the most relevant AI Tools you can immediately use to get started with AI

🟣 I’m Karine. I help you adapt your content strategy to AI Search and GEO through a masterclass and a community focused on AI marketing. The next session of my GEO masterclass in english will be in May. Want to join?

Join the waitlist

I’m obsessed with how AI changes Search, Content, and marketing. I do believe that AI is no longer optional for content strategists. This newsletter is your guide to leveraging it effectively. Thanks for being a part of this journey with me!

Subscribe now

📍THE news that needs your attention

This post from Search Engine Lands blog refers to an interview with Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of DeepMind (bought by Google in 2014 and which is now officially Google AI Labs).

The short of it: For the past 20 years, we’ve learned to “speak Google”. Over the next 10 years, we will learn to “Speak to AI”.

“Google will look much different in 2033, where conversation is the interface rather than the Search box. ChatGPT, the new Bing, and Google’s new Search Generative Experience are all huge signals of a major shift in Search.

Nothing will change immediately, but in the coming years, these changes could potentiallly upend the way Google - as the dominant search engine - has shaped the web and, as a byproduct, SEO and PPC.

We’ve learned to speak Google. Now that’s over. That moment is done, and we can now talk to computers in fluent natural language and that is the new interface.

It’s not going to happen overnight. There is going to be a transition. But these kinds of succinct, dynamic, personalized, interactive moments are clearly the future.

Mustafa Suleyman - Co-founder @Google DeepMind.

Sources: Read the full post (and listen to the full interview) (🔗 here).

🧠 What does that mean for us, humble humans?

Over the pasts months, I often summarized the major shift AI was bringing in our lives in 1 sentence: The shift from Search to Chat (here).

The next step is happening right now: the shift from SEO to SGE (Search Generative Experience).

During Google I/O we learned that SGE will:

• Unlock new types of user questions, bringing a much deeper and more personalized experience.

• Enable anyone to understand a topic deeper, uncovering new viewpoints faster, by providing them with an AI-Powered snapshot of key information to consider.

• Help us understand the full picture when we’re shopping by providing a snapshot of noteworthy factors to consider.

One of the most significant updates to Search includes integrating a “Perspective” feature highlighting especially long-form videos, images, and posts offering users diverse viewpoints.

SGE is currently being experienced and gradually deployed within the US right now.

The actual experience of SGE seems quite different from what was announced by some beta testers (check Ross Hudgens (🔗 here) and Julia McCoy’s (🔗 here) take on that) but one way or another, and even though Users don’t enjoy SGE so much, Google won’t give up anytime soon (remember Google +… It took 9 years to Google to push the off button).

So. What should you do with that?

Many things.

Getting an “SEO/SGE plan” is certainly one of those (more on that in the next coming issues of this newsletter).

Here is another one: go all in into visual content.

🎯 THE insight from social networks

A mindblowing, meaningful, and fun experiment with AI integrated with Adobe Photoshop.

The short of it: The pasts few weeks in AI news have been pretty busy on that side. And AI Tools for design and visual content creation are booming. Visual content has never been that easy to create. Just go for it 😉.

Sources: Check the full video (🔗 here).

What does that mean for us, humble humans?

One of the main abilities of AI tools is to enable you to go from text content to pretty much any visual format you might want: Text-to 3D, Character, Image, Slide, Vector, Image, etc.

AI can capture the visuals of lots of brands and spread your ideas in an outstanding visual way:

• Car brands can be associated with an animal in a stunning way(🔗 here).

• Gen AI is even now being used to create hyper-customized QRCode by using Stable Diffusion and ControlNET. You can now turn functional QR Codes into beautiful images (🔗 here).

• Tools like Runway, you can also create in a few minutes mindblowing generative videos (🔗 here).

• An entire shopping experience can be created in 3D, even for brands like Louis Vuitton… (🔗 here).

Go visual!!

🧩 AI Marketing Corner

Topic: Visual Content (all forms)

🤗 THE tactic (from me):

Start with audio (recording your content). Transcribe the audio into written content. Turn the written content into 1 visual content format mainly (images, 2D, 3D, videos, etc.). And scale.

🛠 5 AI tools for your marketing:

Besides Runway and Adobe Photoshop integrating AI, here are other tools to help you do that.

• DragGAN- A photo editor that will let you change outfits, rotate your head, resize a car, or alter your facial expression, without the need to learn a complicated App. Developed by some MIT Students recently and already a big hit. (🔗 Here).

• Thoth - AI-Powered infographics. Turn any text into 1-page infographics in literally 1 minute (🔗 Here).

• StockIMG.ai - Stock photos are dead (or at least, should be completely out of your content marketing strategy). But StockIMG ai offers you AI-generated stock images. Worth a try. (🔗 Here).

• Miro - Your Team’s visual platform. Help you turn your ideas into visual content to share with your team (🔗 Here).

• Prezi - To create inspiring slides and presentations (🔗 Here).

📝 THE Tutorial:

Prompting on mid-journey might seem like a big deal. Apparently, it’s not (🔗 Here). But just in case it’s still … :

This Mid-Journey Paramater Cheat Sheet should be helpful (🔗Here).

🤓 THE content worth your reading:

A massive curation post with tons of resources from a16z, mostly for Techies, but with a nice paragraph dedicated to Image Generation Model - AI Canon (🔗here).

🟣 I’m Karine. I help you adapt your content strategy to AI Search and GEO through a masterclass and a community focused on AI marketing. The next session of my GEO masterclass in english will be in May. Want to join?

Join the waitlist

I’m obsessed with how AI changes Search, Content, and marketing. I do believe that AI is no longer optional for content strategists. This newsletter is your guide to leveraging it effectively. Thanks for being a part of this journey with me!

Subscribe now

📍THE news that needs your attention

This blog post from Goldman Sachs’s blog refers to a conversation between Bill Gates and Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison at a Goldman Sachs conference in San Francisco.

The short of it: Autonomous Agent will kill Google and Amazon.

“There will be one company that creates a personal agent that will understand all your activities and will read your messages. It will read the stuff you don’t have time to read.

(…) That’s a big thing because you’ll never go to a search site again. You’ll never go to a productivity tool again. You’ll never go to Amazon again. Everything will be mediated through your agent”.

Bill Gates.

Sources: Read the full post (🔗 here).

🧠 What does that mean for us, humble humans?

Autonomous Agents (AI agents) are the next big thing.

All those large companies - Apple this past month, but also Verizon, Samsung, Bank Of America, etc. who decided to restrict the use of ChatGPT in their companies are all the ones that are most probably currently working on creating their own AI agent. If you don’t believe me, check this post from Allie Miller (🔗 here) 😉.

You might not be able to do that, at least right now.

That said, the road to AI Agents is still long and will be paved with many milestones, some of which are set to be real tsunamis. The first of these will be the transition from Search to Chat.

That, you have the ability to anticipate and get ready for.

🎯 THE insight from social networks

This post from Eli Schwartz is about the impact of SGE and what you can do right now to get ready for it.

The short of it: Yesterday, Google released access to a few SEO professionals to experience the very first version of SGE. The feedbacks so far are not great. But it’s the beginning of a new SEO Era…

This-is-happening-now.

Sources: Read the full post (🔗 here).

What does that mean for us, humble humans?

Prepare for the SEO Hurricane. As Eli recommends in his post:

• Don’t avoid the conversation. Talk about it with your team.

• Traffic will decrease inevitably. Adjust your plan, and review your goals & KPIs.

• Diversify. Aim at different goals on other platforms.

• Train, read, and stay updated.

Reading this newsletter is a good start to doing that 😉.

🧩 AI Marketing Corner

Topic: Content Repurposing

🤗 THE tactic (from me):

Now is the time to consider content repurposing not only as part of your distribution strategy but as part of your core content strategy itself.

Here are a few things to consider:

• Go all in for very long-form content (anyone who has more than 50 episodes of a podcast, YouTube show, or blog posts has a gold mine).

• Any content format will be fine. AI tools enable you to do almost anything you want (written to audio, video to text, audio from video). The sky is truly the limit. So just go with your own flow.

• Create exceptionally unique content (more than ever)

• Continue to think about your website as a master topic cluster

• Continue to think about your website as the main home for your content

• But, adjust your goals: so far, ranking on Google on X or Y keywords was always one of the mandatory steps or goals of any content strategy. It can still be, but equally with other goals on other platforms.

• Repurpose A LOT in every possible format for as many platforms as possible.

🛠 5 AI tools for your marketing:

Tools to help you do that.

• Go Charlie - Turn your videos into summaries, rewrite, and summarize the content. It can also create images from text descriptions and turn images into Alt Text (🔗 Here).

• Mixo - Launch a start-up in a second with AI. The AI-powered builder helps entrepreneurs quickly launch and validate their idea. Great tools to create a fast topic cluster. (🔗 Here).

• Supercreator - Great tool to repurpose your content into videos for TikTok (🔗 Here).

• MagicBookifier - Turn audio into a Book. Great repurposing tool if your main platform is a Podcast (🔗 Here).

• Sidebird. io - Turn any Notion pages into a Twitter Thread (🔗 Here).

📝 THE Tutorial:

A few things to consider about Prompting:

1. Stay away from the hype around “prompt learning. My rant about it (🔗Here).

2. Yes, you do need your own prompts for your job.

3. Using pre-written prompts by others might help, but it will never perfectly fit your needs.

4. Instead of templates, understand the main components of good prompts.

This prompting Guide will help you do just that (🔗Here).

🤓 THE content worth your reading:

This (very important) post from Google’s Blog: A new way to Search with Generative AI - An overview of SGE (🔗here).

🟣 I’m Karine. I help you adapt your content strategy to AI Search and GEO through a masterclass and a community focused on AI marketing. The next session of my GEO masterclass in english will be in May. Want to join?

Join the waitlist

🗞 THE AI Marketing news in the news

This blog post from Simon Willison about the Leaked Google Document: “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does Open AI”.

Imagine a conversation in one of Google’s offices about them and Open AI going like this:

“ (…) The uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race, and neither is Open AI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch. I’m talking of course about open source. Plainly put, they are lapping us. Things we consider “major open problems” are solved and in people’s hands today. (...).

While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly. Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. And they are doing so in weeks, not months. (...) “.

Sources: Read the full leak and original source here.

Insights:

1. The Coca-Cola v/s Pepsi; Mac v/s PC war is back! Just call it now Google v/s Bing.

Over the pasts few weeks, Bing has deployed major improvements to its Search Engine/Chat. Bard was Google’s answer to ChatGPT. Today, Project Magi (Google’s project that incubates the brand-new concept of Search Generative Experience that will replace SEO) is Google’s answer to ChatGPT + Bing.

That was last week.

Yesterday, Open AI rolled out ChatGPT plugins to Plus users which basically means that ChatGPT will now officially be connected to the internet. And tomorrow, some other news of this kind. And so on.

Overwhelming news to say the 1 same thing:

Those who were leading the world so far, as monopolistic giants owning our data are now engaged in a commodity war - except that instead of Coke or computer, the product is now Chat v/s Search. But they’re also aware that the final winner will most probably be none of them.

The winner is already Open Source. Which means…us. AI belongs to everybody.

2. AI belongs to everybody: just have a look at the amount of money invested in AI Open-Sources just over the pasts few weeks (to name just a few):

• GitHub, the open source platform from where so many new innovations such as AI-Agent are coming out just reached 90 million active users on its platform (here).

• Hugging Face, a start-up that makes machine learning and the best AI chat models available to everyone (and very modestly called itself the AI community building the future) just reached 2 billion valuations to build the GitHub of machine learning (here).

• Anthropic who aims to build the next generation of AI assistants to compete with ChatGPT just raised another $300M at a $4.1B valuation (here).

• Together, another open-source firm, just raised $20 million in Seed capital to make AI and Cloud accessible (here).

3. The real AI-Driven change lies in places like GitHub where anyone can use those technologies and build something that can disrupt everything.

Those are invisible and unpredictable competitors for Google, Bing & Co. AI is part of Web 3. Web 3 is a decentralized web. Where the power is owned by... individuals like us.

What does that mean for us, humble humans?

• Open Source means YOU, me, anyone.

• Use it!!

• Here are a few things to keep in mind to leverage this new superpower:

• Be aware that Personal Branding is the only marketing that is left – and do something with it: create something that only you can create.

• Develop partnerships: you might be a genius content writer – and not an engineer at all. It’s ok. Find one and build a smart partnership with him/her. And reverse.

• If you already are a content creator, no matter how is this content packaged so far (audio, video, written, visual, or else) use it to launch your own AI Bot (more on that below).

• If you are not yet a content creator, fix that ASAP. You have much more content than you think – and thanks to AI, you can turn all of it into an extremely powerful marketing asset.

Just keep reading to know more about how to implement those ideas.

🔎 1 insight from social networks

Very humbly, this week, I’ll share one of mine… All you need to know about Google I/O kick-off 👉 Here.

🧩 AI Marketing Corner

Topic: Coping with the “content creation anxiety” + AI chatbot

🔎 The 1 AI case study:

The true winner is Open Source and Seth Godin made good use of it. He trained his own AI chatbot.

🤗 1 tactic (from me):

Gather all your content and create your own AI bot.

The idea here is to understand that you do have content – or at least more content than you think - even if you think you don’t.

1. First, you certainly also have sales brochures, PDFs, text-based conversations with customers, former presentations, speeches, etc.

2. Second, in our AI era, be aware that YOU ARE THE CONTENT. You, your expertise, your memories, your thoughts, your passions, your readings, favorites books, foods, movies, or worsts nightmares. All of this can be turned into some content (of any format) – at the snap of a finger – and then nurture a chatbot content strategy that will enable you to connect with your consumers in the way they want to (in 2023).

You just need to find ways to extract it - and put it into a format.

Tactic: Just start!

🛠 4 AI tools for your marketing:

Tools to help you do that.

• TheoAssist - Get inspired by this AI Tool to understand the process of creating content based on former existing content/book, etc. TheoAssist is a chat and research tool built around the Bible (🔗Here).

• Rewind.ai – Ask the tool to remind you (written) anything you’ve seen, said, or heard. Truly impressive to transform everything you did, attend, thought, etc. into content – and knowledge base (🔗Here).

• Character.AI - You can also trigger different types of conversations with an AI and turned them into content. For example, trigger conversations with Character AI which allows you to talk to famous people, dead or alive (who by the way just raised, with no revenue, $150M led by a16z) - and turned it into content (🔗Here).

• GPTFlix and Ghola - If you’re really completely out of content bases, you can even create a Chatbot to talk about movies GPTFlix (pick the one that is connected to your industry or type of business) - or get inspired by Ghola, a platform to train and talking to public figures for insights (🔗Here) and (🔗Here).

• AskAI - Create your own ChatGPT with your own content (🔗Here).

📝 1 Tutorial:

This LinkedIn Slideshow where Isabella Bedoya, the Founder of one of the largest AI tools database and prompt base ThereIsAnAIForThat, shares her secret sauce to generate 2.3M impressions and $96k$ in 6 weeks with smart content repurposing and the rain Chain of Prompt (🔗here).

🤓 1 content worth your reading:

This post from Hubspot details the virtues of Chat (and chatbot) in a marketing strategy (🔗here).

🟣 I’m Karine. I help you adapt your content strategy to AI Search and GEO through a masterclass and a community focused on AI marketing. The next session of my GEO masterclass in english will be in May. Want to join?

Join the waitlist

I’m obsessed with how AI changes Search, Content, and marketing. I do believe that AI is no longer optional for content strategists. This newsletter is your guide to leveraging it effectively. Thanks for being a part of this journey with me!

Subscribe now

^_🗞 THE News in the News

In this interview with the Wall Street Journal, Sundar Pichai indicated that while Google had previously used AI to improve the search experience and quality of answers provided by its search engine, they now integrating AI into its search engine itself to transform “search” into “conversation”.

👉 What does that mean for us, Humble Humans?

We are moving from Search to Chat.

Until now, SEO-performing websites were designed around topic clusters. It could very well be that Chat will now become the dominant interface for future software and that websites will need to be designed not as a group of pages around a specific topic - but more as an interface allowing conversations with future clients based on their needs a business is filling in through its products or services.

🔎 THE Post from Social Media

In early April, Dharmesh Shah, Hubspot’s Founder, personally bought the domain name chat.com (not on behalf of Hubspot). Why does that matter? Not that much for the cost of the transaction (certainly substantial but not disclosed anyway). It is a BIG DEAL in terms of the major Tech & Marketing Trends that it embodies.

👉 What does that mean for us, Humble Humans?

ChatGPT is not just an innovation related to artificial intelligence, it is also a major UX (User Experience) innovation. We might have to completely re-think the architecture of a website (and thus, a brand content strategy) through the prism of conversation AND community....

Starting when?

Yesterday 😱.

🧩 AI Marketing Corner

Topic: Content writing

🛠 THE AI tool:

• copy.ai (link)

🤖 THE prompt/group of prompts (from others):

• This one post regroups 54 examples of prompts for blog writing (link).

🤗 THE tactic (from me):

You have a great idea for a piece of content. First, clearly identify the topic (and the audience you’re targeting). Record it (on your cell, on your Mac, on Loom). Don’t try to do it perfectly. Just speak as it comes. Download the files into an audio transcript tool (I use Trint – but you have plenty of others).

Read to “clean it” from the Euh, ah, etc.

Ask ChatGPT the following prompts:

1) “You’re an expert in [your topic]. Please provide an outline for a 2500 words post around the [Your Topic Keywords]

2) Now, create the post based on this outline, topic, and ideas”. In the tone of [be specific on your topic of expertise and specify your audience].

Of course, don’t stop here. Add your personal touch. But at least, you won’t be able to say that “writing is not your thing” and fighting writer’s block can no anymore be your alibi to not start with content marketing

🤓 THE good read:

AI-Generated content is the new Floor - Rand Fishkin / Sparktoro’s blog (link)

🟣 I’m Karine. I help you adapt your content strategy to AI Search and GEO through a masterclass and a community focused on AI marketing. The next session of my GEO masterclass in english will be in May. Want to join?

Join the waitlist

I’m obsessed with how AI changes Search, Content, and marketing. I do believe that AI is no longer optional for content strategists. This newsletter is your guide to leveraging it effectively. Thanks for being a part of this journey with me!

(3 min read)

🗞 THE news in the news

An interview with Yann Le Cun, VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta.

As of today, AI needs to be seen as an amplifier of human intelligence. But in less than 5 years, ChatGPT will be old school and AI-powered tools will not only be able to read and think - but also to feel… Yann Le Cun clearly states that that’s his goal, shared by other Top Notched AI researchers just like him (Demis Hassabis, CEO of Deepmind, Google’s AI subsidiary says the same thing (here).

Insights:

1. What Yann Le Cun describes is pretty much already happening now with the rise of AI assistant and AutoGPT: you give the AI instructions and assigned it certain goals and the “robot” is deploying a full plan for you - including the prompts you need - which by the way means that the highly trendy new skills “prompt engineering” might not be that hot anymore within couple months (weeks?)... Meta is actually developing this right now (here).

2. To some extent, this idea of a robot not only being able to think and learn but also to “feel” is pretty much already here too. Just Real robots are being integrated with ChatGPT (here). A recent study enlightens that ChatGPT already shows more empathy than the real doctor (here).

What does that mean for us, humble humans?

• Don’t be overwhelmed. Try first. Understand second. Stay aware. Train.

• Start by figuring out how AI can be of any help to your job. Then identify the specific tasks that are either repetitive, time-consuming, or complex. As Yan Le Cun says, use those tools with the goal of “amplifying your / your team’s intelligence”.

Sources: View the full interview here and read it here.

🤫 Just between you and me

To pick only 1 AI news this week was a tough one because Dr. Geoffrey Hinton quitting Google and saying that “ a part of him now regrets his life’s work” is definitely a big one but… I’m not sure we’re learning anything new here (my rant about that here).

Instead, I’ve picked this interview with Yann Le Cun, the French (of course, I’m not biased AT ALL on this one) Head of AI Research at Met because I keep hearing everywhere - as an alibi for NOT paying attention to AI - that Human emotions will never be replaced by AI Robots - and that appears to not being so true anymore...

THE insight from social networks

Among the things you can do with what was described above is the Gem from the brilliant Jeremiah Owyang in this post “Few ways to lead AI and not being replaced by it”. I purely simply loved this one.

🧩 Marketing Corner

Topic: From content to video / YouTube shorts

🛠 3 tools for your marketing

• Opus Pro: This one enables you to create incredible YouTube shorts in literally 3 min et 2 clicks from a regular video - and not even by downloading the video, just by sharing its URL. For example, based on a recent 45 min interview with Mark Schaefer, I was about to create in 2 clicks, 15 YouTube shorts video fully ready to be downloaded. The results were incredible and without doing anything in a few hours, I got a hundred views on 1 short only!! (🔗Here)

• Vidon AI: Awesome too. Transform a short text or a blog post into a super cool animated video that you can customize with your logo, colors, avatar, etc. in just a few clicks. Cherry on the cake: even if you don’t have a drafted blog post but just the topic you’d like to talk about, you can ask an integrated ChatGPT to create the blog post, and once done, with 1 click, VidonAI transformed it into a video. I tested it and the result was impressive. You can create without signing up – but if you’d like to download the final video you must sign up, and subscribe to monthly fees of $12. (🔗Here)

• Boring Report: An App that uses AI to remove sensationalism from the news while preserving essential information. I haven’t tested it (yet). (🔗Here)

📝THE tutorial:

A pretty clear guide on ChatGPT and AuGPT explaining how they differ and how to use it in (pretty) simple words (🔗here).

🤖 THE prompt:

This Google with 150 prompts for Marketing Strategy framework created by John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing network is good stuff. (🔗here).

🤗 THE tactic (from me):

As I explain in each of my presentations when preaching for AI, ChatGPT made us move from Search to Chat. This led Google to not only use AI to improve its search engine, but to transform its Search Engine into an AI-powered Chatbot, now named Bard. The main issue with both is that you couldn’t get the sources neither and links to “back up” and fast-check the answers. This is (already!!) about to be fixed with this recent alternative to ChatGPt and Bard named Perplixity AI. It enables you to have both: the Chat box to start with, and underneath, related links related to your chat. Cherry on the cake: Perplexity AI as a plugin so you can get more accurate and very recent information which, as of right now, ChatGPT can’t allow you to get.

Tactic: When creating your content, or researching, use a mix of the 3: ChatGPT, Bard, and Perplixity. All are Free (🔗here).

🤓THE content worth your reading:

This post from AnimalZ, where Ryan Law explains the 6 risks of AI content (🔗here).