Digital Marketing

Marketing leadership decisions used to be about where to allocate resources between known channels like paid, content, events, and email. Each of these channels has established performance benchmarks and predictable customer acquisition cost (CAC) ranges. But now, that framework is getting harder to trust as more buyer discovery moves to answer engines.

Growth marketing is all about finding the next channel opportunity before the current one gets crowded and expensive. Paid search got crowded. Content took time. Email got filtered. The teams that found a new lever early on took advantage of lower competition, cost, and disproportionate returns before the channel normalized.

Digital marketing teams have spent years building integrated measurement, connecting paid, organic, social, and email into a single picture of how buyers move through the funnel. That picture now has a gap. A growing share of buyer discovery happens in AI interfaces that don’t show up cleanly in any existing channel report.

Content strategists already know how to build for search. They understand how to map topics, connect related pages, and create enough depth to establish authority. But answer engine optimization (AEO) begs the question: When buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity about your category, which pages, if any, actually get cited?