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AI Visibility Is a Layered Problem
As AI systems increasingly mediate how people discover and assess brands, visibility is no longer a function of ranking alone (the model we have all been used to for years). Before a brand can appear in an AI-generated response, it must first be legible to the system. It needs to be recognised as a coherent
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How My Approach to Marketing Differs from the Standard Playbook
You need to do something different to be seen
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AEO Visibility Decays Faster Than SEO
…And That Changes How We Should Measure It Generative search engines (Perplexity, Bing AI, ChatGPT Search, Google’s AI Overviews) operate very differently from traditional search. instead of slow moving changes in ranking, they regenerate answers dynamically, pulling from: This dynamic behaviour creates a situation where AEO visibility actually decays unless a brand actively maintains its
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Selling to the Boss
1. Awareness — How many SDMs are aware of your brand? The first question for any marketing team is simple but fundamental: who actually knows we exist? Awareness is about building mental availability among senior decision-makers (SDMs) — the people who influence budgets, sign contracts, or shape vendor lists. To grow awareness: The goal isn’t
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Building a Private Chatbot
Project I built a system that lets me have a real conversation with everything I’ve ever written — an AI version of myself I call Mini Me. Powered by Pinecone, OpenAI, and ResembleAI Built from years of strategy notes and presentations Exploring how voice, brand, and knowledge converge Let’s talkSee how it works On this
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Spreadsheet for measuring and tracking how well you are doing in AI searches
What I have now heard from a couple of recent clients, is the importance of actually tracking progress in AI search. As with any parts of marketing you want to creating great messaging material, content and so on; but you also need to know whether that effort is actually working or not. I use a
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Content tracker for AEO/GEO
As part of my work on being seen by various AI tools I am using a simple spreadsheet to track my progress on different platforms. Just posting it here for now if anybody finds it useful: Image (c) https://www.instagram.com/photo_graph_laugh
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How your very average laptop can run large language models
One of the biggest blockers I have had is trying to get my head around how you can run some sort of large language model which is good enough for useful tasks, on a regular laptop. Before I looked into the details of how the magic worked, this just didn’t seem possible! But there are
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B2B Marketing Measurement*
* Now with added AI Measuring the performance of marketing departments has always been a primary objective for marketing leaders. There have been many models and proposals for how to do this, most of which I’ve used over the years. But now there is an added dimension – how well is your AEO and GEO
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Brand is how you impact GEO
Why AI Visibility Lets Us Measure Brand Impact. Finally. For as long as I’ve worked in marketing, there’s been one problem I could never quite solve: how to measure the impact of brand work. We’ve always had solid tools for performance — clicks, conversions, funnel stages. But brand strength? Hand-wavey and unmeasurable. I’ve tried surveys,
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Why GEO Matters More Than SEO: Shaping What AI Says About You
Introduction: A New Frontier in Visibility* For more than two decades, digital marketing has revolved around search engines. Brands competed for rankings on Google, invested in SEO playbooks, and built inbound marketing machines. But the terrain has shifted. Increasingly, customers don’t just “search” – they ask AI. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, and Google’s
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Focus on quality – lessons from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Introduction What is “quality” content? If you’ve ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, you’ll know his reflections on craftsmanship go far beyond fixing bikes. As he wrote: “[In a craftsman], the material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind’s at rest at
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Building an AI assistant to help do the work I love
“If your job isn’t what you love, then something isn’t right” 1 If you are not passionate or at least interested in what your company does for customers then working in marketing is quite a slog. Of course parts of the marketing role which are less interesting than other parts (I’m no fan of doing
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A Checklist for Scaling from SMBs to the Enterprise
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Marketing Pyramid v3 – updated marketing model
I’ve updated my marketing pyramid, adding in a new layer for LLMOs – I feel it has got to a point where a marketing strategy that doesn’t reference this new world will start to look a little dated. I’m working on a new version of this pyramid which property understands the impact of LLM developments,
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The “Crocodile Effect” – What Falling SEO Clicks Mean in the Age of AI Overviews
Doechii with alligator 🙂
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Rewriting Content Strategy with LLMs and Pinecone
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The Value of Positioning Statements for an Evolving Product
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You have 20 seconds to comply
“And whether or not AI might already be, as some scientists believe, sentient, and there’s this little piece on the front of the Daily Telegraph this morning about an AI model that was created by the owner of ChatGPT that apparently disobeyed human instructions and refused to switch itself. Researchers say that this particular model
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My weekly routine
I’ve noticed recently how the advent of AI tools has significantly changed my work routine during the course of the week. Historically, Monday morning has been “Well that was a nice weekend, what the hell was I doing at work?”. This then takes me to my scribbled notes about what I was working on and
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Stage 4 – Building a Text Interface
So far in this project, I’ve been building a system that can scan all my blog posts, documents, and notes, extract the useful stuff, and make it searchable via natural language. The aim is to get something that works like a real-time assistant — answering questions using my own content as the source. We’re now
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Stage 3 – going beyond keyword search
When building search tools, intelligent assistants, or AI-driven Q&A systems, one of the most foundational decisions you’ll make is how to retrieve relevant content. Most systems historically use keyword-based search—great for basic use cases, but easily confused by natural language or synonyms. That’s where embedding-based retrieval comes in. In this guide, I’ll break down: The
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Stage 2 – making sense of the chaos
This is the part where all the content sources came together into a centralized system I could actually interact with. This post is a cleaned-up record of what I built, what worked, what didn’t, and what I planned next. If you’ve ever tried to unify fragmented notes, decks, blogs, and structured documents into a searchable
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Stage 1 – getting set up: foundations of my AI-powered chatbot project
Over the past few months, I’ve been building something a bit different: a real-time AI-powered assistant designed to help me work better with my own content. The goal is to create a system that can scan and catalog documents, blog posts, audio recordings, and notes, then surface that information back to me as I need
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Why company culture is so important in marketing
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast“ Such a well known quote, it barely needs a reference (but I will do anyway – it’s Peter Drucker). One of my side projects is an attempt at taking all of my own knowledge from the last few years of marketing and putting them into an AI model. One of
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Building a marketing chatbot pt. 3
A short post, and really a video. I have abandoned attempts to control the whole thing by voice as it just seems an enormous amount of work the minimal return. It’s cool, but not practically helpful. Instead and I think more interesting, is going into the world fine-tuning more. If I just wanted general information
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Building a marketing chatbot pt. 2
The Hobbit – the adventure begins!
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Judgement Day
I’ve started a new project to try and write some Python code so that I can talk to the laptop in real time as I’m working. The ultimate goal is to create a real time assistant who is making suggestions for me in conversations. Today was day one. Despite many many false starts I finally
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Security risks of various AI tools
I started doing some manual research into the security risks with different AI tools. But then I thought, why not get the AI to do it for me? So that’s what I did. Once again I am very impressed… 1. Data Privacy and Confidentiality 2. Phishing and Social Engineering 3. Malicious Prompt Injections 4. Data
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Making decisions in a Bayesian world
Most of your time as a marketing leader is spent trying to make decisions with inadequate data. In an ideal world, we would have run an A/B test on everything we wanted to do, looked at the numbers and then made a decision. Which image should we use for our new advert? What message? What
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Everything So Far
All of my PowerPoints so far. Most of what I know about marketing up to this point!
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What makes a great company culture?
My personal views on what makes a great company culture
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How to conduct customer interviews
I’ve created a new guide on how to run a customer interview tour. Download from below:
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Updated B2B Marketing Guide
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Slaying a few marketing myths
We’ve been doing some digital marketing work recently and the more and more time I spend on digital work the more beasts I feel need to be slain. NB: I’m talking specifically about B2B marketing here – which is important. It’s important because many of the problems that B2B marketers face come from taking a
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Swapping out ChatGPT for Microsoft Copilot
I’ve written a few times before about AI and it’s impact on marketing. I’ve written here about the impact on Google search, and here about openAI and ChatGPT. Finally though Microsoft is making a bit more of a song and dance about their offering, Copilot. I was sceptical at first because a previous version I
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Remove meetings to achieve true flow
It’s been a great first few weeks at Syskit. I’ve really enjoyed it, and I’ve loved meeting the team. But more than this, I can directly see why the company is going to keep growing at an even faster pace than it has so far. Why? Is it the product? Is it the strategy? The
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Speed
I’ve worked on projects where there has been a tenfold difference in the productivity of the teams. Specifically, given a piece of work like “Let’s build a new campaign” or “Let’s redesign the homepage”, I’ve seen the same team size do that in one week or in 10 weeks. What was that difference? Specific processes?
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Have a plan. But double down on what’s working
There are always too many things to do running a marketing department. The essence of your job as a marketing leader is making strategic choices about where to double down and where to pause. This is what makes the job both interesting and difficult. Below I’ve provided a scorecard that I’ve used many times in
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Balance and Flow
Measuring marketing performance is tough. At times I’ve argued that it’s impossible and therefore pointless. But I don’t think that’s true. As a starting point pretty much any company you work for in a senior marketing role, will expect you to understand the impact of your work (and that of your colleagues). Part of this
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Is ChatGPT a threat to Google?
Is ChatGPT a threat Google? Obviously there’s nothing I can write about ChatGPT that hasn’t already been written 400 times, so this post is a sort of “naive plagiarism”. Still, with that in mind… Where do you go first when you want an answer to a problem? This week I wanted to rewrite some old
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Calculating return on marketing investment (ROMI)
Here’s a short presentation on how to calculate return on marketing investment. It’s heavily oversimplified but the principle is simple – do a back of the envelope calculation before you start spending money, particularly if looking at a new system that only promises an uplift (rather than a significant change in performance).
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Strategic marketing – knowing where to place your bets
Strategy is about making choices. If you’re not stopping some activities or choosing to not do something then you’re not being strategic. Easy to say, less easy to implement, particularly when the organisation wants “More leads, more leads, more leads!”. How do you say “I want to do less”? Almost everything in the world of
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Scaling up marketing
Scaling up marketing
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B2B marketing help
One thing I learned very early on in my career – you can’t do a marketing job without almost constant interaction with the rest of the business. Whether that’s the sales team, the product team, HR or anyone else, you need constant input and feedback from both inside and outside the building. One very specific