Inbound Marketing Insights

AI-powered search is changing the way buyers discover, evaluate, and choose businesses online. As tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Claude become part of the buying journey, marketers must adapt their inbound strategies to ensure their expertise is surfaced, trusted, and recommended.

To better understand what is working today, we asked marketing leaders and SEO experts one question: What specific change have you made to your inbound marketing strategy because of AI search, and what results have you seen?  These 15 responses reveal practical, real-world strategies that organizations can begin implementing now to improve visibility, build authority, and connect with buyers in the age of AI search.

• Target Specific Prospect Questions
  
• Distribute Audio Via RSS For Visibility
• Connect Your Content Into an AI Knowledge Network
• Lead With Entities And Responses
  
• Place A Clean Pull Quote Upfront
• Use Customer Language On Service Sections
• Favor Firsthand Expertise Over Volume
• Build Credibility To Influence AI Recommendations
• Center Your Content On Buyer Queries
• Pursue Answer Engine Citations
  
• Refresh Pages To Match Intent
• Craft Verbatim Copy For Chat Assistants
• Strengthen Local Authority With EEAT
• Write For How LLMs Read
• Prioritize Support Docs Over Blogs

Target Specific Prospect Questions
The specific change to my inbound marketing strategy for AI search: shifting from keyword-led content planning to question-led content planning. Traditional keyword research surfaces terms with search volume. Question-led research surfaces the exact language buyers use when they are trying to solve a problem — which is also the language AI search systems are optimizing to answer. The difference is significant. A keyword like “fractional CMO” tells you the topic. A question like, “How much does a fractional CMO cost for a SaaS startup?” tells you the specific buyer moment and the specific information they need to move forward.

The implementation change was straightforward: before writing any piece of content, I identify the one specific question a buyer in a specific situation would ask, and I make that question the organizing principle of the page rather than a keyword density target. The first two sentences answer the question completely. Everything else supports and expands that answer.

The results within the first two months of launch: Google Search Console showing 2,000+ impressions across 152 distinct queries on a brand new domain, with the highest-performing pages being those organized around specific buyer questions rather than broad topic keywords. The fractional-cmo-rates page generates 378 impressions because it answers “how much does a fractional CMO cost” directly and immediately — not because it targets “fractional CMO” as a keyword. AI search rewards specificity. Question-led content is structurally specific.

Liviu Multiply CMO, Fractional CMO, Multiply CMO

Distribute Audio Via RSS For Visibility
The single-most effective change I made to my inbound marketing strategy this year happened by accident — a tiny extra step I almost didn't take. A few months back, I launched a new YouTube channel focused on helping seasoned professionals become more visible in AI-powered search. Candidly, this is a new chapter in my career, so I needed to walk the walk. On a whim, I took the audio from five short videos I had published and distributed them through a podcast RSS feed. I didn't tell a soul.

What happened next blew me away. After only three days, those podcast episodes started showing up as featured sources in Google AI Overviews about me, my framework, and my business. Almost no one had actually listened to the new "series" yet, but distribution through Apple, Spotify, and Amazon appeared to create trusted third-party sources. Those sources surfaced before YouTube, where I had posted the same content in video form about 10 days earlier.

They also appeared ahead of my websites and social profiles. More interestingly, the information that showed up was layered and compelling. Google's AI was able to find me, understand me, and share detailed insights into my workflow, point of view, and the authority I'm actively building. It's worth noting: for a visibility strategist, I have a hilariously common name — Ashley Smith. It has always been a challenge to show up in search the way I want to. But in 2026, that's changing.

This experiment reinforced an important lesson: modern search engines and LLMs are trying to understand people, businesses, and expertise — not just rank webpages. I'm relatively new doing this specific work, but I'm increasingly showing up in search positioned as an expert. My recommendation for the tenured, mostly invisible professional reading this is simple: you already have the toolkit. You have the years of experience and the real-world domain authority. Document your original thinking. Record your conversations, presentations, and 20-minute Zoom banter sessions.

Use the audio, give it a clear title, a half-thoughtful description with your name, link your assets, and hit publish. You don't need an editor, an audience, or an SEO guru for AI search engines to start learning who you are and what you know. But they won't guess. You have to give them something to work with — and it turns out, a simple RSS feed can do a lot of heavy lifting.

Ashley Smith, AI Visibility Strategist, Show Your Proof

Connect Your Content Into an AI Knowledge Network

One of the biggest shifts we've made is thinking beyond individual pieces of content and focusing on how everything connects. AI search doesn't just evaluate a single blog post or landing page. It looks across your website, social channels, contributed articles, case studies, videos, podcasts, and other trusted sources to understand your expertise.

We've started intentionally connecting these assets through consistent messaging, internal linking, author profiles, and references to related resources. Rather than creating isolated content, we're building a knowledge ecosystem that reinforces our authority across multiple touchpoints.

The result has been stronger topical authority, improved visibility in AI-powered search experiences, and prospects who arrive with a deeper understanding of our expertise before the first conversation.

Elyse Flynn Meyer, Owner & Founder, Prism Global Marketing Solutions

Lead With Entities And Responses
One change cut wasted content by 50%: every new page now starts with entity coverage and answer structure, not keyword volume. Instead of writing a broad "best guide", the brief maps the core entities, likely follow-up questions, comparison points, and the one clear action the reader wants to take. That gives search engines and AI overviews cleaner signals, and it gives users a page that can be quoted or summarised without losing the point.

For a B2B software client, that meant replacing broad blog topics with decision-stage pages built around use cases, objections, integrations, pricing context, and short FAQ blocks. Over about four months, non-brand organic clicks grew roughly 32%, pages appearing in AI-generated search summaries more than doubled based on manual tracking, and demo requests from organic traffic went up about 18%. I've found this works because AI search rewards pages that resolve the next three questions, not pages that just mention the main keyword more times.

Josiah Roche, Fractional CMO, JRR Marketing

Place A Clean Pull Quote Upfront
The changes I've made across the sites I work on is rewriting them so an AI can lift a clean answer, not just so Google can rank them. On one client's site that meant adding a short, direct answer block at the top of the key pages and a few FAQ-style Q&As near the bottom, marking the page and their credentials up with schema, and putting their qualifications front and center so a model has a reason to trust him as a source. Nothing fancy, just the SEO basics done deliberately for how LLMs read rather than for blue links.

Soon after, someone reached out who said they'd found them through ChatGPT. One inquiry isn't a trend, but it's a concrete sign the work is surfacing where people now search. If you're starting, take your highest-intent pages and put a plain, quotable answer right at the top, before anything else.

Manuel Otter, GEO & SEO Consultant, HarborVisibility

Use Customer Language On Service Sections
We had previously been creating our service pages based on SEO success metrics instead of the needs of our target audience, who typically are 2 minutes away from calling us for an appointment. We randomly selected questions that customers had asked on their intake calls and literally copied and pasted page copy that included those exact words. Note that those are not paraphrased versions. These were actual phrases that real customers use when deciding which company they want to work with and how to choose that company.

For example, instead of writing a heading such as "Professional SEO Services," we wrote, "How long does it take to see results with SEO?" (as all small business owners want to know before hiring us). Approximately 6-8 weeks after we rewrote our core service pages using this method, Google AI began displaying those pages in their Overview section for search terms that we had never ranked for before.

The results have changed as well. People call and already know what we do, how long it will take to complete a project, and what our pricing is in general. Individuals who contacted us had an understanding of our process, our time frame, and our price ranges. This reduced our average first consultation time from 40 minutes to 20 minutes. AI search not only brings up the page that is most relevant to what someone typed or spoke out loud, but for us, it turns a passive service page into a page that actually gets you a step closer to your prospect calling you before you even get your tool out.

Tyler Desjardins, Lead Generation | Web Design & Development | SEO, Pivot Creative Media

Favor Firsthand Expertise Over Volume
One of the most significant adjustments for our inbound marketing approach has included moving away from generating a lot of keyword-based content and instead focusing on developing high-value, first-hand expertise-based content. As AI search engine technologies continue to grow and improve their ability to identify quality sources of unique insights versus content that reiterates existing information found online, companies must shift their focus as well.

Rather than continuing to develop an increasing number of low-to-moderate value articles focused on keyword topics, we will be reducing the volume of articles we create while simultaneously increasing the overall quality of those developed. The higher-quality articles will include: proprietary data; actual client case studies; expert commentary; and actionable frameworks. Additionally, each article authored by us will clearly state the author(s) credentials so readers know who wrote them.

Each article will provide answers to potential follow-up questions that users may ask based on their experience reading our content. Our results are positive. Organic traffic patterns are changing due to increased use of AI-powered search experiences. However, engagement metrics associated with organic traffic have improved, along with lead quality and the number of citations received from the same AI-powered search experiences.

Often, when we speak to new prospects, they tell us they initially came across our company's insights via AI-based search assistants before actually accessing our website. This supports our premise that success in today's modern SEO is no longer just about achieving rankings. Success is now about establishing credibility with both humans and AI-based search systems.

Michael Salvaggio, CEO, SEO Brand

Build Credibility To Influence AI Recommendations
One of the biggest changes I've made is shifting part of our inbound strategy away from traditional Organic vs. Paid thinking and toward buyer intent signals and credibility building. We're seeing buyer behavior change rapidly. Prospects are increasingly using tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity as part of their research process, often before they ever visit a company's website. Instead of searching for keywords and clicking through multiple results, they're asking AI tools for recommendations, comparisons, and buying guidance.

What's particularly interesting is that many of the companies now appearing most frequently in AI-generated answers aren't necessarily the ones with the strongest content. They're often the companies that have spent years investing in thought leadership, PR, expert insights, customer advocacy, and brand credibility across the web and beyond.

As a result, we've shifted more effort toward creating authoritative content, increasing expert visibility, building executive thought leadership, securing third-party mentions, and ensuring our expertise is consistently represented across trusted sources. Personal branding has become an important part of this strategy as well.

The results have also been interesting. While we're seeing some traditional organic traffic and conversion patterns change, the quality of inbound leads is overall improving while the bulk numbers of the old-way conversion tracking is massively decreasing. Buyers are arriving much more educated, with stronger opinions, clearer expectations, and a better understanding of the problem they're trying to solve. Conversations tend to start further down the funnel because much of the initial research has already happened before they reach us.

For me, the biggest takeaway is that inbound marketing is no longer just about ranking or even "demand capture." It's about being the source that AI tools (and HUMANS) can trust and reference. Traditional campaigns still work, but they perform significantly better when they're supported by a strong brand, credible experts, and consistent visibility across the broader digital ecosystem. Brand is back to being one of the strongest competitive advantages in the age of AI search.

Stefka Ivanova, VP of Marketing, Stefka.com

Center Your Content On Buyer Queries
The most impactful change we have made to our inbound marketing since the rise of AI Search was restructuring our content around specific questions rather than around keywords and service categories. We went through our content library and identified gaps. Then started writing in a way that answered specific questions.

The result has been that our content is getting surfaced more frequently in AI-generated responses across multiple platforms, and the inbound leads we're receiving are coming in warmer and more informed than before. The quality of the conversation has noticeably improved, which tells us that AI search is meaningfully pre-qualifying the audience that eventually finds its way to us.

Nick Stamoulis, President & Founder, Brick Marketing - Digital Marketing Agency

Pursue Answer Engine Citations
The single biggest change: I stopped optimizing exclusively for Google and started optimizing for AI citations at the same time. Here's the specific strategic shift. In 2024, I realized 40% of prospects were researching us through ChatGPT and Perplexity before ever touching Google. Traditional inbound marketing assumed everyone starts with Google. That assumption is dying.

Instead of creating content optimized purely for Google rankings, I now create content designed to be cited by AI systems. That means building topical authority through Featured.com (getting published on high-authority sites with proper attribution), creating content with unique data AI can't generate, and structuring everything with a clear Q&A format that AI platforms prefer.

I created detailed case studies with specific metrics instead of generic blog posts. "A Denver law firm moved from position 23 to position 3 in four months. Here's what happened in month one, month two, month three" instead of "SEO takes 3-6 months." When people ask ChatGPT about SEO timelines, our specific content gets cited because it contains information generic training data doesn't have.

30% of new consultation requests now explicitly mention ChatGPT or Perplexity as their discovery source. That's up from essentially zero 18 months ago. More importantly, these leads convert faster. They've already validated our expertise through AI citations before reaching out. The average sales cycle has compressed from 90 days to 60 days. I completely restructured our budget allocation. 60% goes to traditional SEO, 40% to AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). That shift reflects where traffic is actually flowing. Most agencies still treat Google as 95% of the game. Google is declining as a traffic source due to AI Overviews.

Chris Raulf, International AI and SEO Expert | Founder & Chief Visionary Officer, Boulder SEO Marketing

Refresh Pages To Match Intent
I shifted our inbound strategy to an AI-assisted SEO workflow that aligns content with how people actually search. We used keyword clustering and content gap analysis, then generated optimized titles, meta descriptions, FAQs, and blog outlines using tools like Clearscope and SurferSEO, plus AI trained on our brand voice. The work focused on refreshing stale PDPs and blogs so they match user intent instead of internal jargon.  As a result, organic traffic to PDPs and blogs rose by over 60% in 90 days, and bounce rate dropped significantly. This change let us write smarter and convert more of the traffic we earned.

Malia Leong, Founder & Fractional CMO for High Growth Beauty Brands, Digital Consultant & Creative Director

Craft Verbatim Copy For Chat Assistants
We stopped writing for rankings and started optimizing our writing for the purposes of being cited verbatim. In 2026, most questions get answered inside the AI chat — meaning potential buyers read the AI summary and never actually click. We structure our content as clearly as possible, ensuring the information is both quotable and factual, with the goal of ensuring the models can utilize this information directly. We want the AI to attribute our own words for definitions, numbers, and claims. We now get fewer "raw" clicks, but the clicks we do get have a high chance of being our buyer. Since we're now a cited source in AI chats, the traffic we get is well informed about our product and converts at a much higher rate. Qualified leads are much more important than volume.

Dr. Weston Quintrell, Founder and CEO, Lead Titan AI

Strengthen Local Authority With EEAT
I've been prioritizing EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) signals within content to build authority and trustworthiness at a local level. With the help of AI and Google's search console tools, I'm able to develop sitemaps of clients' websites, identify gaps in information that customers are actively searching for in Google and LLMs, and build pillar and cluster pages with content that directly answers frequently asked questions, rather than focusing on simple keyword ranking.

It's also crucial to understand where LLMs are sourcing their information from, and to leverage those sources (such as Reddit and Wikipedia) in addition to obvious platforms like the client's own website, Google Business Profile, and social accounts. As a result, I've seen more leads flowing into contact forms, clients being recommended by ChatGPT within top local service search results, and a stronger web presence.

I attribute part of that success to intentionally keeping it local. You'll bite off more than you can chew by trying to compete with national brands right out of the gate, but you can absolutely make a dent in your local market by consistently working on SEO with the help of tools like AI, Google's Search Console, and HubSpot's AEO dashboard.

Laura Quinn, Marketing Account Executive | Marketing Consultant, L.Q. Creative

Write For How LLMs Read
We are in the health and wellness industry, and we rely heavily on content marketing to drive traffic. Organic search represents almost 50% of our overall traffic. We started seeing the effects of zero-click searches on our CTR and realized that appearing in AI Overviews is becoming essential if we want to stay competitive.

Over the past year, we have started optimizing our content to better match how LLMs (Large Language Models) process and present information. This includes using natural language, shorter sentences, more direct answers, and repeating key phrases from the question in the answer where relevant.

Surprisingly, this approach has not only helped us appear in AI Overviews, but it has also led other AI tools to cite our website. We now see referral traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, with most of it coming from ChatGPT.

Abdulaziz Ali, Senior Organic Content Strategist, Flymedi

Prioritize Support Docs Over Blogs
Instead of publishing more blog posts, we wrote detailed support docs and treat them as our primary way of getting found in AI search results. Most founders invest time in blog content as this is what traditional SEO rewarded previously, but the way in which AI search works is different. It prioritizes pages that address specific questions using conversational or "plain" language. So, writing a support document about how to access a product after paying with CartMango is likely to yield better results than creating a marketing piece.

That's why our support content now does better than our blog on all the AI search metrics we measure.

We have created a support document, "What to do when your customer doesn't receive their download link after purchase." It explains in detail, in simple terms, what happens in CartMango when a delivery fails. 5 weeks after publishing that, the page showed up in Google AI Overviews for delivery-related queries, whereas our blog post to the same audience had been on page three for 8 months.

Welly Mulia, Founder | Software & Creator Advocate, CartMango

While AI-powered search will continue to evolve, one principle remains constant: creating content that helps real people solve real problems. By applying the strategies shared by these marketing leaders, you can strengthen your inbound marketing efforts, increase your chances of being cited by AI-powered search tools, and continue building meaningful connections with your audience as search enters its next chapter. If you're interested in discussing your current marketing strategy and how to improve your results, we invite you to schedule a complimentary consultation today.