[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":4439},["ShallowReactive",2],{"podcast-marketing-leaders-ai-fluency-is-the-new-competitive-advantage":3,"header-articles":797,"updatesSection-all":2678,"updatesSection-all-team":3453},{"_path":4,"_dir":5,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":8,"description":9,"date":10,"audio":11,"episode":14,"minutes":15,"series":16,"guest":17,"guesturl":18,"seotitle":8,"iframe":19,"guestimg":20,"authors":21,"guestabout":23,"body":24,"_type":791,"_id":792,"_source":793,"_file":794,"_stem":795,"_extension":796,"category":5},"/podcasts/marketing-leaders/ai-fluency-is-the-new-competitive-advantage","marketing-leaders",false,"","AI Fluency Is the New Competitive Advantage","Megan Ratcliff discusses why successful AI adoption has far less to do with tools and far more to do with people, processes, and organizational change. She shares how companies can move beyond experimentation to build true AI fluency, establish governance, create stronger context and data systems, and redesign work around outcomes rather than traditional roles—all while keeping human creativity, judgment, and innovation at the center of the business.","2026-06-18T17:54:10.456Z",{"url":12,"length":13},"https://share.transistor.fm/s/a1595ab7","57181935","222","48","Back on T-R-A-C-K","Megan Ratcliff","https://www.linkedin.com/in/megan-ratcliff/","https://share.transistor.fm/e/a1595ab7","https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/5cf95563-45e9-4138-9bbe-de1b0855c9f9-megan-ratcliff.webp",[22],"Kerry Guard","Megan Ratcliff helps organizations turn AI from a promising tool into a practical advantage by building AI fluency, redesigning workflows, and empowering teams to do their best work.",{"type":25,"children":26,"toc":786},"root",[27,36,42,48,53,58,63,68,73,78,83,88,93,98,103,108,113,118,123,128,133,138,143,148,153,158,163,168,173,178,183,188,193,198,203,208,213,218,223,228,233,238,243,248,253,258,263,268,273,278,283,287,292,297,302,307,312,317,322,327,332,337,342,347,352,357,362,367,372,377,382,387,392,397,402,407,412,417,422,427,432,437,442,447,452,457,462,467,472,477,482,487,492,496,501,506,511,516,521,526,531,536,541,546,551,556,561,566,571,576,581,586,591,596,601,606,611,616,621,626,631,636,641,646,651,656,661,666,671,676,681,686,691,696,701,706,711,716,721,726,731,736,741,746,751,756,761,766,771,776,781],{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":30,"children":32},"element","h2",{"id":31},"overview",[33],{"type":34,"value":35},"text","Overview",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":38,"children":39},"p",{},[40],{"type":34,"value":41},"Megan explains why many organizations are approaching AI the wrong way by focusing on tools instead of transformation. She breaks down the foundational elements of successful AI adoption—including fluency, governance, context, data, and human judgment—and explores how companies can reorganize around outcomes rather than outdated workflows. The conversation reinforces a central theme: AI should amplify human potential, not replace it, and the organizations that thrive will be the ones that use technology to unlock new value rather than simply reduce headcount.",{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":43,"children":45},{"id":44},"transcript",[46],{"type":34,"value":47},"Transcript:",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":49,"children":50},{},[51],{"type":34,"value":52},"Kerry Guard  0:15  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":54,"children":55},{},[56],{"type":34,"value":57},"Hello, and welcome back to Back on Track. I'm Kerry Guard, your host and the CEO of MKG Marketing. Quick word on what we do, because visibility gets thrown around a lot. Getting found today takes three things working together: SEO, so Google ranks you, AEO, so you show up in Google's answer engine, and geo, so you get cited inside the LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, et cetera, where your buyers are not asking, where buyers are now asking their questions. You need all three. That's why we built our search visibility optimization framework. It lays the foundation, so your content actually gets cited where people are searching, not buried on page two. Welcome to the show. I'm so excited for this episode. This show is for the marketing and go-to marketing leaders, figuring out how to do more meaningful work, often with inner teams, more tools, and a whole lot of noise, mostly about AI. If that's you, you're not behind; you probably just jumped in the middle, and we're here to get you back to the beginning in the right order. And my guest today is thinking harder than just about anyone about what the beginning actually looks like. I'm so happy to introduce Megan Ratcliffe, partner at Clarity In Motion Collective. Megan has deep demand gen roots, and after leading an AI transformation inside a high-stakes GTM org, she and her partners, Keryn and Asma, set out to do something bigger: help revenue teams turn AI from an abstract promise into a real operational advantage with speed, with humanity, and without replacing the people who make a company worth buying from. She's not just teaching teams to use AI, she's helping them rethink the whole shape of how work gets done. Megan, welcome to the show.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":59,"children":60},{},[61],{"type":34,"value":62},"Megan Ratcliff  2:02  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":64,"children":65},{},[66],{"type":34,"value":67},"Oh, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":69,"children":70},{},[71],{"type":34,"value":72},"Kerry Guard  2:05  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":74,"children":75},{},[76],{"type":34,"value":77},"Oh, I've been looking forward to this. I am super excited as well. Let's get right into it. You, for folks meeting you for the first time, tell us about Clarity in Motion Collective. You and Carolyn did the AI transformation at your last company. People started asking you to come speak, and you basically went, 'Wait, this is the most fun we've ever had. Take us back to that moment. What made you jump in?",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":79,"children":80},{},[81],{"type":34,"value":82},"Megan Ratcliff  2:30  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":84,"children":85},{},[86],{"type":34,"value":87},"Yeah, for sure. So, Carolyn and I have worked together, like, for several years in different capacities. She was a client of mine to begin with, and then I called her one day, and I was like, \"What are you doing? And she's like, \"I'm doing this new thing over here, and I was like, 'Cool, I want to come. So she was the VP of marketing at like a B2B SaaS company, and I was like, \"Cool, I've never like worked inside of an org before, I've always worked on the agency side. So I was like, \"How hard can it be? So I jumped in, and like, at that time, is when Chat GPT became public, and so we were like, \"What, there's an opportunity here? And so we were a tiny company going against like a Goliath of a competitor, and so we didn't have a lot of time, we didn't have a lot of resources, there wasn't a lot of money floating around like our budget compared to theirs was insane, and we didn't have any additional head count that we could add, so we were like, what can we do, and so that's where the idea of AI ecosystem was born, and it's about, you know, adding on skills that you don't have, so that you can like really fill out the role, and so we started to do that together, and from that, like, little seed, the entire marketing org transformed, and it took, it's not overnight, it like takes a while for people to get this figured out, and the work changes, and then other teams inside of that company were like, \"not back, what are you guys doing? so then we started presenting to the other teams and helping them do this transformation, and then, like, other companies started to catch wind of this, and they were like, \"What are you guys doing? And so we decided to just like jump off on our own and start doing this, and we brought along a partner, her name is Esma Stewart, who is brilliant, and she was leading the AI transformation at a very highly regulated agency, and we were like, we need you to come on board, because what we're doing isn't easy. A lot of the clients that we're talking to are in highly regulated industries, so we need to figure out how to do this safely and responsibly, so that teams get the most benefit out of it without exposing themselves to risk. So that's how it was born. It started just about a year ago. Oh",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":89,"children":90},{},[91],{"type":34,"value":92},"Kerry Guard  4:43  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":94,"children":95},{},[96],{"type":34,"value":97},"My gosh, I feel like in the age of building a company, a year ago is probably like, if you know, if we're talking, feels like forever.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":99,"children":100},{},[101],{"type":34,"value":102},"Megan Ratcliff  4:51  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":104,"children":105},{},[106],{"type":34,"value":107},"Yes.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":109,"children":110},{},[111],{"type":34,"value":112},"Kerry Guard  4:52  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":114,"children":115},{},[116],{"type":34,"value":117},"Yeah, like dog years, right, versus yes, cat years versus human years. So one year is probably five years. So what's. You know, Chat GPT comes on board, you know, comes out to be a thing, you guys jump on board with it, you figure out how to utilize it. What's changed since then? You know, we got new tools, new capabilities. What do you say has been the biggest shift in AI in the last year?",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":119,"children":120},{},[121],{"type":34,"value":122},"Megan Ratcliff  5:16  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":124,"children":125},{},[126],{"type":34,"value":127},"Oh my gosh, like, what hasn't changed? I feel like I feel like just have the ability to mature what you're able to do on your own, so I'm non-technical. Carolyn and Esma are more technical than I am. Carolyn ran off at one point, and Esma is just like a builder by nature. It's foreign to me to be a builder, so the fact that this, like, all clicked in my brain so easily was lovely, but the thing that I think has changed the most was, like, the onset of co-work when that came from Anthropic, because that opened doors for non-technical folks to get in and do actual work, and to create automations that they weren't able to do previously, before you would need to use a tool like Z Pier or Make or NADN, and coming from a non-technical background like I did, even getting into NAD and like trying to figure it out was very difficult, and so the unlock for me was co-work being accessible to me, and me being able to like figure out how that system worked, so when I first like started getting in there and using it, I was like cloud code curious, and I was like, I think I can do this also, but I want a tutorial from an actual like machine learning engineer first, and so we like get into this lesson, and he was like, okay, here's what we're going to do. He like started in the terminal, and I was like, \"Oh no, but he was talking about file structure, and I was like, \"This is boring. Why are we doing this? And he's like, \"You will see why this becomes fundamentally important. And so we worked on, like, setting up file structure first. This is how it works. This is the hierarchy of the files. This is what belongs in here. And after that lesson, I was like, oh my gosh, you are so right. So now when I work with clients, it's less like what's the custom GPT we're going to build, and it's more like what is the outcome that we want to achieve. Let's set up our context and file structure to set us up for success, and then let's figure out what it is that we need to build, so it's been quite fascinating since the launch of Co-work. I will say, and then with Codex coming out, you have a couple of options on what you want to do.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":129,"children":130},{},[131],{"type":34,"value":132},"Kerry Guard  7:34  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":134,"children":135},{},[136],{"type":34,"value":137},"I love Co-work,",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":139,"children":140},{},[141],{"type":34,"value":142},"Megan Ratcliff  7:37  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":144,"children":145},{},[146],{"type":34,"value":147},"It's so good, it's so fun.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":149,"children":150},{},[151],{"type":34,"value":152},"Kerry Guard  7:39  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":154,"children":155},{},[156],{"type":34,"value":157},"My first experience with AI, like outside of just prompting, was when I started with Cursor about a year ago. Yeah, redid a client's website in a month using Cursor. It was wild because with Tailwind UI and Nux JS, and Cursor, I was just flying, but I wanted more. I was, but I was like, I want to do this with everything, like, why can't everything just where I could just go into a window, and I start asking things, and then things start happening behind the scenes, now I have to touch it, like.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":159,"children":160},{},[161],{"type":34,"value":162},"Megan Ratcliff  8:14  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":164,"children":165},{},[166],{"type":34,"value":167},"Yeah.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":169,"children":170},{},[171],{"type":34,"value":172},"Kerry Guard  8:14  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":174,"children":175},{},[176],{"type":34,"value":177},"When does that happen? Then, yeah, Claude Cohen came out, and I was like, \" This is amazing. ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":179,"children":180},{},[181],{"type":34,"value":182},"Megan Ratcliff  8:18  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":184,"children":185},{},[186],{"type":34,"value":187},"It is the best I know. Well, and then when Cloud Design came out, I was like, tried",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":189,"children":190},{},[191],{"type":34,"value":192},"Kerry Guard  8:23  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":194,"children":195},{},[196],{"type":34,"value":197},"That yet?",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":199,"children":200},{},[201],{"type":34,"value":202},"Megan Ratcliff  8:24  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":204,"children":205},{},[206],{"type":34,"value":207},"Oh my gosh, it's like, it's like, so incredible. Like, literally, this morning I was on a call with somebody, and the point of the call was not to do the thing that we did. It's like we were squirrels, and we went off, but she was like, you know what I want to build is I want to build like this interactive game that I can bring to trade shows and events, and I was like, I love that, say more. And so she, as she was talking, I was in cloud design, I had built their design system already, so like everything was already in there, and so she was like, okay, I want it, I want to be able to like find the bugs that are in websites, so I want to create like a fictitious website, and like the user has to find the bugs in 60 seconds, and the faster they do it, the higher the score. And then, well, let's have a leaderboard, and I wanted to be lead gen, and this, and then that, and then the other thing, and I was like, cool. So I was like, I will build this over here, let's do your real work over here. And then by the end of the session, we had her functioning game built. I sent it to Climb Code, and it started building it, so I was like, there you go, there's your game. Her brain exploded. She was like, \" This is magic, and I was like, it feels like magic, doesn't it? ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":209,"children":210},{},[211],{"type":34,"value":212},"Kerry Guard  9:31  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":214,"children":215},{},[216],{"type":34,"value":217},"It does feel like magic. Let's talk about the building blocks, because you mentioned them in terms of file structure, which I totally agree with getting your, getting your folder set up so that Claude knows sort of its boundaries. I think it is also a safety feature. Yeah, I haven't given it, I'm like scared to hook it up to my Google Drive.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":219,"children":220},{},[221],{"type":34,"value":222},"Megan Ratcliff  9:54  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":224,"children":225},{},[226],{"type":34,"value":227},"Yeah,",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":229,"children":230},{},[231],{"type":34,"value":232},"Kerry Guard  9:56  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":234,"children":235},{},[236],{"type":34,"value":237},"yeah. Have you done it? Yeah, of course, of course, I. Of course, did you put guard rails or anything around it to like try, and",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":239,"children":240},{},[241],{"type":34,"value":242},"Megan Ratcliff  10:04  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":244,"children":245},{},[246],{"type":34,"value":247},"yeah, so like, yeah, so when you're in Claude, when you add a connector, there's like certain permissions that you can give it, like you're allowed to do this, you're not allowed to do this, or you need to ask me before you do this, and the way that I always like advise on this is, if you want to connect to a drive, create a sandbox and only connect to that sandbox, only use projects inside of that place, just to keep things in one little spot. If you're going to manipulate a file, make a copy of that file. So there are definite things that you can do to help safeguard, but I think that there's still a lot that we're learning about how these models work, what they can access, and what they can't. So it's always best to be a little bit cautious. I would err on the side of being more conservative with what you're willing to connect, watch what other people do first, learn from what happens to them before you like jump in and go crazy, but, but, yeah, the connectors do make things just like really streamlined and really wonderful, but we have a cloud sandbox set up in our business, so everything runs through OneDrive rather than the whole thing. Yeah.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":249,"children":250},{},[251],{"type":34,"value":252},"Kerry Guard  11:16  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":254,"children":255},{},[256],{"type":34,"value":257},"Even on my computer, it jumped files. I had it in a folder, it's supposed to only stay in that folder, and it totally jumped folders like the project went outside of that project into another folder project and pulled from that one and added the folder to this project. I was like, no, no, that folder does not belong in this project. I don't know how you did that or knew to do that, but no, undo. Yay, put that back over there. yeah.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":259,"children":260},{},[261],{"type":34,"value":262},"Megan Ratcliff  11:43  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":264,"children":265},{},[266],{"type":34,"value":267},"If that folder had been accessed previously, that's probably how that happened, but if it had never been accessed before, that is, that's a little fun. That",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":269,"children":270},{},[271],{"type":34,"value":272},"Kerry Guard  11:52  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":274,"children":275},{},[276],{"type":34,"value":277},"project, let's, yeah, what are some other foundational building blocks that we need to be taking? I know that we're all just plowing ahead, you know, figuring stuff out as we go, but what else should we, if we could start over, or at least take a huge step back?",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":279,"children":280},{},[281],{"type":34,"value":282},"Megan Ratcliff  12:15  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":284,"children":285},{},[286],{"type":34,"value":227},{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":288,"children":289},{},[290],{"type":34,"value":291},"Kerry Guard  12:16  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":293,"children":294},{},[295],{"type":34,"value":296},"What else should we be taking into consideration?",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":298,"children":299},{},[300],{"type":34,"value":301},"Megan Ratcliff  12:18  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":303,"children":304},{},[305],{"type":34,"value":306},"So, like, the biggest things that are foundationally important, and I think get skipped a lot, are like org-wide AI fluency, and fluency and literacy are different, you know. Anyone can, like, get into the cloud or get into Gemini and, like, click around and figure out how the tool works, but fluency is fundamentally different. It's about how you work with these, how you think about these tools, and fluency is tool agnostic, so thinking about, you know, how do I break down a problem into smaller pieces, so that's actually achievable. What belongs in AI versus what belongs with humans? What kind of context is helpful and structured correctly, versus what is noise? How do I detect drift? How do I restart a conversation when I've reached drift? How do I audit my work to make sure I'm not shipping something that's AI slop or not factual? So those are like the fundamental fluency skills that we teach that I think a lot of organizations like plow right over, and you might get like one or two trainings from HR or IT, that's like here's what our AI policy is, and here's how you use the tool that we gave you, but a lot of them miss the fluency piece, and for fluency to really stick, it has to be customized to the work that you actually do, so if you're a marketer and you are like specifically a PMM, and you're getting examples from somebody in sales, that the fluency doesn't necessarily click for you, because that's not your job, you have to like see it in your work for you to be able to be like got it, mindset has shifted. Now, the other thing that I'll say is really important is governance. So, you probably, most people watching, probably have an AI policy somewhere sitting on a server in their organization, which is like, these are the approved tools. Don't put PII in there, don't do this, don't do that, don't do the other thing, don't start using a tool with a personal account like that's great and fine, every company should have that, but governance is like the living movement of how do we work with this technology across teams, how do we navigate this responsibly, how do we navigate this safely, what are like the decisions that have been made that help protect us as a company, what are the decisions that we've made, like, how risky are we going to be? How do we automate things? What's connected, what's not? So that's more like the living movement of how this happens in an organization, rather than like a staple to the wall. Here's the policy, so fluency, governance, those are the foundational pieces that need to be in place. For people to start to do this transformation in a really safe, responsible, but curious way.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":308,"children":309},{},[310],{"type":34,"value":311},"Kerry Guard  15:07  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":313,"children":314},{},[315],{"type":34,"value":316},"You mentioned the difference between what the robot should do and what the humans should do. Do you have.. I know it changes, like you mentioned, it kind of changes per role, but yeah, do you have sort of like guidelines, best practices around what that should be? Yeah.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":318,"children":319},{},[320],{"type":34,"value":321},"Megan Ratcliff  15:26  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":323,"children":324},{},[325],{"type":34,"value":326},"It's like super curated for each individual person, the role they play, and why they're approaching AI in the first place. So, my number one rule is don't give AI the things that you like to do. If you are a creative, keep that - you're the creative, that's what you like to do. Give AI the stuff you don't like to do. If you don't want to, like, manage a spreadsheet, AI is wonderful at doing that. If you are a type of person, maybe you have like a more balanced brain, and you're like, there are some things I do like to write and some things I don't like to decide what you like versus what you don't. So that's my number one rule, is keep the stuff you like to do offload the stuff you don't, because of the way the AI is moving and changing, and like the sections that each of these AI companies are investing in, there's a lot of things it can do that it used to not be able to, so it's kind of like you get to choose what you offload versus what you don't, but when it comes to judgment, that should always be a human, AI can't practice judgment when it comes to like actual innovation and actual creativity, like AI cannot create something new or novel, only humans can do that. So those are the things that I like; those things stay human. Well, you can offload most other things to AI, but keep what you like to do, and offload the rest.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":328,"children":329},{},[330],{"type":34,"value":331},"Kerry Guard  17:07  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":333,"children":334},{},[335],{"type":34,"value":336},"It's your expertise too. ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":338,"children":339},{},[340],{"type":34,"value":341},"Megan Ratcliff  17:10  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":343,"children":344},{},[345],{"type":34,"value":346},"Yeah,1,000%",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":348,"children":349},{},[350],{"type":34,"value":351},"Kerry Guard  17:11  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":353,"children":354},{},[355],{"type":34,"value":356},"Somebody said the other day on LinkedIn that they used AI - they're a writer, it's what they do. They write LinkedIn posts, it's literally their job, and they offloaded it to AI, and it took them a whole day to write something that would have taken them an hour.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":358,"children":359},{},[360],{"type":34,"value":361},"Megan Ratcliff  17:23  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":363,"children":364},{},[365],{"type":34,"value":366},"Yeah, I've had like a very similar experience with this. Well, first of all, like LinkedIn is a little bit wild these days, I will say, and it's a lot of people using AI in ways that it probably shouldn't be used, and when people give up their authentic voice to a robot, like it's missing its soul, and it's easy to tell, right? There are certain language patterns AI picks up on that it's difficult to edit out with a prompt, it just is going to appear, and unless you're doing like really good line edits on it, it's going to be very visible that you use, you had an assist, right, which I don't think is like terrible all the time, but when I was first starting, I was using my pal Claude just to help me start to organize and frame what I was going to say, because when I first started like posting to LinkedIn, that felt like a very vulnerable moment for me, because I was like on my AI journey, like posting in real time about what I was learning and how I was progressing in my career. This was a couple of years ago, and I am not, by nature, a great writer. I have literal English majors in my family who are excellent writers, and it's not me; I can barely string a sentence together. So for me it was very vulnerable and scary to be posting about this, but also adding on that I'm not an eloquent, like, writer, those things together, so I was using it as an assist, but like, as I was doing that, and as I was progressing, I was like, you know what, this is missing is it's missing like my authenticity and my soul, so I stopped doing it, and so now everything that you read on my LinkedIn is that is a 100% me. I am writing that with my two fingers inside, usually in the LinkedIn box, and because of that, I think that builds more trust. So when we offload the writing that should come from an actual person to an AI, I think it becomes very visible and noticeable, and I think there's a breakdown in trust there.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":368,"children":369},{},[370],{"type":34,"value":371},"Kerry Guard  19:27  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":373,"children":374},{},[375],{"type":34,"value":376},"I think there's a lot of breakdown and trust that's just happening across the board, even for, like, I know my daughter is calling, like, a 10-year-old looking at stuff on YouTube, like a slop, right? Like, yeah, she is just so in tune with it these days that I think these kids are going to be, they're going to tune it out, right? ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":378,"children":379},{},[380],{"type":34,"value":381},"Megan Ratcliff  19:49  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":383,"children":384},{},[385],{"type":34,"value":386},"Yeah, there's like, there's so much out there right now, like content is being generated, like there's more AI stuff on the internet than there is. Human created stuff at this point in time, which is crazy, but I think when people don't have the foundation of fluency and they don't have the foundation of governance, they're running wild and they're creating stuff that's not worthwhile any longer, and so you have to have those foundational pieces, like, I think AI is a wonderful assist to help with a lot of different things, but when you are just shipping straight AI-created material, first of all, that's like not defensible, like, you, it's not yours any longer, you can't claim it when there's no human intervention and there's no like polish on it that comes from a human, you can tell, and so that's where it starts to like be a breakdown in your audiences. They don't trust you any longer, because it's not you that's behind it, it's a robot.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":388,"children":389},{},[390],{"type":34,"value":391},"Kerry Guard  20:53  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":393,"children":394},{},[395],{"type":34,"value":396},"From an SEO perspective, this is going to become - it's already is just so important in terms of the content that's being produced, because if it's not different to your point earlier about needing to make sure that as humans we're creating things that are net new and not just regurgitations of the World Wide Web.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":398,"children":399},{},[400],{"type":34,"value":401},"Megan Ratcliff  21:14  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":403,"children":404},{},[405],{"type":34,"value":406},"Right.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":408,"children":409},{},[410],{"type":34,"value":411},"Kerry Guard  21:14  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":413,"children":414},{},[415],{"type":34,"value":416},"That in order to get mentioned to show up in AI SEO, like we have to say something different, and it has to be in line with what the brand offers, and how the audience is thinking about the problem, and so I agree with you that AI is a great assist there in helping you figure out what the problem is, and how you're different in doing that deep research. Yeah, but man, I had tried to help me write the website, and I was like, you just, yeah.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":418,"children":419},{},[420],{"type":34,"value":421},"Megan Ratcliff  21:51  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":423,"children":424},{},[425],{"type":34,"value":426},"Me, yeah, well, I'm like, the thing I think that it's easy for people to grasp, right, content is easy, I can use AI to write content, everyone's doing it everywhere, that's the, that's the shortcut. When you start working as, like, AI, as the, as a, like backup, as behind-the-scenes, that's where it becomes really valuable. So think about, as somebody who creates content, you have to, like, mine a lot of information, right? You need insights from different places where maybe you're not always at there's, you know, like Reddit, there's conversations going on all the time, or in like Trust Pilot, or whatever, like there's conversations happening all over the web, and what AI is really great at is like plucking those and bringing them back to you, so you can be like, oh, that is interesting, let me double tap on that a little bit. So, when you use it as your source of intelligence and helping you, like, kind of pull out this information, you, the human, are the one that's saying, this is the insight right here, I'm going to write about that. So, when you use it behind the scenes, that's what the time saver is. Yes, and that's what's going to make you more differentiated than somebody else, is because you're not just like rambling on because you can, you're talking about something that's important to somebody else, and that maybe they're not receiving an answer to, so you are answering their question, and that is the hard thing to do, and that's what the, like, best people are doing.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":428,"children":429},{},[430],{"type":34,"value":431},"Kerry Guard  23:27  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":433,"children":434},{},[435],{"type":34,"value":436},"Yeah, allowing, freeing you up to focus on this, the things that really are what we need to be doing, versus moving data between sheets. Yes.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":438,"children":439},{},[440],{"type":34,"value":441},"Kerry Guard  23:36  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":443,"children":444},{},[445],{"type":34,"value":446},"yeah.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":448,"children":449},{},[450],{"type":34,"value":451},"Megan Ratcliff  23:36  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":453,"children":454},{},[455],{"type":34,"value":456},"Exactly.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":458,"children":459},{},[460],{"type":34,"value":461},"Kerry Guard  23:38  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":463,"children":464},{},[465],{"type":34,"value":466},"You said the work you set out to do isn't the work you're actually doing now. It's become a change management moment, the chance to knock the whole structure down and rebuild it. What does that rebuild actually look like? So, we talked about fluency, we talked about governance, and we talked about the file structure. Is there any, like, what's the next step in that?",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":468,"children":469},{},[470],{"type":34,"value":471},"Megan Ratcliff  23:59  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":473,"children":474},{},[475],{"type":34,"value":476},"Yeah, so this is like where it starts to get hard and really uncomfortable for companies, and companies are not going to like cross the chasm without it, and it's you have to reorganize on outcomes, and so when we think about a marketing org, there are certain outcomes that you're signing up for each quarter or every year, and so when we put those like on the board, and then you look back at, okay, how do we actually achieve that? You have to start realigning the work that you're doing from the work that you've always done, and so to reach those outcomes, you can't do the work you've always done any longer, and you have to realign the people that do that, like actually works on that work, so it's about understanding everyone's skills, and then mapping out where we have gaps, mapping out the work to be done to achieve that outcome, which is it's not a new concept by any means. Microsoft wrote a really great paper on this last year, called the Frontier Firms, it. If you have an extra 25 minutes, I would read that front to back. I have read it probably 15 times. It's just an excellent case study on who's actually changing in this moment versus who is like cosplaying, and so just getting your team a Claude license without changing the way that work gets done is not actually changing anything. If you pulled the tool out, would the work have changed or not? If the answer is no, you're not doing this correctly. So, you fundamentally just have to change how work gets done in this time, because the work you used to do isn't the work that you're going to need to do moving forward. So, the vast majority of what I talk to leaders about now is, let's take a step back, what is the outcome you're actually trying to achieve? We need to rethink how work is getting done. Sometimes that involves an org structure change, like, oh, actually, we don't like these people are in the wrong roles, like they should be, we should have a marketing engineer now, or we should have, like, a go-to-market specialist that's pulling all these teams together, or we should have that, you know what I mean. And so we need to redeploy people in the roles that actually align with the skills that they have, rather than here's the traditional role that we used to be in, because that's how it's always been. So it's a big, big change management initiative. I would say it's like 80-20, 80% is change management, 20% is like learning the tooling, so that's something that absolutely cannot be ignored. And it's something that I'm working very closely with leaders on right now, is like figuring this out. How does it change? How does it shift? What does this look like in 612, 18 months?",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":478,"children":479},{},[480],{"type":34,"value":481},"Kerry Guard  26:44  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":483,"children":484},{},[485],{"type":34,"value":486},"GTM has been something that's been around for, I'd say, the last five years, maybe three, three to five years, but I feel like I'm now just understanding what it means, and I feel like AI is really making that role,",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":488,"children":489},{},[490],{"type":34,"value":491},"Megan Ratcliff  26:59  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":493,"children":494},{},[495],{"type":34,"value":446},{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":497,"children":498},{},[499],{"type":34,"value":500},"Kerry Guard  27:00  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":502,"children":503},{},[504],{"type":34,"value":505},"solidified as like the thing you need, would it? What other roles has AI impacted in that way? Where it wasn't really a thing, or it was kind of sort of hovering in the background. You mentioned the, the, the marketing engineer - I've heard that term starting to sort of float now. What roles have changed, and what new roles are sort of coming up, thanks to this change management you're talking about?",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":507,"children":508},{},[509],{"type":34,"value":510},"Megan Ratcliff  27:27  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":512,"children":513},{},[514],{"type":34,"value":515},"Yeah, so a role that you're probably hearing a lot about is a go-to-market engineer, and previously, before AI, before AI, we had, you know, there would be sales, sales enablement, marketing, sometimes product marketing would sit outside of there. You would have customer success, so all of these teams were working independently of each other, right? Sometimes, like, marketing will call over to sales and be like, \"What's the word on the street?\" Or sales will call over to marketing and be like, \" Hey, can I get a battle card? So, like, they were all functioning independently with the onset of AI, and honestly, just like with the shift of how companies need to work, you need a central like team called the go-to market that is really understanding how the customer is going to experience you as a company, and that go-to-market team is pulling on all of those levers: sales, marketing, sales enablement, product marketing, customer success. They have to pull it all together because a customer doesn't experience you in all of those separate silos. They experience you as one brand, and so that go to market is the one that's understanding the customer, creating the experiences that the customer wants to have with your brand, and making sure that they are, you know, having a good experience with you, understanding what services you have, helping them like expand inside of your company, while also making it seem like their idea, so like that go to market is, you know, sometimes it's one person called a go to market engineer. I think that that term was kind of popularized by Clay a couple of years ago, and now we're seeing, you know, tooling being built to support the go to market to support that go to market engineer. So it's kind of a wild time. So that is one thing that's happening for sure that we're seeing everywhere. Another one that I'm seeing is context engineers. So, when we think about how our brand, you know, shifts and changes, and how everybody talks about our company at the same time? So, say if you have a brand with several different products and a salesperson reaching for something over here to help sell the one product, that like that context could have shifted and changed in a different area of the business, and that salesperson would never have known about it, and so the context engineer is building this context layer that sits across the entire org that every. A single person can tap into so that they have the latest and greatest context. This is how we talk about the service; this is how we talk about the brand; this is what we say; this is how we say it. So that context layer is becoming very important, and you'll see context engineers starting to sprout up that structure, that context in a way that's usable.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":517,"children":518},{},[519],{"type":34,"value":520},"Kerry Guard  30:18  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":522,"children":523},{},[524],{"type":34,"value":525},"Everything I'm shouting from the mountaintops in regards to how you have to really understand your customer and the problem that they're having that you solve better than anybody else, and how you communicate that, and it has to be consistent through your entire customer journey all the way out to your entire digital footprint, and so this seems like the solution, but when you're talking to companies that are more, maybe in that scale up phase, and their resources, like you've worked at, you've worked at a few of these, they're sort of their resources are a bit more limited. How do they justify, like, the amount of resources that this takes to be able to do this, or is it just a changing marketing team, where it's now all being sort of compressed more into the GTM team, and they're all working as a single entity, versus sales over here, marketing over here, GTM in the middle?",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":527,"children":528},{},[529],{"type":34,"value":530},"Megan Ratcliff  31:18  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":532,"children":533},{},[534],{"type":34,"value":535},"It depends on the size of the company, so like smaller companies, obviously, are a lot more agile, so they're able to like pull this all together, and also like their context layer is probably a lot smaller than a gigantic corporation that has several product lines, etc., etc. So I've seen it a couple of different ways. I am actually working with a client right now on building their context layer, and there are like phases to this, right? We're not just going to go and build this all out in one shot. We have to figure out how the company is going to use it first. So we're doing like a v version of it, and there's like three different outputs that are being deployed as the context layer, and then we're figuring out what v looks like, and the person I'm working with is like a content person on their team right now, and he's taken like a vested interest in this, because he's like, I know how fundamentally important it is for everybody to be speaking the same language, and to be like detailing out what we do the same way, and for each industry that we serve, there are certain ways that we talk about things that's really important, and as you know, people are using AI to help them write sales emails, or to help them, you know, pull together decks to present to clients, that all needs to look and sound the same, and so we're building this context layer in phases, so V is almost complete, and it's getting deployed in a couple of different ways, but it's centrally located as a markdown file in one place that can be pulled into the different AI tools that they use. It's also being deployed as like a few different skills that we're breaking it into, and it's being like pushed into one project where if you have questions about how to say it, what to do, who we serve, you can go get that information in one central location, but the marketing team is the team that is driving that context layer. There's a couple of other layers too, I don't know if you want to go into them, but like to do true AI transformation, it's more than context, so there's, there's like the data layer as well, so marketing should be, should be a layer, but that is much, much larger than a marketing team, because you're going to have customer success is getting information from the user on how they're using the product and what they're having trouble with, like that, is really valuable information. Sales are getting, you know, questions about. Here's the problem that I'm trying to solve. Here's what's going on. Valuable information. Marketers have a different lens that they're looking. Here's what's going on in the market. Here's what our competitors are doing. Here's what we're up against. Valuable information. And then everything is going into, like, a black hole inside of whatever CRM that they're using, that's probably not being updated very well, and so there's a lot of missing data, but when you give everyone access to all of the lenses, that makes it a much more complete data set, so that everybody can look at it and be like, oh, customer success is saying, like, users are having trouble with this feature, we need to do something about that, and so those are the things that used to get lost, but if you can create a full data layer where all of the information is accessible to the different teams that need it, that is like one huge thing that you're doing to really help move your business forward, and also like AI is an amplifier, so if your data layer is a mess, guess what's going to get amplified, that data layer, and it's going to be even messier. So folks need to get that sorted out like immediately, and then there's the context layer, then there's the orchestration layer, which is how do we. Pull these levers. How do we manipulate the context? How do we manipulate the data? What are the tools that we're building and using across teams? How do we compound the value of those tools? So that's another layer. So the orchestration layer is really about the ecosystem that you build to support it, and then there's the judgment layer.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":537,"children":538},{},[539],{"type":34,"value":540},"Kerry Guard  35:19  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":542,"children":543},{},[544],{"type":34,"value":545},"With fields and agents.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":547,"children":548},{},[549],{"type":34,"value":550},"Megan Ratcliff  35:20  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":552,"children":553},{},[554],{"type":34,"value":555},"yeah,",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":557,"children":558},{},[559],{"type":34,"value":560},"Kerry Guard  35:21  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":562,"children":563},{},[564],{"type":34,"value":565},"Sort of thing that happens in an orchestra.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":567,"children":568},{},[569],{"type":34,"value":570},"Megan Ratcliff  35:22  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":572,"children":573},{},[574],{"type":34,"value":575},"Exactly, yeah, and then the last layer is the human judgment layer, and this is the skill that you build that's part of that foundation, you know, it's part of governance. How risky are we going to be? What do goods look like? What do we feel confident putting out into the market? How do we want people to experience us? Is this right or is this not right? So that judgment layer is a really critical component, and if you don't have that locked in with your team, it can get really messy. So those are the four layers, essentially, that you need for true AI transformation.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":577,"children":578},{},[579],{"type":34,"value":580},"Kerry Guard  35:58  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":582,"children":583},{},[584],{"type":34,"value":585},"In terms of the data layer, what I loved about what you were saying, that I think is so interesting, is you know, when we think about data, we generally think about the numbers of it all, but everything you described is qualitative.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":587,"children":588},{},[589],{"type":34,"value":590},"Megan Ratcliff  36:10  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":592,"children":593},{},[594],{"type":34,"value":595},"Yeah",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":597,"children":598},{},[599],{"type":34,"value":600},"Kerry Guard  36:11  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":602,"children":603},{},[604],{"type":34,"value":605},"that usually gets lost in the CRM and is hard to pull out. So, how are you when you're talking about the data layer? Where am I getting technical here, because I'm trying to understand the building? Where does it live? Going back to the folders, I imagine it's getting you to have agents that go out and get the data and pull it into a folder that then everybody has access to from the orchestra.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":607,"children":608},{},[609],{"type":34,"value":610},"Megan Ratcliff  36:35  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":612,"children":613},{},[614],{"type":34,"value":615},"Yeah, the way that a lot of companies are doing this is they're building vector databases to house all this information, so what's great about a vector database is it creates meaning out of ones and zeros, and so if you are looking for something, but you don't have like the exact right query, it's going to still surface information that's related to that, so if you as a marketer, what's going on in customer success lately? You could query a vector database that's housing the conversations that are going on, the, you know, win-loss rates with customers, the expansion rates within customers, and you can help figure out what is what is actually happening, you know, you're looking through their lens, but everybody's data is stored in a place where it's accessible to all, and so at every company, depending on the size of the company, the data layer is going to look different, and I am not like a technical person, so there are people that are much more qualified to speak on this, but those that I have talked to, this is the way that they're setting it up, even if you think about, if you think about, like reporting, so I work with a lot of like marketing agencies, and we think about, you know, if you're a cross-channel marketing agency, you've got a lot of different teams that are contributing to one client, but the client doesn't want 15 different reports, they want one, and so you have to combine all of that data and normalize it in one place, so that you can create a report that is smart, cohesive, that tells like the full story of what's going on, because we know that it's not one channel that's going to do xyz, it's the combined effort of all of those channels, and so putting everything into one place is what helps you uncover those insights, so there's a, there's a lot of different ways to look at it, for sure. Hire an expert.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":617,"children":618},{},[619],{"type":34,"value":620},"Kerry Guard  38:30  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":622,"children":623},{},[624],{"type":34,"value":625},"because we're an agency, and so we want to know, especially SEO, so much more qualitative than necessarily quantitative as well. So to be able to tell that story, and then delayer in digital ads to talk about how they impact one another, is going to be really cool. I also am really excited because we're going to be able to aggregate it across all of our clients and make it client agnostic to find trends, just like what's happening, so smart that is.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":627,"children":628},{},[629],{"type":34,"value":630},"Megan Ratcliff  38:55  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":632,"children":633},{},[634],{"type":34,"value":635},"That's like an excellent example of how a data layer can work when you build it correctly, is you're able to like slice and dice it in ways that you weren't able to do before, so you could create like a trends report on here's what we're seeing in the industry based on real data that's happening, that's that's like so valuable.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":637,"children":638},{},[639],{"type":34,"value":640},"Kerry Guard  39:16  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":642,"children":643},{},[644],{"type":34,"value":645},"I'm so excited.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":647,"children":648},{},[649],{"type":34,"value":650},"Megan Ratcliff  39:17  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":652,"children":653},{},[654],{"type":34,"value":655},"That's amazing. You'll have to show me sometime. I am really interested.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":657,"children":658},{},[659],{"type":34,"value":660},"Kerry Guard  39:22  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":662,"children":663},{},[664],{"type":34,"value":665},"Oh, well, we get set up. I'll call you. We will make that happen. This is amazing. Oh my gosh, I could talk to you all day. We have all right. I'm gonna ask another question, because I can't. You said when companies cut people, they're cutting their context, their nuance, their culture, and killing the chance to create new value streams. Make that case for the exec who's staring at AI as a way to do more with fewer people.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":667,"children":668},{},[669],{"type":34,"value":670},"Megan Ratcliff  39:50  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":672,"children":673},{},[674],{"type":34,"value":675},"Yeah, for sure. I think that people have, like, such a misunderstanding. So, people in general, there's such bad marketing around AI. Now it's like, so bad, we have such a bad PR problem, but executives right now have a lot of pressure, right? What you need to do more with less money, and it's easiest to cut head count, but what they're giving up when they do that is that there's a lot of nuance that is carried with human beings, there's a lot of creativity that is carried with human beings, and there's a lot of curiosity that is carried with human beings. So, my favorite example of a company doing this right is the IKEA example, and if you haven't heard about this, I really encourage you to look it up, because what happened with IKEA is they introduced AI into their business. Obviously, they found efficiencies. We don't need as many customer service people, we don't need as many XYZ, but instead of letting them go, they redeployed them, and they opened up a new division, which is helping customers design their space using AI. So now they have re-skilled the employees that would have been displaced to drive that business forward, and it's like it's been like a billion-dollar business for Ikea, because they opened up a new value stream using human innovation, human ingenuity, and creativity. Think about all of the information that those customer service people hold in their brains to be able to help support their customers in this new endeavor, so that's where, like, I love to see it, because AI gives you the ability to do more with less. Yes, but it also gives you the ability to do something new, which is the best part of this whole thing, and that's what I want people to realize and understand, and it's not about cutting costs, it's about adding revenue, and the only way you add revenue is redeploying people, reskilling people in areas you haven't been before, so that's like my number one, like, come on,",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":677,"children":678},{},[679],{"type":34,"value":680},"Kerry Guard  42:00  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":682,"children":683},{},[684],{"type":34,"value":685},"Yes, I completely agree. I don't think the answer is to cut people. I think the answer is to give them the AI tools, the fluency, the governance, and the how to use this, and then maybe you'll find that you need to hire less people as you go, but you'll actually fuel your efforts now by not letting people go, you'll actually fall behind in the market by letting people go. Then, had you kept them getting the right skill set and seen what could happen, I had a great conversation with a friend of mine who's also a marketer, and we were talking about how even if AI helps us find some efficiencies, we're always going to have work to do.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":687,"children":688},{},[689],{"type":34,"value":690},"Megan Ratcliff  42:49  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":692,"children":693},{},[694],{"type":34,"value":695},"There's always work to do, 100%",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":697,"children":698},{},[699],{"type":34,"value":700},"Kerry Guard  42:51  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":702,"children":703},{},[704],{"type":34,"value":705},"always work to do. So, yeah, I would. I just cannot agree more in terms of, please don't let your people go, give them the right skills and the right tool sets, and see where it'll take you, and I'll redeploy them. That's brilliant.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":707,"children":708},{},[709],{"type":34,"value":710},"Megan Ratcliff  43:09  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":712,"children":713},{},[714],{"type":34,"value":715},"Yeah, I think I think one of my favorite things about people is their ability to surprise you in the best ways, and like, we ran a workshop a couple of years ago, Carolyn and I did, and it was like, let's grab like the most untethered thinkers in this organization, those that are not going to be boxed in by like what we've always done, and let's have like a revenue workshop with them to find new value streams for the company. We came up with like 15 new ideas. I think we deployed like five in a couple of months, because we could, and so that's what I want to see from companies, that's what I want to see from leaders, is like the people will surprise you in the best ways, if you get rid of them, you're losing your ability to innovate.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":717,"children":718},{},[719],{"type":34,"value":720},"Kerry Guard  43:58  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":722,"children":723},{},[724],{"type":34,"value":725},"It's so true. Oh my gosh, Megan, this was amazing. There's so much more we can learn. I know it. And if you'd like to learn more from Megan, you can find her. I'm assuming on LinkedIn. That's how I find you. I found you. Is there anywhere else people can get in touch with you?",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":727,"children":728},{},[729],{"type":34,"value":730},"Megan Ratcliff  44:13  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":732,"children":733},{},[734],{"type":34,"value":735},"Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, LinkedIn slash Megan Ratcliffe, probably. Otherwise, my website is Clarity inmotion.com. You can find me there as well.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":737,"children":738},{},[739],{"type":34,"value":740},"Kerry Guard  44:23  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":742,"children":743},{},[744],{"type":34,"value":745},"And we should all head there right now and go learn more, because this is where it's all I will link to the IKEA article, the Frontier paper, all of the things, so that we can dig deeper into what Megan is saying and get out ahead, because we have a, we have a lot of work to do, y'all.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":747,"children":748},{},[749],{"type":34,"value":750},"Megan Ratcliff  44:41  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":752,"children":753},{},[754],{"type":34,"value":755},"Yes, yes. ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":757,"children":758},{},[759],{"type":34,"value":760},"Kerry Guard  44:42  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":762,"children":763},{},[764],{"type":34,"value":765},"Thank you so much, Megan. This was amazing.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":767,"children":768},{},[769],{"type":34,"value":770},"Megan Ratcliff  44:45  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":772,"children":773},{},[774],{"type":34,"value":775},"Yes, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":777,"children":778},{},[779],{"type":34,"value":780},"Kerry Guard  44:48  ",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":782,"children":783},{},[784],{"type":34,"value":785},"That was every bit the conversation I knew it would be. Thank you for being here, so generous with it. You can find Megan, as we mentioned, at Clarity In Motion Collective over on LinkedIn and at Clarity inmotion.com. Go connect. Especially if your team is staring down AI and trying to do it in a way that keeps your people at the center. If there's one thing to take with you, AI isn't the thing that makes your people expendable. Your people are the context, the nuance, the culture, the whole reason anyone wants to do work with you. The opportunity isn't to do the same work with fewer humans, it's to build the work around what your humans are actually best at, and let the technology carry the rest. This episode is brought to you by MKG Marketing. And when we say visibility, here's exactly what we mean: all three working together - SEO, AEO, GO - you need all three, and you need them to own their own pieces. They'll also overlap and ultimately help you be visible and not just be sighted, but we want to help you get mentioned, ultimately get mentioned. That's what needs to happen, and we're here to help you. Thanks for being here. We'll catch you next Thursday as you are.",{"title":7,"searchDepth":787,"depth":787,"links":788},2,[789,790],{"id":31,"depth":787,"text":35},{"id":44,"depth":787,"text":47},"markdown","content:podcasts:marketing-leaders:ai-fluency-is-the-new-competitive-advantage.md","content","podcasts/marketing-leaders/ai-fluency-is-the-new-competitive-advantage.md","podcasts/marketing-leaders/ai-fluency-is-the-new-competitive-advantage","md",[798,1155,1481,1801,2390],{"_path":799,"_dir":800,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":801,"description":802,"date":803,"imgAlt":804,"img":805,"body":806,"_type":791,"_id":1151,"_source":793,"_file":1152,"_stem":1153,"_extension":796,"category":800,"minutes":1154},"/blog/seo/the-board-ready-svo-dashboard-how-to-report-pipeline-when-traffic-disappears","seo","The Board-Ready SVO Dashboard - How to Report Pipeline When Traffic Disappears","When top-of-funnel web traffic drops, legacy marketing reports make you look like you are failing. Here is how to present high-converting SVO pipeline data that wins over the board.","2026-06-17T17:31:07.350Z","SVO","https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/18b8f0c2-c43f-4536-a5c7-ac65d154018a-mkg-blog-the-board-ready-svo-dashboard-hero-image.webp",{"type":25,"children":807,"toc":1142},[808,813,818,823,828,837,843,848,853,858,863,869,874,887,922,927,935,941,946,966,971,976,982,987,1004,1009,1032,1037,1045,1051,1056,1061,1094,1099,1105,1110,1115,1131,1137],{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":809,"children":810},{},[811],{"type":34,"value":812},"As the lone marketing leader in a growing organization, preparing monthly updates for executive leadership can quickly start to feel like a defensive drill. You open your standard analytics dashboard to build the performance report, and the headline charts look alarming. Total organic website sessions have declined sharply over the past two quarters. Click-through rates on your core keyword targets have stalled. To a CEO or board that’s used to gauging marketing health by steadily rising traffic graphs, this data signals an unmistakable operational breakdown. The immediate assumption is that your acquisition engine is stalling and your marketing budget is being squandered.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":814,"children":815},{},[816],{"type":34,"value":817},"But when you move beyond surface-level web traffic and examine the actual sales pipeline in your CRM, a very different picture emerges. Sales-qualified opportunities are stable. The total value of your active pipeline is increasing, and customer acquisition timelines are actually accelerating. The core problem isn’t diminishing market demand or poor execution from your team. The real constraint is that your existing reporting models are completely blind to where high-intent pipeline is being created before prospects ever land on your website.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":819,"children":820},{},[821],{"type":34,"value":822},"Traditional marketing dashboards are built on a simple, linear multi-channel attribution story: a prospect clicks an organic listing, browses your blog, and submits a form. Today, that critical mid-funnel research phase has shifted almost entirely into conversational search environments.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":824,"children":825},{},[826],{"type":34,"value":827},"High-value enterprise buyers are now getting direct vendor comparisons, validating integration requirements, and checking compliance criteria long before they visit a URL or show up in your SEO tools. If you continue trying to justify marketing’s impact with legacy traffic volume, session length, and top-of-funnel MQL counts, you will keep appearing to lose momentum, even as your true revenue influence grows. To withstand serious boardroom scrutiny, you must let go of vanity traffic metrics and adopt an executive reporting framework built squarely around SVO ROI.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":829,"children":830},{},[831],{"type":28,"tag":832,"props":833,"children":836},"img",{"alt":834,"src":835},"Pipeline report","https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/b0f0d46f-904b-4a50-8853-f82738aeda04-mkg-blog-the-board-ready-svo-dashboard-image-1.png",[],{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":838,"children":840},{"id":839},"the-blind-spots-of-legacy-attribution",[841],{"type":34,"value":842},"The Blind Spots of Legacy Attribution",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":844,"children":845},{},[846],{"type":34,"value":847},"To defend your marketing budget and protect your strategy from premature executive meddling, you first need to understand why legacy tracking tools fail to reflect the real high-value buyer journey. Traditional multi-channel attribution models are built on the idea that your corporate website is the primary hub for education and intent capture. As software purchasing moves away from simple click-through behavior, this assumption creates enormous data blind spots.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":849,"children":850},{},[851],{"type":34,"value":852},"This measurement failure is at the heart of the Attribution 3.0 crisis. When an enterprise procurement leader turns to a conversational engine to compare your product’s deployment speed and API integrations with a competitor, the system pulls from thousands of distributed data sources to produce a single, authoritative recommendation. The buyer reads the synthesized insight, concludes that your brand is the best fit, and then goes straight to your site to book a demo.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":854,"children":855},{},[856],{"type":34,"value":857},"By the time that lead appears in your CRM, legacy analytics tools label it as a direct visit or branded search. The pivotal mid-funnel research stage, the moment your technical optimization actually won the buyer’s attention, is completely invisible in your standard reporting.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":859,"children":860},{},[861],{"type":34,"value":862},"If your executive updates continue to lean on top-of-funnel click volume, you are effectively punishing your marketing strategy for generating efficient, zero-click conversions. To reset this story in the boardroom, you must move beyond counting casual web sessions and start measuring Referential Authority. You need to demonstrate to leadership that marketing’s true value lies not in attracting passive visitors but in embedding your platform within the precise data ecosystems where buying decisions are made.",{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":864,"children":866},{"id":865},"building-the-board-ready-svo-metric-suite",[867],{"type":34,"value":868},"Building the Board-Ready SVO Metric Suite",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":870,"children":871},{},[872],{"type":34,"value":873},"Replacing defensive, traffic-focused explanations with an objective growth framework requires a complete re-engineering of your executive dashboard. A board of directors does not care about individual keyword movements, impressions, or fluctuating organic search charts. They require clear, financial-grade evidence showing that your digital distribution strategy is systematically capturing market share and feeding the revenue engine.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":875,"children":876},{},[877,879,885],{"type":34,"value":878},"As explicitly illustrated in your active pipeline analytics, looking at revenue value relative to acquisition cost completely re-frames the value of your marketing channels. A sophisticated, ",{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":881,"children":882},"strong",{},[883],{"type":34,"value":884},"Board-Ready Metrics",{"type":34,"value":886}," suite shifts the focus from traffic volumes to actual funnel efficiency by isolating three primary pillars:",{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":889,"children":890},"ul",{},[891,902,912],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":893,"children":894},"li",{},[895,900],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":896,"children":897},{},[898],{"type":34,"value":899},"AI Share of Voice:",{"type":34,"value":901}," This metric tracks your brand's presence across specific procurement prompts relative to your primary competitors. By systematically auditing target commercial queries across major language models, you calculate the exact percentage of time your platform is recommended as a preferred solution.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":903,"children":904},{},[905,910],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":906,"children":907},{},[908],{"type":34,"value":909},"Verified Citation Frequencies:",{"type":34,"value":911}," Instead of tracking superficial impressions, you document the exact number of times a conversational interface explicitly links to your domain or your authoritative third-party profiles to validate its recommendation. This provides absolute proof that your content infrastructure is acting as a trusted source of truth.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":913,"children":914},{},[915,920],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":916,"children":917},{},[918],{"type":34,"value":919},"MQL to SQL Conversion Velocity:",{"type":34,"value":921}," Rather than celebrating a high volume of cheap, top-of-funnel clicks, this metric shows that your conversational optimization is driving pre-educated buyers who convert at a significantly higher rate through the sales pipeline.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":923,"children":924},{},[925],{"type":34,"value":926},"By centering your dashboard on these pillars, you completely change the dynamic of your executive conversations. You stop talking about the web traffic you lost and start showing the high-value pipeline share you actively control.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":928,"children":929},{},[930],{"type":28,"tag":832,"props":931,"children":934},{"alt":932,"src":933},"reports","https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/96600b7e-0c88-4723-84a4-6302d54d9c81-mkg-blog-the-board-ready-svo-dashboard-image-2.png",[],{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":936,"children":938},{"id":937},"analyzing-the-high-yield-channel-mix",[939],{"type":34,"value":940},"Analyzing the High-Yield Channel Mix",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":942,"children":943},{},[944],{"type":34,"value":945},"A close examination of your performance data makes one thing unmistakably clear: the real business value lies elsewhere than traditional metrics suggest. Organic search may still deliver impressive traffic volume, but once you map each channel against pipeline value and cost per sales-qualified lead (SQL), the underlying structure comes into focus.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":947,"children":948},{},[949,951,964],{"type":34,"value":950},"Conventional ",{"type":28,"tag":952,"props":953,"children":957},"a",{"href":954,"rel":955},"https://mkgmarketinginc.com/expert-digital-marketing-services/search-engine-optimization/",[956],"nofollow",[958],{"type":28,"tag":959,"props":960,"children":961},"u",{},[962],{"type":34,"value":963},"organic SEO",{"type":34,"value":965}," often appears efficient on a cost-per-lead basis, yet it typically produces an oversized pool of low-intent visitors that converts poorly into a true pipeline. In contrast, optimization designed for modern conversational interfaces generates a smaller, highly concentrated stream of pre-qualified buyer intent. Prospects arriving through these paths have already completed their comparison research before they ever encounter your forms.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":967,"children":968},{},[969],{"type":34,"value":970},"This behavioral shift is visible in your performance models. A traditional search visitor typically requires extensive nurturing through long, resource-intensive content sequences, whereas an SVO-driven lead advances from MQL to confirmed SQL at a significantly higher rate. In many enterprise environments, this conversion velocity surpasses traditional organic search by double-digit margins.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":972,"children":973},{},[974],{"type":34,"value":975},"When you share these metrics with the board, you can show that declining raw web traffic is actually a sign of optimization. You are intentionally filtering out low-value, non-converting visitors while increasing your share of high-intent, high-value buyers. This reframes a traffic drop from an apparent marketing failure into a deliberate, highly efficient pipeline strategy.",{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":977,"children":979},{"id":978},"aligning-the-funnel-for-maximum-capital-efficiency",[980],{"type":34,"value":981},"Aligning the Funnel for Maximum Capital Efficiency",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":983,"children":984},{},[985],{"type":34,"value":986},"The ultimate business validation of a fully optimized reporting architecture is a dramatic increase in mid-funnel conversion velocity and overall capital efficiency. When your digital footprint is designed specifically to feed modern answer engines, you eliminate a massive amount of friction from the standard buyer journey.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":988,"children":989},{},[990,992,1002],{"type":34,"value":991},"As clearly demonstrated in recent performance datasets, including ",{"type":28,"tag":952,"props":993,"children":996},{"href":994,"rel":995},"https://company.g2.com/news/g2-research-the-answer-economy",[956],[997],{"type":28,"tag":959,"props":998,"children":999},{},[1000],{"type":34,"value":1001},"G2’s 2026 Answer Economy Report",{"type":34,"value":1003},", 51% of B2B software buyers now actively bypass traditional search engine queries in favor of direct, conversational interfaces when evaluating options.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1005,"children":1006},{},[1007],{"type":34,"value":1008},"Consider the operational divergence between two distinct corporate marketing frameworks:",{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":1010,"children":1011},{},[1012,1022],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1013,"children":1014},{},[1015,1020],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1016,"children":1017},{},[1018],{"type":34,"value":1019},"The Traffic-Dependent Funnel:",{"type":34,"value":1021}," An organization spends heavily to maintain high-volume web traffic, driving users to gated content hubs and complex multi-page blogs. As user behavior shifts toward conversational search, click volume plummets, stalling lead metrics and forcing the marketing team to continually request more ad budget to sustain the pipeline.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1023,"children":1024},{},[1025,1030],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1026,"children":1027},{},[1028],{"type":34,"value":1029},"The Citation-Optimized Funnel:",{"type":34,"value":1031}," An organization focuses entirely on structuring its data for machine ingestion, deploying clean schema layers, ungated technical specifications, and consistent feature registries across the web. The brand is systematically surfaced at the top of every conversational procurement summary, routing highly educated, pre-validated buyers directly into the sales cycle.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1033,"children":1034},{},[1035],{"type":34,"value":1036},"This clear operational contrast explains why modern marketing maturity is no longer defined by how many visitors you drive to your website. It is defined by how effectively you position your company's core insights for synthesis by the platforms where your buyers already spend their time.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1038,"children":1039},{},[1040],{"type":28,"tag":832,"props":1041,"children":1044},{"alt":1042,"src":1043},"funnel","https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/a1923ed9-0c7c-4ff8-ac6e-03616b440fcd-mkg-blog-the-board-ready-svo-dashboard-image-3.png",[],{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":1046,"children":1048},{"id":1047},"operationalizing-the-boardroom-presentation",[1049],{"type":34,"value":1050},"Operationalizing the Boardroom Presentation",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1052,"children":1053},{},[1054],{"type":34,"value":1055},"Transitioning to a highly structured pipeline framework requires a permanent shift in how your daily marketing operations are structured, tracked, and defended. As a solo marketing leader, you can no longer operate as a creative services hub; you must run your department like a data-driven financial operations center.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1057,"children":1058},{},[1059],{"type":34,"value":1060},"Defending your marketing strategy to the board requires anchoring your weekly execution around three concrete operational cadences:",{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":1062,"children":1063},{},[1064,1074,1084],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1065,"children":1066},{},[1067,1072],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1068,"children":1069},{},[1070],{"type":34,"value":1071},"SVO ROI Alignment:",{"type":34,"value":1073}," Update your revenue dashboards to chart pipeline value directly against cost per SQL across all channels, ensuring high-yield conversational paths are clearly highlighted ahead of legacy traffic channels.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1075,"children":1076},{},[1077,1082],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1078,"children":1079},{},[1080],{"type":34,"value":1081},"Data Layer Governance:",{"type":34,"value":1083}," Implement strict internal protocols to ensure that all public listings of your technical features, security standards, and integration protocols match perfectly across your website, product registries, and press releases.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1085,"children":1086},{},[1087,1092],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1088,"children":1089},{},[1090],{"type":34,"value":1091},"Citation Node Auditing:",{"type":34,"value":1093}," Monitor how frequently major conversational platforms cite your domain or your independent user review profiles relative to your primary competitors in response to category-focused research prompts.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1095,"children":1096},{},[1097],{"type":34,"value":1098},"When these tracking metrics run on a fixed, uninterrupted schedule, your organization builds a permanent competitive advantage. You stop chasing unpredictable web traffic algorithms and start managing the foundational data infrastructure that governs modern business decisions.",{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":1100,"children":1102},{"id":1101},"proving-marketing-value-in-the-new-boardroom-reality",[1103],{"type":34,"value":1104},"Proving Marketing Value in the New Boardroom Reality",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1106,"children":1107},{},[1108],{"type":34,"value":1109},"A sudden drop in website sessions is only a true crisis for marketers who depend on vanity metrics, inflated content volume, and outdated multi-channel tracking models. For leaders who prioritize technical accuracy, operational rigor, and precise pipeline attribution, this shift in analytics is a powerful competitive advantage. It removes the edge from rivals who chase shallow web clicks and instead rewards organizations focused on delivering deep, verifiable revenue impact.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1111,"children":1112},{},[1113],{"type":34,"value":1114},"We design and build the advanced data layers and go-to-market reporting systems that shield growth-focused organizations from tracking blind spots and traffic volatility. By replacing fragmented, traffic-obsessed reports with a unified, boardroom-ready pipeline framework, we make your real marketing impact unmistakable, authoritative, and impossible for leadership to ignore.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1116,"children":1117},{},[1118,1120,1129],{"type":34,"value":1119},"Don’t let your organization’s true pipeline value be buried by an obsolete web analytics model. Examine your digital footprint, rebuild your executive dashboards, and implement an ",{"type":28,"tag":952,"props":1121,"children":1124},{"href":1122,"rel":1123},"https://mkgmarketinginc.com/expert-digital-marketing-services/search-visibility-optimization/",[956],[1125],{"type":28,"tag":959,"props":1126,"children":1127},{},[1128],{"type":34,"value":804},{"type":34,"value":1130}," reporting engine that wins the argument in every single boardroom presentation.",{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":1132,"children":1134},{"id":1133},"summary",[1135],{"type":34,"value":1136},"Summary",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1138,"children":1139},{},[1140],{"type":34,"value":1141},"As traditional web tracking fails to reflect decentralized buyer research, solo marketing leaders are confronting a misleading reporting crisis: website sessions are declining, yet underlying sales pipeline performance remains strong. This disconnect exists because legacy attribution models cannot capture the critical middle-funnel validation that now occurs in modern conversational search environments. To preserve executive trust and safeguard growth budgets, organizations need a dashboard purpose-built for Attribution 3.0. By moving beyond raw traffic counts and focusing on financial-grade indicators such as AI Share of Voice, Verified Citation Frequency, and MQL-to-SQL Conversion Velocity, marketing leaders can definitively demonstrate SVO ROI and make a compelling case for clear market leadership.",{"title":7,"searchDepth":787,"depth":787,"links":1143},[1144,1145,1146,1147,1148,1149,1150],{"id":839,"depth":787,"text":842},{"id":865,"depth":787,"text":868},{"id":937,"depth":787,"text":940},{"id":978,"depth":787,"text":981},{"id":1047,"depth":787,"text":1050},{"id":1101,"depth":787,"text":1104},{"id":1133,"depth":787,"text":1136},"content:blog:seo:the-board-ready-svo-dashboard-how-to-report-pipeline-when-traffic-disappears.md","blog/seo/the-board-ready-svo-dashboard-how-to-report-pipeline-when-traffic-disappears.md","blog/seo/the-board-ready-svo-dashboard-how-to-report-pipeline-when-traffic-disappears",8,{"_path":1156,"_dir":800,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":1157,"description":1158,"date":1159,"img":1160,"imgAlt":1161,"body":1162,"_type":791,"_id":1478,"_source":793,"_file":1479,"_stem":1480,"_extension":796,"category":800,"minutes":1154},"/blog/seo/the-death-of-the-ten-blue-links-why-svo-is-the-only-survival-strategy-for-2026","The Death of the Ten Blue Links - Why SVO is the Only Survival Strategy for 2026","B2B search is shifting fast. Strong visibility now means showing up across Google, AI answers, and the discovery paths buyers actually use.","2026-06-10T16:08:09.873Z","https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/fc323672-061d-46ab-9bd0-60927e7379e5-mkg-blog-the-death-of-the-ten-blue-links-hero-image.webp","performance review sheet",{"type":25,"children":1163,"toc":1469},[1164,1169,1174,1186,1191,1198,1204,1209,1238,1243,1248,1254,1259,1264,1297,1302,1308,1314,1319,1324,1329,1334,1340,1345,1350,1373,1378,1385,1391,1396,1401,1434,1439,1445,1450,1455,1460,1464],{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1165,"children":1166},{},[1167],{"type":34,"value":1168},"You executed the playbook exactly as prescribed. You audited technical site infrastructure, identified high-intent target keywords, built comprehensive topic clusters, and maintained a consistent content production cadence. By conventional organic search indicators, your performance should be exemplary. Yet when you review your year-over-year traffic, unique visitors are down 40 percent. Your high-volume keywords still rank at the top of legacy search engines, but the actual pipeline has evaporated. To leadership, it appears to be a sudden breakdown in marketing execution—an internal failure where your strategies have simply stopped working.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1170,"children":1171},{},[1172],{"type":34,"value":1173},"The reality is far more structural and long-lasting. This is not a breakdown of tactics; it is the wholesale collapse of traditional search behavior. The era of the “ten blue links” has ended. For nearly thirty years, digital discovery was built on a straightforward exchange: a user entered a query, a search engine returned a list of destination websites, and the user clicked through to find answers. That journey has now been fully disrupted by conversational interfaces, multimodal engines, and automated answer summaries.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1175,"children":1176},{},[1177,1179,1184],{"type":34,"value":1178},"This shift is fundamentally altering the business-to-business procurement landscape. According to data from ",{"type":28,"tag":952,"props":1180,"children":1182},{"href":994,"rel":1181},[956],[1183],{"type":34,"value":1001},{"type":34,"value":1185},", 51% of B2B software buyers now begin their vendor research inside an AI chatbot rather than a traditional search engine. Buyers are completely bypassing the click-and-browse stage of research. Instead of scanning individual vendor blogs to compare capabilities, they issue a single prompt to a large language model (LLM) requesting a definitive recommendation based on explicit parameters such as compliance, integrations, and user sentiment.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1187,"children":1188},{},[1189],{"type":34,"value":1190},"When your ideal customer profile (ICP) conducts this kind of research, traditional organic rankings become less relevant. If your brand is not explicitly mentioned in the synthesized response, your company is effectively removed from the evaluation process. To navigate this shift, organizations must move beyond keyword search volume and adopt a deliberate Search Visibility Optimization (BVO / SVO) framework. Survival in 2026 depends on evolving from conventional keyword tracking to actively managing your full brand presence across the entire conversational web.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1192,"children":1193},{},[1194],{"type":28,"tag":832,"props":1195,"children":1197},{"alt":7,"src":1196},"https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/90ef92e5-5d1d-4993-bf61-4daac6415448-mkg-blog-the-death-of-the-ten-blue-links-image-1.png",[],{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":1199,"children":1201},{"id":1200},"the-structural-reality-of-the-answer-economy",[1202],{"type":34,"value":1203},"The Structural Reality of the Answer Economy",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1205,"children":1206},{},[1207],{"type":34,"value":1208},"To build a marketing engine that actually performs in this environment, you must understand how modern discovery systems process information. Legacy search engines optimized for page authority, using backlinks and click signals to decide which URL to surface next. Modern conversational engines function as inference systems. They do not rank pages; they synthesize information from thousands of public and private sources to produce a single, comprehensive response.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1210,"children":1211},{},[1212,1214,1224,1226,1236],{"type":34,"value":1213},"This evolution forms the core of ",{"type":28,"tag":952,"props":1215,"children":1218},{"href":1216,"rel":1217},"https://mkgmarketinginc.com/expert-digital-marketing-services/answer-engine-optimization/",[956],[1219],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1220,"children":1221},{},[1222],{"type":34,"value":1223},"Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)",{"type":34,"value":1225}," and ",{"type":28,"tag":952,"props":1227,"children":1230},{"href":1228,"rel":1229},"https://mkgmarketinginc.com/expert-digital-marketing-services/generative-engine-optimization/",[956],[1231],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1232,"children":1233},{},[1234],{"type":34,"value":1235},"Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)",{"type":34,"value":1237},". These frameworks recognize that language models act as automated research assistants for B2B buyers. When an enterprise software buyer asks an engine to find a platform that complies with specific financial regulations and integrates seamlessly with their current software suite, the model scans its training data and real-time web crawlers to construct a customized comparison matrix.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1239,"children":1240},{},[1241],{"type":34,"value":1242},"If your corporate content exists only in unstructured formats, sits behind aggressive lead-generation gates, or is buried in vague, fluff-heavy marketing copy, conversational engines cannot reliably interpret your product features. Because these models are designed to minimize the risk of hallucinating information, they will skip over any brand whose product data is unclear, unverified, or internally inconsistent. Instead, they will fulfill the user’s request with competitors whose digital ecosystems are structured, transparent, and corroborated across independent platforms.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1244,"children":1245},{},[1246],{"type":34,"value":1247},"This creates a hidden crisis of competitive displacement. You can maintain perfect rankings on legacy search result pages, but if your brand is missing from the conversational shortlists where buyers actually make their decisions, your organic inbound pipeline will continue to erode. Visibility is no longer a traffic acquisition problem; it is a data-structuring and entity-indexing requirement.",{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":1249,"children":1251},{"id":1250},"measuring-the-true-llm-footprint",[1252],{"type":34,"value":1253},"Measuring the True LLM Footprint",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1255,"children":1256},{},[1257],{"type":34,"value":1258},"Shifting your marketing organization away from legacy keyword volume demands a systematic, diagnostic approach to measurement. Continuing to evaluate visibility through search impressions or raw website clicks is an operational dead end. Instead, you need to audit your precise LLM Footprint to determine how conversational systems are interpreting and recommending your company.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1260,"children":1261},{},[1262],{"type":34,"value":1263},"A comprehensive brand footprint diagnostic focuses on three explicit phases:",{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":1265,"children":1266},{},[1267,1277,1287],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1268,"children":1269},{},[1270,1275],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1271,"children":1272},{},[1273],{"type":34,"value":1274},"Procurement Prompt Baselining:",{"type":34,"value":1276}," Develop a highly standardized matrix of commercial intent prompts that match your ICP’s exact purchasing criteria. Run these prompts across every major model—including Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity—to document your brand's natural inclusion rate, tracking how often your company is named as a preferred solution compared to your direct competitors.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1278,"children":1279},{},[1280,1285],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1281,"children":1282},{},[1283],{"type":34,"value":1284},"Citation Node Mapping:",{"type":34,"value":1286}," Analyze the specific external links, user review directories, and independent community spaces that conversational engines reference to validate their claims. Mapping these nodes reveals exactly where the models pull their authority data, allowing you to prioritize your brand distribution efforts.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1288,"children":1289},{},[1290,1295],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1291,"children":1292},{},[1293],{"type":34,"value":1294},"Semantic Consensus Auditing:",{"type":34,"value":1296}," Inspect how cleanly and uniformly your core product capabilities, pricing architectures, and compliance certifications are stated across the web. Inconsistent naming conventions or outdated documentation undermine the model’s confidence, leading to your brand being omitted from synthesized comparison tables due to data uncertainty.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1298,"children":1299},{},[1300],{"type":34,"value":1301},"By executing this technical audit, you replace defensive marketing explanations with an objective, data-driven roadmap. You reveal the exact structural gaps that keep your brand hidden from automated evaluation systems, allowing you to build an intentional plan for reclamation.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1303,"children":1304},{},[1305],{"type":28,"tag":832,"props":1306,"children":1307},{"alt":7,"src":1196},[],{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":1309,"children":1311},{"id":1310},"securing-dominance-via-citational-authority",[1312],{"type":34,"value":1313},"Securing Dominance via Citational Authority",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1315,"children":1316},{},[1317],{"type":34,"value":1318},"The most effective remedy for a deficit in conversational visibility is the deliberate, aggressive cultivation of Citational Authority. For a language model to confidently present your brand as a trusted option, it must detect a clear, consistent pattern of authoritative validation across multiple independent sources. The model does not rely on what you claim about yourself on your homepage; it relies on the broader consensus of the public web.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1320,"children":1321},{},[1322],{"type":34,"value":1323},"Building this authority demands unwavering commitment to a consistent content rhythm. This is not about churning out large volumes of generic, AI-generated blog posts to chase superficial keywords. It is about maintaining a highly disciplined, regular cadence of deep technical insights, validated customer case studies, and original subject matter expertise. Your executive and technical leaders must reliably contribute substantive, non-commoditized insights to reputable developer repositories, trusted industry publications, and independent community forums.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1325,"children":1326},{},[1327],{"type":34,"value":1328},"When your brand maintains an uninterrupted cadence of high-value, expert data across the web, you continuously feed the exact informational nodes that language models crawl and index. This pattern of cross-platform validation tells the model that your company is an immutable category leader.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1330,"children":1331},{},[1332],{"type":34,"value":1333},"A short-term, campaign-driven approach fails completely under this new paradigm. You cannot buy your way into an LLM's next training or inference cycle with a temporary advertising blitz. The models are built to recognize long-term consensus and verified expertise. Maintaining a structured, disciplined distribution rhythm ensures your technical capabilities are permanently embedded in the underlying datasets used to generate vendor shortlists.",{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":1335,"children":1337},{"id":1336},"transitioning-to-a-structured-knowledge-system",[1338],{"type":34,"value":1339},"Transitioning to a Structured Knowledge System",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1341,"children":1342},{},[1343],{"type":34,"value":1344},"The core advantage of an optimized brand presence is the velocity at which you can capture modern enterprise intent. When a buyer forces an engine to evaluate the marketplace, the system naturally routes toward the path of least risk and highest data integrity.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1346,"children":1347},{},[1348],{"type":34,"value":1349},"Consider the contrasting outcomes between two distinct operational approaches:",{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":1351,"children":1352},{},[1353,1363],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1354,"children":1355},{},[1356,1361],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1357,"children":1358},{},[1359],{"type":34,"value":1360},"The Creative Brochure Site:",{"type":34,"value":1362}," A company relies on highly stylized, abstract copywriting hidden inside interactive web elements or gated PDF forms. The conversational engine cannot confidently extract technical metrics, deployment speeds, or API compliance standards. Fearing an inaccurate response, the engine excludes the brand from the user's answer.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1364,"children":1365},{},[1366,1371],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1367,"children":1368},{},[1369],{"type":34,"value":1370},"The Machine-Readable Knowledge Base:",{"type":34,"value":1372}," A company deploys advanced semantic layers, using clean schema markup, clear product tables, and consistent platform definitions across all channels. The engine instantly extracts, validates, and incorporates the brand's exact specifications, placing them at the top of the recommended shortlist with explicit trust citations.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1374,"children":1375},{},[1376],{"type":34,"value":1377},"This comparison illustrates why deep technical documentation has become a critical driver of middle-funnel conversion. API tables, integration matrices, and security registries are no longer merely passive references for post-sale support; they now serve as high-value entry points for automated vendor discovery. By presenting this information in a clear, structured way to machine web agents, you remove the friction that prevents your brand from being surfaced by automated evaluation systems.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1379,"children":1380},{},[1381],{"type":28,"tag":832,"props":1382,"children":1384},{"alt":7,"src":1383},"https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/23bac03b-041d-4119-842a-86228876c352-mkg-blog-the-death-of-the-ten-blue-links-image-3.png",[],{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":1386,"children":1388},{"id":1387},"operationalizing-your-response-presence",[1389],{"type":34,"value":1390},"Operationalizing Your Response Presence",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1392,"children":1393},{},[1394],{"type":34,"value":1395},"Succeeding in this decentralized landscape requires moving past traditional organic search tactics and installing a repeatable, unified operational system. Marketing departments must stop operating as creative project centers and begin running like data-driven technical operations.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1397,"children":1398},{},[1399],{"type":34,"value":1400},"This requires aligning your weekly execution around three concrete operational areas:",{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":1402,"children":1403},{},[1404,1414,1424],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1405,"children":1406},{},[1407,1412],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1408,"children":1409},{},[1410],{"type":34,"value":1411},"Citation Frequency Tracking:",{"type":34,"value":1413}," Monitor how frequently major conversational engines cite your domain or your trusted independent profiles relative to your primary competitors during category-focused research prompts.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1415,"children":1416},{},[1417,1422],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1418,"children":1419},{},[1420],{"type":34,"value":1421},"Data Schema Governance:",{"type":34,"value":1423}," Implement strict internal compliance to ensure that every public listing of your features, security standards, and integration protocols matches perfectly across your website, product registries, and press releases.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1425,"children":1426},{},[1427,1432],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1428,"children":1429},{},[1430],{"type":34,"value":1431},"Review Stream Automation:",{"type":34,"value":1433}," Build a continuous customer feedback mechanism that feeds recent, highly detailed textual review data into third-party evaluation directories, keeping the engines supplied with fresh trust signals.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1435,"children":1436},{},[1437],{"type":34,"value":1438},"When these operations run on a fixed, uninterrupted schedule, your organization builds a permanent competitive advantage. You stop chasing unpredictable search engine algorithm updates and start managing the foundational data infrastructure that governs all automated business decisions.",{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":1440,"children":1442},{"id":1441},"reclaiming-the-funnel-in-the-era-of-inference",[1443],{"type":34,"value":1444},"Reclaiming the Funnel in the Era of Inference",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1446,"children":1447},{},[1448],{"type":34,"value":1449},"The rise of conversational discovery is not an existential threat to marketing leaders who operate with deep expertise, operational rigor, and strong engineering discipline. It is a threat to organizations that depend on high-volume, generic content and unverified marketing assertions. If your digital presence resembles an unindexed corporate brochure, automated models will quietly exclude you from consideration.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1451,"children":1452},{},[1453],{"type":34,"value":1454},"We specialize in designing and engineering the modern technical architectures and go-to-market operational systems that keep organizations visible across the entire modern discovery landscape. By combining technical semantic layer engineering with disciplined execution rhythms, we ensure your brand authority is clear, verifiable, and undeniable to both human buyers and machine-learning algorithms.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1456,"children":1457},{},[1458],{"type":34,"value":1459},"Do not allow your organization to be quietly displaced from your ideal market segments by an information structure failure. Audit your digital footprint, structure your institutional knowledge, and implement a brand-visibility operating model built to dominate the modern synthesis.",{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":1461,"children":1462},{"id":1133},[1463],{"type":34,"value":1136},{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1465,"children":1466},{},[1467],{"type":34,"value":1468},"The B2B buying journey has undergone a fundamental structural shift, with 51% of software buyers now beginning vendor research inside AI chatbots rather than on traditional search engines. This behavioral change creates a significant risk of competitive displacement for brands that do not appear in model outputs or are omitted from automatically generated shortlists. To safeguard your pipeline, enterprises must implement a rigorous Brand Visibility Optimization (BVO) strategy. By conducting systematic prompt diagnostics to assess Search Sentiment, maintaining a consistent cadence of expert content publication, and ensuring all product capabilities are clearly represented in LLM Training Data, organizations can secure automated market discovery and regain narrative control across every AI search interface.",{"title":7,"searchDepth":787,"depth":787,"links":1470},[1471,1472,1473,1474,1475,1476,1477],{"id":1200,"depth":787,"text":1203},{"id":1250,"depth":787,"text":1253},{"id":1310,"depth":787,"text":1313},{"id":1336,"depth":787,"text":1339},{"id":1387,"depth":787,"text":1390},{"id":1441,"depth":787,"text":1444},{"id":1133,"depth":787,"text":1136},"content:blog:seo:the-death-of-the-ten-blue-links-why-svo-is-the-only-survival-strategy-for-2026.md","blog/seo/the-death-of-the-ten-blue-links-why-svo-is-the-only-survival-strategy-for-2026.md","blog/seo/the-death-of-the-ten-blue-links-why-svo-is-the-only-survival-strategy-for-2026",{"_path":1482,"_dir":800,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":1483,"description":1484,"date":1485,"img":1486,"imgAlt":1487,"body":1488,"_type":791,"_id":1798,"_source":793,"_file":1799,"_stem":1800,"_extension":796,"category":800,"minutes":1154},"/blog/seo/invisible-by-default-why-your-growth-plateau-is-actually-an-ai-visibility-debt","Invisible by Default - Why Your Growth Plateau is Actually an AI Visibility Debt","Explore why strong B2B content may still go unseen in AI search, and how to improve discoverability across answer engines and buyer journeys.","2026-06-02T15:24:04.123Z","https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/e9858bf4-e35a-4936-afec-f847048cb846-mkg-blog-invisible-by-default-hero-image.webp","Invisible by Default ",{"type":25,"children":1489,"toc":1790},[1490,1495,1500,1505,1517,1529,1536,1542,1547,1552,1557,1562,1568,1573,1578,1611,1616,1623,1629,1644,1649,1682,1687,1694,1700,1705,1710,1743,1748,1754,1759,1764,1769,1773,1778],{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1491,"children":1492},{},[1493],{"type":34,"value":1494},"Scaling an enterprise to $5 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) reflects strong product–market fit, founder resilience, and effective early execution. By this point, your go-to-market motion often feels solidified: you’ve invested heavily in traditional acquisition funnels, built out a sales team, and watched organic search impressions grow. Yet many executive teams encounter an invisible ceiling at exactly this stage. Historical pipeline engines start to lose efficiency, customer acquisition costs rise, and legacy growth strategies begin to stall.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1496,"children":1497},{},[1498],{"type":34,"value":1499},"When you turn to your usual marketing dashboards to diagnose the slowdown, the numbers obscure the real structural issue. Website traffic appears steady, ad click-through rates look serviceable, and SEO tools report healthy organic rankings. But the breakdown isn’t occurring on your website or in the channels you’re measuring. The real risk sits where your modern buyers are actually making their decisions.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1501,"children":1502},{},[1503],{"type":34,"value":1504},"A major behavioral shift has fundamentally reshaped the B2B buying cycle. Enterprise procurement teams and decision-makers are no longer paging through traditional search results, hopping between blogs, or downloading gated whitepapers to assemble their initial vendor lists. Instead, they’re feeding complex procurement criteria directly into large language models and conversational search tools—and using the synthesized outputs to create their shortlists.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1506,"children":1507},{},[1508,1510,1515],{"type":34,"value":1509},"This behavior is a structural reality. Data from ",{"type":28,"tag":952,"props":1511,"children":1513},{"href":994,"rel":1512},[956],[1514],{"type":34,"value":1001},{"type":34,"value":1516}," reveals that 51% of B2B software buyers now prioritize starting their vendor research inside an AI chatbot rather than a traditional search engine. When a decision-maker commands an engine to compare mid-market enterprise platforms based on specific compliance standards, deployment speeds, and past user sentiment, the platform delivers a synthesized, definitive response.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1518,"children":1519},{},[1520,1522,1527],{"type":34,"value":1521},"If your brand is entirely absent from that generated output—if the engine cites three of your primary competitors as the market standards while your company is completely omitted—you are invisible by default. This is not a standard search engine ranking issue; it is an accrued ",{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1523,"children":1524},{},[1525],{"type":34,"value":1526},"Visibility Debt",{"type":34,"value":1528}," that actively suppresses your revenue potential. Overcoming this stagnation requires shifting away from legacy traffic metrics and executing a precise diagnostic audit to identify and close the brand-to-bot gap.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1530,"children":1531},{},[1532],{"type":28,"tag":832,"props":1533,"children":1535},{"alt":7,"src":1534},"https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/9d1f342d-2771-4e82-910f-1e49caca001c-mkg-blog-invisible-by-default-image-1.png",[],{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":1537,"children":1539},{"id":1538},"the-reality-of-the-zero-click-funnel",[1540],{"type":34,"value":1541},"The Reality of the Zero-Click Funnel",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1543,"children":1544},{},[1545],{"type":34,"value":1546},"To understand how a company can thrive in legacy channels yet remain invisible to an LLM, you have to examine the data structure of the Zero-Click Reality. Traditional search engines function as directories, sending human users to external websites where information lives. Success in that model is measured by traffic generation. Conversational search engines, by contrast, act as inference engines, synthesizing massive data repositories to deliver a complete, self-contained answer—without ever sending the user elsewhere.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1548,"children":1549},{},[1550],{"type":34,"value":1551},"When a model receives a prompt from a prospective buyer, it looks for verified consensus, clear entities, and authoritative proof points across its training data and live web indexes. It effectively acts as an automated procurement officer, evaluating which solutions pose the lowest operational risk based on the buyer’s stated criteria.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1553,"children":1554},{},[1555],{"type":34,"value":1556},"Many high-growth companies carry significant visibility debt because their digital footprint was created for human readers, not for machine consumption. They’ve invested in creative copy, design-heavy landing pages, and disconnected campaigns. While these assets may impress a human visitor, the underlying data layers are often unstructured, poorly indexed, or entirely absent from the authoritative repositories that language models rely on to validate brand claims.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1558,"children":1559},{},[1560],{"type":34,"value":1561},"This operational gap leads directly to competitive displacement. Your product may be technically superior, your customer success scores may be higher, and your pricing may be more attractive than the alternatives surfaced by the model. But the engine cannot parse or verify that superiority if your institutional knowledge is locked inside a black box of unstructured formats. If the machine cannot confidently confirm your capabilities, it will exclude you from the narrative to avoid hallucinating your value.",{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":1563,"children":1565},{"id":1564},"calculating-the-brand-to-bot-gap",[1566],{"type":34,"value":1567},"Calculating the Brand-to-Bot Gap",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1569,"children":1570},{},[1571],{"type":34,"value":1572},"Clearing your visibility debt begins with a structured, technical investigation into how conversational engines perceive your organization. You must audit the digital gap between what your company actually does and what the models say you do. This requires a rigorous diagnostic protocol that treats brand presence as a data-engineering problem rather than a creative messaging exercise.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1574,"children":1575},{},[1576],{"type":34,"value":1577},"This diagnostic protocol focuses on three critical assessment areas:",{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":1579,"children":1580},{},[1581,1591,1601],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1582,"children":1583},{},[1584,1589],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1585,"children":1586},{},[1587],{"type":34,"value":1588},"Inference Share-of-Voice:",{"type":34,"value":1590}," Evaluate a comprehensive matrix of intent-based procurement prompts across all primary conversational models. Document exactly how often your brand is included in generated shortlists, which competitors dominate the recommendations, and what specific attributes the models use to justify their selections.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1592,"children":1593},{},[1594,1599],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1595,"children":1596},{},[1597],{"type":34,"value":1598},"Source Citation Mapping:",{"type":34,"value":1600}," Analyze the underlying domains, review networks, and community spaces that the engines cite when generating responses for your category. Identifying these source nodes reveals exactly where the models pull their authority data, showing you where your digital footprint is lacking.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1602,"children":1603},{},[1604,1609],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1605,"children":1606},{},[1607],{"type":34,"value":1608},"Semantic Entity Integrity:",{"type":34,"value":1610}," Audit how consistently your primary features, target verticals, and compliance standards are stated across the web. Disconnected information, shifting nomenclature, and outdated product registries confuse the pattern-matching algorithms of language models, leading to a complete omission of your brand due to data uncertainty.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1612,"children":1613},{},[1614],{"type":34,"value":1615},"Transitioning to this diagnostic approach changes how you evaluate your competitive standing. You stop guessing why your sales pipeline is stalling and begin identifying the explicit technical and data-structure deficiencies that prevent your brand from being recognized as a market leader.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1617,"children":1618},{},[1619],{"type":28,"tag":832,"props":1620,"children":1622},{"alt":7,"src":1621},"https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/0e789da1-7a18-466c-a46a-76c14cdbfb85-mkg-blog-invisible-by-default-image-2.png",[],{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":1624,"children":1626},{"id":1625},"implementing-generative-engine-optimization",[1627],{"type":34,"value":1628},"Implementing Generative Engine Optimization",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1630,"children":1631},{},[1632,1634,1642],{"type":34,"value":1633},"Resolving an AI visibility deficit requires an intentional transition to ",{"type":28,"tag":952,"props":1635,"children":1637},{"href":1228,"rel":1636},[956],[1638],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1639,"children":1640},{},[1641],{"type":34,"value":1235},{"type":34,"value":1643},". This framework is not about manipulating an algorithm or inflating surface-level metrics; it is about structuring your company’s real-world expertise, product specifications, and customer validation into machine-readable data layers that engines can easily ingest and trust.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1645,"children":1646},{},[1647],{"type":34,"value":1648},"This structural optimization requires executing three precise operational phases:",{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":1650,"children":1651},{},[1652,1662,1672],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1653,"children":1654},{},[1655,1660],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1656,"children":1657},{},[1658],{"type":34,"value":1659},"Technical Semantic Architecture:",{"type":34,"value":1661}," Deploy comprehensive schema markups across your entire digital footprint. Ensure your product capabilities, pricing architectures, geographic availability, and security standards are explicitly coded, transforming your corporate website into a clear, structured knowledge graph for web crawlers.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1663,"children":1664},{},[1665,1670],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1666,"children":1667},{},[1668],{"type":34,"value":1669},"Un-gating Institutional Knowledge:",{"type":34,"value":1671}," Redesign your content distribution strategy to prioritize data accessibility. Move critical technical specifications, API documentation, and detailed deployment case studies out of hidden, gated PDF downloads and place them directly onto clean, indexable pages that conversational web agents can completely crawl and process.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":1673,"children":1674},{},[1675,1680],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":1676,"children":1677},{},[1678],{"type":34,"value":1679},"Decentralized Trust Syndication:",{"type":34,"value":1681}," Build a structured operational cadence to feed independent, authoritative third-party data sources. Language models heavily weight community discussions, technical forums, and third-party review platforms to validate corporate claims. Ensuring your brand has a steady stream of user validation on these independent nodes builds the cross-reference patterns that engines require to verify your authority.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1683,"children":1684},{},[1685],{"type":34,"value":1686},"When these three phases are executed systematically, your digital presence shifts from a collection of creative marketing materials to an authoritative node in the web's knowledge graph. You give conversational engines the exact, high-integrity data points they need to confidently feature your platform on every enterprise shortlist.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1688,"children":1689},{},[1690],{"type":28,"tag":832,"props":1691,"children":1693},{"alt":7,"src":1692},"https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/14fbaccb-7940-4e86-9deb-c443cc852444-mkg-blog-invisible-by-default-image-3.png",[],{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":1695,"children":1697},{"id":1696},"de-risking-your-long-term-growth-narrative",[1698],{"type":34,"value":1699},"De-risking Your Long-Term Growth Narrative",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":1701,"children":1702},{},[1703],{"type":34,"value":1704},"The primary benefit of clearing your visibility debt is the creation of a predictable, self-sustaining pipeline engine that scales entirely independent of rising advertising costs. 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Look at your analytics to separate ",{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":2274,"children":2275},{},[2276],{"type":34,"value":2277},"traditional search clicks",{"type":34,"value":2279}," from ",{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":2281,"children":2282},{},[2283],{"type":34,"value":2284},"AI referral traffic",{"type":34,"value":2286},". Understanding the gap between these two will help you decide how to split your budget between traditional SEO and AI-focused content in the second half of the year.",{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":2288,"children":2290},{"id":2289},"call-to-action-optimize-for-the-future",[2291],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":2292,"children":2293},{},[2294],{"type":34,"value":2295},"Call to Action: Optimize for the Future",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2297,"children":2298},{},[2299],{"type":34,"value":2300},"The updates from May 2026 make one thing clear: scaling a tech company through search isn't about ranking in a list of ten blue links anymore. 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To keep your customer acquisition costs (CAC) low and your pipeline predictable, your team needs a modern Search Visibility Optimization (SVO) strategy.",{"type":28,"tag":1901,"props":2307,"children":2309},{"id":2308},"how-mkg-helps-you-win-in-ai-search",[2310],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":2311,"children":2312},{},[2313],{"type":34,"value":2314},"How MKG Helps You Win in AI Search:",{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":2316,"children":2317},{},[2318,2328,2338],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":2319,"children":2320},{},[2321,2326],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":2322,"children":2323},{},[2324],{"type":34,"value":2325},"GEO/AEO Gap Analysis:",{"type":34,"value":2327}," We analyze how your brand stands up in Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT Search to find where competitors are taking your citations—and we fix your content to win them back.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":2329,"children":2330},{},[2331,2336],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":2332,"children":2333},{},[2334],{"type":34,"value":2335},"Technical Entity Setup:",{"type":34,"value":2337}," We update your site's backend code with precise Schema.org integrations (for your People, Products, and Organization) so AI assistants can read and trust your data.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":2339,"children":2340},{},[2341,2346],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":2342,"children":2343},{},[2344],{"type":34,"value":2345},"Full-Funnel Attribution:",{"type":34,"value":2347}," We separate your classic search clicks from new AI referral traffic, giving your executive team clear, fluff-free ROI numbers.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2349,"children":2350},{},[2351,2356,2357,2364],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":2352,"children":2353},{},[2354],{"type":34,"value":2355},"Stop guessing how AI is affecting your pipeline.",{"type":34,"value":1920},{"type":28,"tag":952,"props":2358,"children":2361},{"href":2359,"rel":2360},"https://mkgmarketinginc.com/",[956],[2362],{"type":34,"value":2363},"Book a Discovery Call",{"type":34,"value":2365}," with the MKG SVO Team today to check your AI search footprint and protect your growth strategy.",{"title":7,"searchDepth":787,"depth":787,"links":2367},[2368,2369,2373,2378,2383],{"id":1812,"depth":787,"text":1818},{"id":1893,"depth":787,"text":1899,"children":2370},[2371],{"id":1903,"depth":2372,"text":1909},3,{"id":2010,"depth":787,"text":2016,"children":2374},[2375,2376,2377],{"id":2019,"depth":2372,"text":2025},{"id":2069,"depth":2372,"text":2075},{"id":2134,"depth":2372,"text":2140},{"id":2163,"depth":787,"text":2169,"children":2379},[2380,2381,2382],{"id":2172,"depth":2372,"text":2178},{"id":2204,"depth":2372,"text":2210},{"id":2261,"depth":2372,"text":2267},{"id":2289,"depth":787,"text":2295,"children":2384},[2385],{"id":2308,"depth":2372,"text":2314},"content:blog:seo:monthly-search-industry-report-may-2026.md","blog/seo/monthly-search-industry-report-may-2026.md","blog/seo/monthly-search-industry-report-may-2026",6,{"_path":2391,"_dir":800,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":2392,"description":2393,"date":2394,"img":2395,"imgAlt":2396,"body":2397,"_type":791,"_id":2675,"_source":793,"_file":2676,"_stem":2677,"_extension":796,"category":800,"minutes":1154},"/blog/seo/the-2026-brand-visibility-audit-is-your-icp-finding-your-competitors-in-the-llm","The 2026 Brand Visibility Audit: Is Your ICP Finding Your Competitors in the LLM?","When your target accounts use AI search to shortlist vendors, do you exist? Here is how to audit your brand presence and reverse competitive displacement.","2026-05-27T14:44:51.901Z","https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/1ebdbd36-b81a-40c3-b8d6-528986294139-mkg-blog-the-2026-brand-visibility-audit-hero-image.webp","Brand Visibility Audit",{"type":25,"children":2398,"toc":2666},[2399,2404,2409,2425,2430,2437,2446,2451,2456,2461,2466,2475,2480,2485,2503,2508,2515,2524,2529,2534,2539,2544,2553,2558,2563,2576,2581,2588,2597,2602,2607,2625,2630,2639,2644,2649,2654,2661],{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2400,"children":2401},{},[2402],{"type":34,"value":2403},"For years, B2B marketing operated on a straightforward logic: win the search engine results page, win the pipeline. Teams engineered content to capture specific keywords, mapped backlinks to boost domain authority, and celebrated when landing pages claimed the top spots on Google. If a prospective customer in your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) looked for a solution, your site appeared.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2405,"children":2406},{},[2407],{"type":34,"value":2408},"That logic no longer holds. A complete decoupling has occurred between traditional website traffic and the actual vendor shortlisting process. B2B buyers are bypassing the endless lists of blue links entirely. Instead of clicking through five different websites to read corporate marketing copy, they are leveraging large language models (LLMs) to perform the heavy lifting of vendor evaluation.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2410,"children":2411},{},[2412,2414,2423],{"type":34,"value":2413},"This behavior is a structural reality. Data from",{"type":28,"tag":952,"props":2415,"children":2417},{"href":994,"rel":2416},[956],[2418,2419],{"type":34,"value":1920},{"type":28,"tag":959,"props":2420,"children":2421},{},[2422],{"type":34,"value":1001},{"type":34,"value":2424}," reveals that 51% of B2B software buyers now begin their vendor research inside an AI chatbot rather than a traditional search engine. Buyers are leaning into a centralized discovery model in which they issue a single, structured prompt to an LLM to compare market options. The model synthesizes data from across the web, evaluates capabilities, and surfaces a definitive recommendation.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2426,"children":2427},{},[2428],{"type":34,"value":2429},"The challenge arises when your target accounts run these prompts, and your competitors are consistently cited as the preferred solution while your brand is completely left out of the answer. It is a highly efficient form of Competitive Displacement. If your organization does not appear in the model's synthesized output, you are filtered out before a sales representative is even considered. Reclaiming your place in the funnel requires moving past traditional SEO and mastering Brand Visibility Optimization (BVO).",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2431,"children":2432},{},[2433],{"type":28,"tag":832,"props":2434,"children":2436},{"alt":7,"src":2435},"https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/15431b64-54bd-447a-b57e-c64f2f7b9398-mkg-blog-the-2026-brand-visibility-audit-image-1.png",[],{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":2438,"children":2440},{"id":2439},"the-reality-of-llm-synthetic-vetting",[2441],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":2442,"children":2443},{},[2444],{"type":34,"value":2445},"The Reality of LLM Synthetic Vetting",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2447,"children":2448},{},[2449],{"type":34,"value":2450},"When an LLM builds a B2B vendor shortlist, it doesn’t scan the web like a human. It isn’t impressed by a sleek homepage or polished brand copy. Instead, it treats the digital landscape as a single, connected dataset and assesses vendors based on entity clarity, semantic relevance, and pattern recognition.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2452,"children":2453},{},[2454],{"type":34,"value":2455},"If an enterprise software buyer asks an LLM for platforms that meet specific compliance standards, deployment models, and pricing structures, the model goes back to its processed data layers for hard evidence. It searches for alignment across technical documentation, community conversations, and independent sources before producing an answer.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2457,"children":2458},{},[2459],{"type":34,"value":2460},"That creates a serious blind spot for teams still operating on legacy marketing assumptions. You might own the top spot on a traditional search engine for a high-intent keyword, but if the model can’t confidently interpret your product architecture or validate your customer satisfaction, you’ll be excluded from its comparison set. Instead, it will surface competitors whose data is clean, structured, and consistently verified across the web.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2462,"children":2463},{},[2464],{"type":34,"value":2465},"In this new reality, visibility is less about acquisition and more about indexation and structure. To influence how models evaluate your company, you must deliberately manage the information they ingest. Treat the public web as your LLM training data layer—and consider audited, third-party environments as your core competitive arena.",{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":2467,"children":2469},{"id":2468},"executing-a-diagnostic-brand-visibility-audit",[2470],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":2471,"children":2472},{},[2473],{"type":34,"value":2474},"Executing a Diagnostic Brand Visibility Audit",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2476,"children":2477},{},[2478],{"type":34,"value":2479},"To correct a deficit in AI search visibility, an enterprise cannot rely on guesswork. You need a systematic, repeatable diagnostic protocol to discover exactly where the models are pulling their information, why they favor alternative solutions, and how they perceive your overall Search Sentiment.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2481,"children":2482},{},[2483],{"type":34,"value":2484},"This diagnostic process requires three foundational execution phases:",{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":2486,"children":2487},{},[2488,2493,2498],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":2489,"children":2490},{},[2491],{"type":34,"value":2492},"Intent-Based Prompt Baselining: Test a standardized matrix of procurement prompts across major models like Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT. Document the exact terminology used to describe your category, track which competitors populate the shortlists, and analyze the specific source citations generated by the engines to back up their recommendations.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":2494,"children":2495},{},[2496],{"type":34,"value":2497},"Review Ecosystem Quantification: Assess the volume, recency, and detailed text sentiment of your third-party evaluation profiles. Models rely heavily on independent customer validation to verify brand claims; a stagnation in your review pipeline signals a high risk of model omission.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":2499,"children":2500},{},[2501],{"type":34,"value":2502},"Entity Verification and Mapping: Inspect how consistently your core capabilities, naming structures, and integrations are stated across public channels. Inconsistent nomenclature across your website, product registries, and press releases dilutes the LLM's pattern-matching capability, causing it to bypass your brand due to data uncertainty.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2504,"children":2505},{},[2506],{"type":34,"value":2507},"By treating this audit as a precise engineering diagnostic rather than a creative exercise, you reveal the specific technical gaps that are causing your competitive omission. You shift the conversation from a vague discussion about brand awareness to a concrete roadmap for structural data optimization.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2509,"children":2510},{},[2511],{"type":28,"tag":832,"props":2512,"children":2514},{"alt":7,"src":2513},"https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/7ff92deb-11ff-4c70-acaa-433b513eeac0-mkg-blog-the-2026-brand-visibility-audit-image-2.png",[],{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":2516,"children":2518},{"id":2517},"establishing-narrative-control-via-consistency",[2519],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":2520,"children":2521},{},[2522],{"type":34,"value":2523},"Establishing Narrative Control via Consistency",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2525,"children":2526},{},[2527],{"type":34,"value":2528},"The definitive solution to an AI visibility deficit is a relentless dedication to operational Consistency. In a marketing landscape that changes every quarter, consistency is the operational framework that turns sporadic actions into a predictable, compounding authority engine. For a language model to confidently output your brand name as a trusted option, it must recognize a steady, unfragmented pattern of authoritative data over time.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2530,"children":2531},{},[2532],{"type":34,"value":2533},"This operational rhythm applies directly to how you structure and distribute your subject matter expertise. Language models prioritize information that is backed by verified experts, deep industry use cases, and recurring, high-value concepts. When your technical leaders contribute regular, deep-dive insights to reputable public engineering repositories, trusted community hubs, and authoritative industry spaces, you continuously feed the exact data pools that models crawl.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2535,"children":2536},{},[2537],{"type":34,"value":2538},"A short-term, campaign-driven approach fails completely under this model. You cannot run a one-time push to force your way into an LLM's next update cycle. The models are designed to identify long-term consensus and verified domain expertise.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2540,"children":2541},{},[2542],{"type":34,"value":2543},"Maintaining a disciplined, predictable cadence of technical data output ensures your company is recognized as an immutable category leader. This approach hardcodes your product capabilities into the data layers that models rely on to construct competitive matrix responses, thereby protecting your pipeline from displacement.",{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":2545,"children":2547},{"id":2546},"why-structured-data-ingestion-wins-the-funnel",[2548],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":2549,"children":2550},{},[2551],{"type":34,"value":2552},"Why Structured Data Ingestion Wins the Funnel",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2554,"children":2555},{},[2556],{"type":34,"value":2557},"The primary advantage of a fully optimized brand footprint is the velocity at which you can capture modern buyer intent. When an AI search engine is tasked with compiling an urgent vendor shortlist, it favors the path of least risk and highest data integrity.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2559,"children":2560},{},[2561],{"type":34,"value":2562},"Consider the contrasting outcomes between two distinct structural approaches:",{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":2564,"children":2565},{},[2566,2571],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":2567,"children":2568},{},[2569],{"type":34,"value":2570},"The Unstructured Site: A company relies on creative, stylized copywriting buried inside static image layouts or gated PDF forms. The LLM cannot confidently extract technical metrics, security protocols, or API pricing structures. 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By making this information perfectly machine-readable, you eliminate the friction that keeps your brand from being detected by automated evaluation systems.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2582,"children":2583},{},[2584],{"type":28,"tag":832,"props":2585,"children":2587},{"alt":7,"src":2586},"https://assets.mkgmarketinginc.com/80069c1b-7cc2-44cd-abe9-bc52ca56473f-mkg-blog-the-2026-brand-visibility-audit-image-3.png",[],{"type":28,"tag":29,"props":2589,"children":2591},{"id":2590},"systematized-brand-visibility-optimization",[2592],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":2593,"children":2594},{},[2595],{"type":34,"value":2596},"Systematized Brand Visibility Optimization",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":2598,"children":2599},{},[2600],{"type":34,"value":2601},"Succeeding in this decentralized landscape requires moving past ad-hoc optimization tactics and installing a repeatable, unified operational system. 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Before having kids, my husband and I spent at least three months each year exploring the world.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3587,"children":3588},{},[3589],{"type":34,"value":3590},"I take cooking classes with locals wherever I go and love scuba diving whenever there’s water nearby.\nMy kids are my world—seeing their faces light up when experiencing something new brings me the greatest joy.",{"title":7,"searchDepth":787,"depth":787,"links":3592},[],"content:team:alicia-antonow.md","team/alicia-antonow.md","team/alicia-antonow",1,{"_path":3598,"_dir":3456,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":3599,"description":3600,"name":3599,"jobTitle":3601,"team":3602,"images":3603,"ref":3605,"linkedIn":3606,"sequence":3607,"body":3608,"_type":791,"_id":3656,"_source":793,"_file":3657,"_stem":3658,"_extension":796,"category":3456,"minutes":787},"/team/avery-davis","Avery Davis","Avery Davis is an Account Superivor here at MKG Marketing.","Account Supervisor","Account Services",{"landscape":3604},"avery-davis.webp","avery-davis","avery-davis-114055191",59,{"type":25,"children":3609,"toc":3653},[3610,3616,3621,3626,3631,3635],{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3611,"children":3613},{"className":3612},[3473],[3614],{"type":34,"value":3615},"\nAvery began his digital marketing career at a tech startup focused on ID scanning and facial recognition software. In addition to gaining a deep understanding of paid media and analytics, this peaked his interest in cybersecurity and tech in general. He then transitioned to agency life where he specialized in SaaS marketing.\n",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3617,"children":3618},{},[3619],{"type":34,"value":3620},"Over the years, Avery has touched a variety of verticals including health and beauty, eCommerce, medical/pharma, education, and more. He is drawn to agency life because of the variety of clients he is able to work with and, in turn, learn from.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3622,"children":3623},{},[3624],{"type":34,"value":3625},"Although he’s touched several areas of digital marketing, Avery feels most at home when doing Account/ Project Management as well as Copywriting.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3627,"children":3628},{},[3629],{"type":34,"value":3630},"As is the theme with many of our staff, Avery was drawn to MKG because of our culture. In Avery’s words “MKG shares the same values as I do in both my professional and my personal life. When I saw that we meshed so well, this was an opportunity I couldn’t refuse!”",{"type":28,"tag":1901,"props":3632,"children":3633},{"id":3494},[3634],{"type":34,"value":3497},{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":3636,"children":3637},{},[3638,3643,3648],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":3639,"children":3640},{},[3641],{"type":34,"value":3642},"Avery is an avid racquetball player. Having first gotten into the sport in college, he’s had lots of fun playing over the years. He tries to get to the court at least once a week.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":3644,"children":3645},{},[3646],{"type":34,"value":3647},"Avery is a hobby bartender and enjoys making, tasting, and learning about different drinks. He’s mainly a Kentucky bourbon guy but also loves Japanese whisky!",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":3649,"children":3650},{},[3651],{"type":34,"value":3652},"Avery is a black belt in Pasaryu. This is a Korean mixed martial art which includes karate, kung fu, and Taekwondo. He has also trained and competed with weapons: nunchucks and samurai sword just to name a couple!",{"title":7,"searchDepth":787,"depth":787,"links":3654},[3655],{"id":3494,"depth":2372,"text":3497},"content:team:avery-davis.md","team/avery-davis.md","team/avery-davis",{"_path":3660,"_dir":3456,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":3661,"description":3662,"name":3661,"ref":3663,"jobTitle":3664,"team":3665,"images":3666,"linkedIn":3668,"quote":3669,"quoteCite":3670,"sequence":3671,"body":3672,"_type":791,"_id":3719,"_source":793,"_file":3720,"_stem":3721,"_extension":796,"category":3456,"minutes":787},"/team/jared-gerling","Jared Gerling","Meet Jared Gerling, one of MKG Marketing’s thoughtful SEO Experts, bringing 10+ years of experience, intentionality, and creativity to the team.","jared-gerling","SEO Expert","SEO Experts",{"landscape":3667},"jared-gerling.webp","jaredgerling","The truth is, most of us discover where we are heading when we arrive.","Calvin (Calvin and Hobbes)",55,{"type":25,"children":3673,"toc":3717},[3674,3679,3684,3689,3694,3699],{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3675,"children":3676},{},[3677],{"type":34,"value":3678},"Jared's journey into digital marketing started with answering a classified ad for a company looking for people with writing backgrounds for a position in SEO. As a graduate of Michigan State University with a degree in Creative Writing, this sounded like the perfect opportunity.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3680,"children":3681},{},[3682],{"type":34,"value":3683},"This small agency taught him SEO from the ground up, and, after taking a break from digital marketing to receive his MA from DePaul University, Jared jumped back into the field at a medium-sized agency out of Chicago as an SEO analyst.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3685,"children":3686},{},[3687],{"type":34,"value":3688},"Since then, Jared has worked for large and small marketing agencies for over a decade, providing expert SEO services in almost every industry that has a website on the internet. And with his background in writing, Jared feels most at home in the content and customer facing side of SEO and digital marketing.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3690,"children":3691},{},[3692],{"type":34,"value":3693},"It was first and foremost the people that drew Jared to MKG. Everyone at MKG has been so in tune with his values and his personality, and they've made his time at MKG easily the best experience of his career.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3695,"children":3696},{},[3697],{"type":34,"value":3698},"Fun Facts:",{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":3700,"children":3701},{},[3702,3707,3712],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":3703,"children":3704},{},[3705],{"type":34,"value":3706},"I love to travel with my wife. We've been to many incredible places over the years, and are always on the lookout for our next destination.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":3708,"children":3709},{},[3710],{"type":34,"value":3711},"I was a college rower in my younger days. I rowed mostly eights as a port, and competed against some of the best schools in the nation...and lost to most of them.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":3713,"children":3714},{},[3715],{"type":34,"value":3716},"I love a really good French Martini.",{"title":7,"searchDepth":787,"depth":787,"links":3718},[],"content:team:jared-gerling.md","team/jared-gerling.md","team/jared-gerling",{"_path":3723,"_dir":3456,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":3724,"description":3725,"name":3726,"jobTitle":3727,"images":3728,"ref":3730,"sequence":3731,"imageDescription":3732,"body":3733,"_type":791,"_id":3785,"_source":793,"_file":3786,"_stem":3787,"_extension":796,"category":3456,"minutes":787},"/team/kathy-obrien","Kathy Obrien","Meet Kathy O’Brien, MKG Marketing’s amazing executive assistant who consistently supports all of MKG across the many needs of the company.","Kathy O'Brien","Executive Assistant",{"landscape":3729},"kathy-obrien.webp","kathy-obrien",80,"Kathy O’Brien, MKG Marketing’s Executive Assistant, in front of a gray background | MKG Marketing",{"type":25,"children":3734,"toc":3782},[3735,3741,3746,3755,3760,3764],{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3736,"children":3738},{"className":3737},[3473],[3739],{"type":34,"value":3740},"\nKathy loves details and has managed the finer details of business her entire career.  She started her career in Center City, Philadelphia working for several law firms.  After she was married and had her first son, she left the bustling city to work closer to home at an international publishing company.  In 1994, Kathy and her husband Bill moved with their two sons to Charlotte, North Carolina.  They eventually completed their family with two more boys born in Charlotte.\n",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3742,"children":3743},{},[3744],{"type":34,"value":3745},"In 2000 they relocated to Chester County, a suburb of Philadelphia. After a hiatus and four sons, Kathy returned to work in Chester County. This time, she gave retail a whirl so that she could be home when her school age boys were home. She quickly found out Ann Taylor was employing one of their best customers. Kathy then spent the following 10+ years in the Non-Profit arena where she did whatever needed to be done to further the mission. No job was too big, small, or unimportant to tackle.",{"type":28,"tag":3747,"props":3748,"children":3749},"blockquote",{},[3750],{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3751,"children":3752},{},[3753],{"type":34,"value":3754},"Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.\nMother Teresa",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3756,"children":3757},{},[3758],{"type":34,"value":3759},"By February 2020, Kathy was eager to build something for herself and her family. She set off on a new adventure of starting her own business when she was connected with Kerry, Mike, and MKG. Having commuted and worked outside of the home for 10+ years, she was ready to work from home and have a better life balance. She followed the rainbow and found MKG in her pot of gold. MKG is like no other firm or organization for which Kathy has worked. Their standard of people first is evident in every team member, every decision, every meeting, every interaction. They live their standard.",{"type":28,"tag":1901,"props":3761,"children":3762},{"id":3494},[3763],{"type":34,"value":3497},{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":3765,"children":3766},{},[3767,3772,3777],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":3768,"children":3769},{},[3770],{"type":34,"value":3771},"Kathy’s dislikes: fruit & chocolate together and Tuesday.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":3773,"children":3774},{},[3775],{"type":34,"value":3776},"Family: Kathy met her husband Bill in Wildwood, New Jersey after their high school graduations during “Senior Week”. They have 4 sons and 2 grandsons. There hasn’t been a girl born in the O’Brien family in 32 years! You will often hear Kathy saying her boys are the best 4 gifts she’s ever been given.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":3778,"children":3779},{},[3780],{"type":34,"value":3781},"Special talent: Baking. Her boys’ (Bill included) favorites are Spritz Cookies and Chocolate Chip Cookies. There is a running family debate as to whether Ricotta Cookies are cookies or biscuits. At Christmas time, Kathy has been known to hide cookies to save some for guests.",{"title":7,"searchDepth":787,"depth":787,"links":3783},[3784],{"id":3494,"depth":2372,"text":3497},"content:team:kathy-obrien.md","team/kathy-obrien.md","team/kathy-obrien",{"_path":3789,"_dir":3456,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":22,"description":3790,"ref":3791,"name":22,"team":3461,"quote":3792,"images":3793,"twitter":3795,"isLeader":3465,"jobTitle":3796,"linkedIn":3795,"sequence":3596,"quoteCite":3797,"imageDescription":3798,"body":3799,"_type":791,"_id":3847,"_source":793,"_file":3848,"_stem":3849,"_extension":796,"category":3456,"minutes":3596},"/team/kerry-guard","Meet Kerry Guard, one of MKG Marketing’s founders. She currently fills the role of CEO of MKG as well as hosting the podcast, Back on T-R-A-C-K.","kerry-guard","I don’t have to chase extraordinary moments to find happiness — it’s right in front of me if I’m paying attention and practicing gratitude.",{"landscape":3794},"kerry-guard.webp","kerryguard","Founder & CEO","Brené Brown","Kerry Guard, MKG Marketing’s Owner/CEO, stands on a street in Guernsey with the Town Church behind her | MKG Marketing",{"type":25,"children":3800,"toc":3844},[3801,3807,3819,3832,3836],{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3802,"children":3804},{"className":3803},[3473],[3805],{"type":34,"value":3806},"Kerry Guard (she/her) is a mom of twins - boy and a girl. She understands what work life balance really looks like and is on a mission to build a company that honors parents having a career and a life. She’s out to prove you really can have both with policies like ensuring 20 days of vacation each year, no client emails after 6PM or weekends, unlimited sick days, and everyday flexibility.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3808,"children":3809},{},[3810,3812,3817],{"type":34,"value":3811},"She also hosts our podcast, ",{"type":28,"tag":952,"props":3813,"children":3815},{"href":3814},"/podcasts/marketing-leaders/",[3816],{"type":34,"value":16},{"type":34,"value":3818},", which brings eight digital marketing experts to your ears every quarter.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3820,"children":3821},{},[3822,3824,3830],{"type":34,"value":3823},"Kerry is responsible for HR. If you’d like to join MKG where people are first and your expertise matter, Kerry will be with you through the entire interview process ensuring each candidate meets the necessary requirements and gets a fair shot. Want to join MKG and Kerry’s mission of bringing People First to as many people as possible? Check out our ",{"type":28,"tag":952,"props":3825,"children":3827},{"href":3826},"/about/jobs/",[3828],{"type":34,"value":3829},"Jobs page",{"type":34,"value":3831}," and see if we have a position right for you!",{"type":28,"tag":1901,"props":3833,"children":3834},{"id":3494},[3835],{"type":34,"value":3497},{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":3837,"children":3838},{},[3839],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":3840,"children":3841},{},[3842],{"type":34,"value":3843},"Kerry now lives in Guernsey — a tiny nook in the world between England and France. Come visit for a spot of tea any time!",{"title":7,"searchDepth":787,"depth":787,"links":3845},[3846],{"id":3494,"depth":2372,"text":3497},"content:team:kerry-guard.md","team/kerry-guard.md","team/kerry-guard",{"_path":3851,"_dir":3456,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":3852,"description":3853,"name":3852,"ref":3854,"jobTitle":3855,"team":3527,"images":3856,"linkedIn":3858,"sequence":3859,"body":3860,"_type":791,"_id":3911,"_source":793,"_file":3912,"_stem":3913,"_extension":796,"category":3456,"minutes":787},"/team/leigh-snyder","Leigh Snyder","Meet Leigh Snyder, one of MKG Marketing’s amazing digital advertising experts, bringing 15 plus years of experience to the team","leigh-snyder","Digital Advertising Expert",{"landscape":3857},"leigh-snyder.webp","leighasnyder",50,{"type":25,"children":3861,"toc":3908},[3862,3868,3873,3878,3883,3888,3893,3898,3903],{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3863,"children":3865},{"className":3864},[3473],[3866],{"type":34,"value":3867},"\nLeigh has over 15 years of experience of managing Paid Search campaigns. She started her career at Solid Cactus, a full service eCommerce agency in Wilkes Barre Pennsylvania. Having no experience in Paid Search, she learned as she went, starting out in the earlier days of Google Adwords, when Adwords Editor wasn't even being used yet.\n",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3869,"children":3870},{},[3871],{"type":34,"value":3872},"Leigh loves to create accounts and watch them grow, even more she loves to take a poorly performing account and turn it around. Watching the KPIs increase from changes she has made or new ideas she implements, keeps her career exciting.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3874,"children":3875},{},[3876],{"type":34,"value":3877},"Managing a wide variety of accounts that include local car dealerships, worldwide clothing stores, online supplement shops to plastic surgeons and much much more, Leigh brings a vast knowledge of creative ways in managing accounts.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3879,"children":3880},{},[3881],{"type":34,"value":3882},"While working the majority of her career in local offices, the options for expanding her career were becoming less and less. She decided to apply for a remote job (before it was the norm) and was able to get experience that wasn't as prevalent in the smaller area in which she resides.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3884,"children":3885},{},[3886],{"type":34,"value":3887},"After working from home for the past 6 years the opportunities kept coming and when MKG reached out to her, she knew that there was something special about them and decided to take the leap. The people first environment is not just talked about here, but it is practiced everyday. MKG Marketing is unlike anywhere she has ever worked.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3889,"children":3890},{},[3891],{"type":34,"value":3892},"Outside of work, Leigh enjoys spending time with her husband Dustin, their blended family (Emma, Casey, Jake & Brayden) and their dog Millie.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3894,"children":3895},{},[3896],{"type":34,"value":3897},"The kitchen is where you will always find her, she loves to cook and bake all things Gluten Free and no one ever knows. When they are not at a swim meet or a baseball game they love swimming in their pool, long walks on the local trails, renovating their house and binging shows.",{"type":28,"tag":1901,"props":3899,"children":3900},{"id":3494},[3901],{"type":34,"value":3902},"Fun Facts",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3904,"children":3905},{},[3906],{"type":34,"value":3907},"Although it was just was a short time, at age 19 Leigh drove cross country from a small town in PA and moved to Hollywood Hills, CA. Her view from her kitchen window was the Hollywood sign. Not a bad first apartment.",{"title":7,"searchDepth":787,"depth":787,"links":3909},[3910],{"id":3494,"depth":2372,"text":3902},"content:team:leigh-snyder.md","team/leigh-snyder.md","team/leigh-snyder",{"_path":3915,"_dir":3916,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":3917,"description":3918,"name":3917,"imageDescription":3919,"ref":3920,"jobTitle":3921,"images":3922,"linkedIn":3920,"quote":3924,"quoteCite":3917,"sequence":3925,"body":3926,"_type":791,"_id":4000,"_source":793,"_file":4001,"_stem":4002,"_extension":796,"category":3916,"minutes":3596},"/team/marketing-leadership/celeste-jacroux","marketing-leadership","Celeste Jacroux","Meet Celeste Jacroux, a strategic GTM partner to MKG and Founder of Sweel Marketing Advisors. She leads Go-to-Market strategy for high-growth companies.","Celeste Jacroux, Founder of Swell Marketing Advisors and MKG Partner","celeste-jacroux","Fractional GTM Leader | Founder, Swell Marketing Advisors",{"landscape":3923},"celeste-jacroux.webp","A great product doesn't win on its own. It wins when the story, the strategy, and the sales motion all pull in the exact same direction.",7,{"type":25,"children":3927,"toc":3997},[3928,3941,3946,3958,3964],{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3929,"children":3931},{"className":3930},[3473],[3932,3934,3939],{"type":34,"value":3933},"\nCeleste Jacroux is a Go-to-Market architect for companies ready to graduate from \"random acts of marketing\" to a predictable revenue engine. As the Founder of ",{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":3935,"children":3936},{},[3937],{"type":34,"value":3938},"Swell Marketing Advisors",{"type":34,"value":3940}," and a strategic partner to MKG, she brings deep expertise in aligning product, sales, and marketing into a cohesive GTM strategy.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3942,"children":3943},{},[3944],{"type":34,"value":3945},"Celeste understands that for founders, the hardest phase is often bridging the gap between a great product and the market that needs it. She specializes in clarifying positioning, defining ideal customer profiles (ICPs), and building the strategic roadmap that turns vision into traction.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":3947,"children":3948},{},[3949,3951,3956],{"type":34,"value":3950},"At MKG, Celeste steps in as a Marketing Leader for our ",{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":3952,"children":3953},{},[3954],{"type":34,"value":3955},"Marketing Leadership + Activation",{"type":34,"value":3957}," clients. She provides the senior-level direction and GTM rigor, working hand-in-hand with MKG’s activation teams to ensure that strategy doesn't just sit in a deck—it gets executed, measured, and optimized for growth.",{"type":28,"tag":1901,"props":3959,"children":3961},{"id":3960},"expertise",[3962],{"type":34,"value":3963},"Expertise",{"type":28,"tag":888,"props":3965,"children":3966},{},[3967,3977,3987],{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":3968,"children":3969},{},[3970,3975],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":3971,"children":3972},{},[3973],{"type":34,"value":3974},"Go-to-Market Strategy:",{"type":34,"value":3976}," Launching new products and entering new markets with precision.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":3978,"children":3979},{},[3980,3985],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":3981,"children":3982},{},[3983],{"type":34,"value":3984},"Positioning & Messaging:",{"type":34,"value":3986}," Translating complex tech into clear customer value.",{"type":28,"tag":892,"props":3988,"children":3989},{},[3990,3995],{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":3991,"children":3992},{},[3993],{"type":34,"value":3994},"Sales & Marketing Alignment:",{"type":34,"value":3996}," Ensuring the revenue team is fighting the same battle.",{"title":7,"searchDepth":787,"depth":787,"links":3998},[3999],{"id":3960,"depth":2372,"text":3963},"content:team:marketing-leadership:celeste-jacroux.md","team/marketing-leadership/celeste-jacroux.md","team/marketing-leadership/celeste-jacroux",{"_path":4004,"_dir":3916,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"title":22,"description":4005,"name":22,"imageDescription":3798,"ref":3791,"jobTitle":4006,"images":4007,"twitter":3795,"linkedIn":3795,"quote":3792,"quoteCite":3797,"sequence":4008,"body":4009,"_type":791,"_id":4087,"_source":793,"_file":4088,"_stem":4089,"_extension":796,"category":3916,"minutes":787},"/team/marketing-leadership/kerry-guard","Meet Kerry Guard, MKG Marketing’s CEO and Principal Strategist. She works directly with founders to build scalable marketing engines while hosting the podcast, Back on T-R-A-C-K.","Fractional Marketing Leaders",{"landscape":3794},5,{"type":25,"children":4010,"toc":4084},[4011,4017,4057,4068,4073,4077],{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":4012,"children":4014},{"className":4013},[3473],[4015],{"type":34,"value":4016},"\nKerry Guard (she/her) is the strategist founders call when they are tired of guessing. As the CEO of MKG Marketing, she doesn’t just run the agency; she steps into the trenches with clients as a Fractional Marketing Leader. She specializes in helping founders navigate the \"Growth Valley\"—building the systems, strategy, and teams required to scale from traction to expansion.",{"type":28,"tag":37,"props":4018,"children":4019},{},[4020,4022,4027,4029,4034,4036,4041,4043,4048,4050,4055],{"type":34,"value":4021},"Her recent work focuses on bringing enterprise-level rigor to growing businesses. She serves as the strategic marketing engine for a diverse portfolio, including ",{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":4023,"children":4024},{},[4025],{"type":34,"value":4026},"Rutkowski Law Firm",{"type":34,"value":4028},", ",{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":4030,"children":4031},{},[4032],{"type":34,"value":4033},"Fulcrum Enterprise Group",{"type":34,"value":4035},", and ",{"type":28,"tag":880,"props":4037,"children":4038},{},[4039],{"type":34,"value":4040},"Premier Office Movers",{"type":34,"value":4042},", where she aligns revenue goals with marketing execution. 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