Tarek is Content Lead at CXL, where he currently explores and experiments with how AI can enhance marketing across multiple domains. From building automated content workflows to improving audience engagement and lead generation, he’s focused on pushing practical, real-world applications of AI in marketing.
Most educational content shows you the polished end result. The best practices, the final framework, the “what works.”
But what often gets left out are the setbacks, the failed experiments, and the messy process that actually leads to those results.
That’s the gap we’re closing with this new series.
AI won’t take your job. But someone who knows AI might.
That’s been the dominant narrative for the past two years. So instead of adding to the speculation, we pulled real data. We analyzed 1,000 US-based marketing job listings on LinkedIn to see what companies are actually hiring for, what they’re paying, and where AI fits in.
If there’s one thing recent SEO and GEO studies have confirmed, it’s that YouTube is now one of the top domains referenced by LLMs.
People would rather watch answers than read them, and according to Datos, YouTube searches aren’t plateauing. They’re growing significantly, steadily pulling search intent away from text-first platforms.
So why are so many marketing professionals avoiding this opportunity for YouTube growth?
Nobody disputes that SEO fundamentals still work. Valuable content. Quality backlinks. Domain authority. These aren’t going anywhere.
It’s how people find information, and the infrastructure determining what gets surfaced that has fundamentally shifted.
When it comes to AI, most of us are already using it in one way or another. While marketers may lean on it for data analysis, to clean up some copy, or automate repetitive tasks, most marketers primarily use it as a search engine.
Whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, chances are you’ve already used one of these tools to research something. But what if, instead of using existing AI to gather insights on your audience, you could build your own AI research tool?
2025 marked a turning point for organic search. The rise of Google’s AI Overviews has led to a noticeable drop in traditional organic clicks. It didn’t just change how content is sourced in search but how search engines decide what content to pull or cite.
People aren’t just Googling anymore; they’re asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to make decisions for them. “What’s the best CRM for startups?” “Which landing page builder should I use?”
The challenge is that you can’t see where ChatGPT looks before it picks a winner: the queries it uses to retrieve information and build AI recommendations are completely invisible.
Until now.
The problem with B2B AI marketing tactics right now is that everyone’s selling certainty in a system that’s changing weekly.
LinkedIn is drowning in posts about “guaranteed” AI strategies: screenshot after screenshot of viral wins, tools that “definitely” get you ranked, and carousels that “always” perform.
But when you actually test them, most fall apart. Not because the tactics are completely wrong, but because they’re presented without context, caveats, or an honest assessment of what changed since they stopped working.
Planning content around search volume data alone while LLMs are running numerous backend queries is the fastest way to miss out on content opportunities.
Seer Interactive found that 95% of the queries that answer engines actually execute have zero tracked search volume. Zero.
So every time you open your keyword tool and filter by volume, you’re systematically ignoring what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are searching for.
The AI search conversation has devolved into a mess of conflicting data points, breathless predictions, and cherry-picked statistics.
One report tells you to panic while another says nothing’s changed. Meanwhile, marketing buzz swings between “Google is dead” and “AI is overrated,” depending on which study dropped that week.