This week: Google’s AI Overviews are eating publisher clicks, AI is supercharging ad creative, and your org chart is already obsolete. And why your positioning is probably broken, plus a new look at the GTM flywheel.
Google’s AI Overviews Are Reshaping Search
Google search volume may have grown over 20% in 2024, but where the clicks go is a different story. The rise of AI-generated answers is creating a sobering new reality for marketers who depend on organic traffic.
Research shows that AI Overviews reduce website clicks by almost half, with some publishers reporting traffic drops as high as 89%. Adding pressure, Google now pulls individual Business Profile reviews directly into AI answers, making reputation management more critical than ever.
For B2B marketers, this represents board-level risk for content-led demand generation. Relying on organic traffic from informational queries is no longer safe. The new imperative is building brand demand beyond classic SERPs and optimizing for being the cited source within AI answers through definitive, well-structured, authoritative content.
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BIG IDEA: AI Overviews are turning search into an answer engine, not a referral engine, demanding a pivot from capturing clicks to building brand recall.
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WHY IT MATTERS: Your SEO strategy must now account for fewer clicks, where your brand's reputation and direct traffic channels are your most durable assets.
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Is your creative team the bottleneck in scaling paid ads? New data suggests AI can augment the creative process for significant gains when Meta ad spend gets stuck.
Aazar Ali Shad highlights a common scaling problem: when spend plateaus, the issue is almost always creative, not targeting. His solution involves doubling creative volume and building iterations from winning ads. This aligns with MIT field experiments showing that pairing humans with AI for ad creation markedly boosted productivity.
After spending $100K testing AI versus human ads, leading teams use AI to scale creative testing and overcome production hurdles. Instead of replacement, AI generates diverse concepts, hooks, and formats while humans provide strategic oversight. The goal is building creative infrastructure that modern ad platforms reward.
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BIG IDEA: AI excels at generating creative volume and variation, but human strategy guides the process and interprets results for scalable ad performance.
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WHY IT MATTERS: Your competitive advantage in paid acquisition may soon depend on how well your team leverages AI as a creative partner, not just an automation tool.
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AI Is Making Your Org Chart Obsolete
While many leaders focus on AI for task automation, the bigger shift is happening in team structure and workflow definition. The idea of linear, human-driven processes is quickly becoming outdated.
Tech giants are making moves. Salesforce recently cut thousands of support roles as AI now handles roughly 50% of their support interactions. This isn’t cost-cutting; it’s fundamental change in how work gets done. One example: taking a customer pain point to working feature in six hours using AI tools, compressing cycles that once took weeks.
This signals a future where marketing and product teams are smaller, more strategic, and heavily AI-augmented. As one observer notes, we’re decoupling output from human keyboard time. For CMOs, this means rethinking team composition, skill sets, and development lifecycles—though managing AI agents can be harder than managing humans.
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BIG IDEA: True productivity gains from AI come not from simple automation, but from collapsing entire workflows and enabling smaller, strategic teams to achieve more.
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WHY IT MATTERS: Your org chart and hiring plans are likely already outdated; the most valuable employees will manage teams of AI agents effectively.
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The Positioning Problem: Why You’re Anyone
In a market where every SaaS tool claims to be an "all-in-one platform," how do you stand out? The answer isn’t a better feature; it’s better positioning that makes clear why customers should prefer you.
Most SaaS positioning boils down to, "You can pick anyone, and we’re anyone." To break free, you must spell out advantages against well-known tools and plot competition on a 2x2 matrix highlighting tradeoffs buyers actually care about. The goal is finding an open quadrant you can own.
This isn’t just messaging; it’s strategic. Good positioning has three levels: clarity (what you do), differentiation (how you’re different), and unique value (why you’re better). While many startups fail at level one, true market dominance requires all three. Your positioning statement should guide every marketing and sales decision.
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BIG IDEA: Effective positioning isn't about being universally "good," but about being uniquely valuable to a specific market segment through clear, meaningful differentiation.
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WHY IT MATTERS: Without sharp positioning, your GTM strategy is built on weak foundation, forcing you to compete on price or features alone—a race to the bottom.
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Beyond CAC: Building a Smarter GTM Flywheel
Is your finance team’s obsession with low Customer Acquisition Cost actually hurting growth? For many B2B tech companies, myopic focus on this single metric leads to counterproductive decisions and stalled momentum.
The CAC conversation is often broken. Evaluating CAC without its relationship to payback period, ACV, and LTV is "math without meaning." Chasing cheap CAC with ineffective GTM motion is like optimizing something that doesn’t work. Focus shouldn’t be cutting costs but creating value by increasing ACVs and pipeline velocity.
This requires shifting from siloed goals—where finance wants cheap leads and sales wants demo volume—to aligned incentives across GTM functions. Building a "GTM Flywheel" means identifying chokepoints and aligning motion to growth phase. For early-stage companies, this often means founder-led GTM motion to get first 100 customers and gather market insights before scaling teams.
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BIG IDEA: Effective GTM strategy focuses on the entire growth equation (LTV, ACV, payback) rather than obsessing over single inputs like CAC.
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WHY IT MATTERS: Aligning your entire GTM team around holistic metrics turns CAC from a budget battleground into a strategic lever for sustainable growth.
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Sound Bites
The throughline this week is clear: technology is forcing us to be better marketers. Whether it’s AI changing engagement rules or tough markets demanding smarter growth strategies, the path forward requires clarity, alignment, and willingness to question old assumptions.
What’s one assumption about your GTM strategy you plan to challenge this quarter?
