Monica Caraway
Right now in B2B marketing, your buyers are asking ChatGPT which vendors to consider. They're using Perplexity to research solutions. They're letting AI tools filter, evaluate, and recommend long before they ever visit your website.
Most companies know AI matters. But they have no idea what to actually do about it.
And if your brand isn't optimized for AI comprehension? You're not just losing rankings. You're losing the conversation entirely before it even reaches a human decision-maker.
That's why winning Gold at the 2025 MarCom Awards for our white paper on marketing to AI feels especially significant. This recognition validates months of testing, implementation, and real-world results helping B2B companies show up where decisions are actually being made: inside AI-generated answers.
The visibility game has fundamentally shifted. SEO got you ranked on the results page. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) gets you cited inside the answer, where buyers make their decisions before they ever click through.
What We Won (And Why It Matters)
Gold Award: Marketing to AI: Your New Audience
Our Marketing to AI: Your New Audience won Gold in MarCom's White Paper/Ebook category. The resource breaks down ten actionable tactics to help B2B companies get discovered, understood, and recommended by AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude.
Why does this matter? AI is a gatekeeper. And if your brand isn't optimized for AI comprehension, you're invisible to a growing segment of your potential customers.
About the MarCom Awards
The MarCom Awards is an international competition administered by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals (AMCP), drawing over 6,000 entries from the United States, Canada, and 41 other countries.
Industry professionals judge entries based on creativity, execution, message effectiveness, and overall impact. Projects are evaluated on their own merits rather than against each other, which means organizations of all sizes get a fair shot at recognition.
Only about 18% of entries earn Gold Awards (those that exceed the high standards of industry norms). Honorable Mentions (about 10% of entries) go to work that meets the judges' expectations for excellence.
Why This Recognition Matters
AI is already shaping how purchasing decisions are made. It's the lens customers are using right now to evaluate who to trust, what to buy, and where to go next. But knowing AI matters and knowing what to do about it are two very different things.
We've been deep in the trenches on this for our clients, testing tactics, measuring what actually moves the needle, and refining our approach based on what gets brands cited by ChatGPT, featured in Google AI Overviews, and recommended by Perplexity. This Gold Award recognizes that work: turning AI marketing theory into practical implementation roadmaps.
What We've Learned About AI Marketing
Through our client work optimizing for AI discovery, we've identified the critical priorities that separate companies who get cited by AI from those who remain invisible:
- Structure matters more than ever. AI needs semantic HTML, schema markup, clear hierarchies, and metadata to understand your content. Beautiful design means nothing if AI can't parse it.
- Repetition isn't redundant (it's reinforcement). AI models favor brands they encounter repeatedly across trusted sources. Consistent brand signals and strategic content distribution build AI memory.
- Multimedia is mandatory. AI doesn't just read text. It processes images, audio, and video. If you're not optimizing across modalities, you're leaving visibility on the table.
- Technical SEO has evolved. Traditional SEO tactics still matter, but AI crawlers have different requirements. Your robots.txt file, llms.txt implementation, and permission settings can make or break your AI discoverability.
- Authority signals drive AI trust. Creating citation-worthy content that AI models trust requires more than just good writing. It requires understanding knowledge graph optimization, implementing structured data correctly, and building offsite authority across the sources AI considers credible.
What's Next?
AI is moving fast, and so are we. Winning Gold for content about AI marketing strategy is one thing. Actually implementing AEO tactics that get your brand cited inside AI-generated answers? That's where it matters.
On Thursday, November 20 at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET, we're sharing our research and tactics in a live 45-minute briefing: The AI Visibility Playbook: Live AEO Briefing for B2B Marketers.
You'll learn:
- How to structure content so AI crawlers can parse and cite it
- Schema and microdata implementations that work
- Offsite authority strategies that build AI trust
- How to measure AEO performance with existing tools
- Ways to align your HubSpot data with AI discovery strategies
The visibility game has changed. AEO gets you cited inside the answers where buyers make decisions.
Register for the live briefing!
📅 Thursday, November 20, 2025
🕘 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET
🎟️ Register here
Can't make it live? Register anyway for the recording plus our AEO implementation checklist.
