TL;DR: For CMOs, the SEO playbook from 2018 is officially obsolete. The rise of AI search requires a fundamental shift in strategy—from optimizing for rankings to engineering for citations. This new approach involves using AI tools as your competitive dashboard, building "LLM-digestible" assets across multiple digital surfaces, and creating reinforcement loops to train AI models to recognize your brand as an authority.
I speak with Chief Marketing Officers every day, and I often find them grappling with a new and unsettling reality: their trusted SEO playbook is no longer delivering the results it used to. The truth is, the game has fundamentally changed. If I had to teach a CMO how to win in today's AI-driven search landscape, without a massive in-house SEO team, this is the six-step strategic framework I would provide.
It's about reorienting your entire approach away from a world that no longer exists and towards the new frontier of digital discovery.
The Modern Marketing Playbook: 6 Steps to AI Search Dominance
Step 1: Shift Your Goal from Rankings to Citations
The old North Star of SEO was achieving a #1 ranking. This is no longer the primary goal. Large Language Models (LLMs) don't "rank" in the traditional sense; they retrieve information from sources they trust and synthesize it into an answer.
Your new guiding question must be: "What content is an LLM most likely to cite when answering a real user prompt?"
This shifts your focus away from vanity metrics like blog traffic and keyword density and towards creating genuinely authoritative, "citable" content. This is the core principle behind our Mercury LLM-SEO (GAIO) services.
Step 2: Treat Perplexity as Your New Competitive Dashboard
Your traditional analytics dashboards, like Google Search Console, cannot show you how visible you are inside ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. But a tool like Perplexity AI can give you real-time intelligence.
- Run strategic queries like:
- “Top [your category] tools for [your industry]”
- “Best alternatives to [your key competitor]”
- “Tools with [a specific integration] for [your ideal customer]”
- Then, analyze the results: Who is being cited? What specific pages are referenced? What formats (lists, tables, Q&A) are being used? This is no longer just research; this is your new competitive map.
Step 3: Build "LLM-Digestible" Assets Across Three Surfaces
You don't need 50 blog posts to win. You need approximately 15 high-signal, strategically placed assets. Think in terms of three distinct "surfaces":
- Your Owned Site: This is where you create clear, highly structured content rich with details about your integrations and use cases. Our Mercury CMS is designed to facilitate the creation of this type of AI-friendly content.
- Community Platforms: Get your brand mentioned organically on Quora, Reddit, G2, and relevant listicles where real users are discussing their needs.
- Trusted Domains: Earn mentions through PR, guest posts on authoritative sites, and inclusion in industry databases. Visibility and authority compound across these surfaces. This is the heart of our Mercury SEVO (Search Everywhere Optimization) strategy.
Step 4: Train the AI with "Contextual Density," Not Content Volume
Your brand needs to appear in the context of highly specific, high-intent prompts.
- For example:
- “Tools with SOC2 and AI compliance for fintech startups”
- “Marketing automation platforms that have a native Notion integration for content teams” LLMs learn through association. Your job is to create content patterns that match these high-intent contexts, moving beyond simple keywords.
Step 5: Master the "Second-Degree Visibility" Game
This is a crucial insight. While Google ranks your pages, LLMs often cite other pages that mention you. The most intelligent way to win at LLM SEO is to get your brand listed in the content that AI models already trust and cite.
- Reverse-engineer the sources: Which Substack newsletters, Reddit threads, or Quora answers consistently appear in AI responses for your industry? Then, find authentic ways to get your brand mentioned in those exact places.
Step 6: Create Prompt Reinforcement Loops
This is one of the most overlooked growth levers. AI models learn and reinforce what gets asked, clicked on, and ultimately cited. You can ethically "train" the model by encouraging your own team and your users to:
- Ask AI tools questions about your industry and solutions.
- Prompt the AI to compare your brand to competitors.
- Cite your website or content in their own prompts when creating content. This is not black-hat manipulation; it is smart signaling that helps the AI learn about your relevance and authority based on real user behavior.
Conclusion: The New Mandate for Marketing Leadership
A CMO in 2025 does not need a massive SEO war chest or a large team of writers to win in the new landscape of AI search. What you need is a sophisticated understanding of how AI models decide who to cite, a strategic placement of your brand's expertise across trusted digital surfaces, and a commitment to creating the clear contextual signals that feed these new engines of discovery. This is the new, more intelligent path to building a dominant and resilient brand.
