SEO is not dead. It is evolving into something far more strategically important.

Conductor is the organic-marketing platform. For years that has meant search-engine optimisation: helping global brands rank in Google and the other search engines, building the technical foundations of websites, and producing the content that earns traffic. In the last 18 months the work has changed materially because the discovery layer has changed. Buyers don't only Google. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot. Discovery is now distributed across answer engines as well as search engines.

We talk about Answer Engine Optimisation alongside SEO. AEO is the discipline of being the answer when an AI assistant generates a response for a buyer. The principles overlap with SEO (authoritative content, clean structure, strong technical fundamentals) and diverge in important ways. Answer engines pull across many sources. They cite differently. They reward different formats. They surface specific facts, numbers, and direct claims. The marketer who understands both is the one whose brand gets found in the new discovery layer.

The average prompt people now give an AI assistant is around 23 words. Compare that to the two- or three-word search query of 15 years of SEO. The prompt is longer, more conversational, more loaded with context. The user has already told the answer engine who they are, what they need, what stage they're at, what they've tried. They expect one synthesised answer, not ten blue links to choose from.

What that does to the funnel is significant. The top of the funnel (the awareness moment) is compressed. The buyer skips the consideration phase that used to involve reading three blog posts and a comparison article. They get an answer. They show up to your website with much higher intent and often much later in the buying journey. The implication for marketing is that the content has to do more work earlier and the brand has to earn the citation.

The biggest organisational change AEO is forcing is the position of the content function inside marketing. Content used to be a cost centre supporting demand generation. Now content is the strategic pillar. The reason: AI assistants source from content. If the brand isn't producing authoritative, useful, citable content at the depth and frequency answer engines reward, the brand isn't being surfaced. Demand gen, paid media, even product marketing all depend on the content function getting it right.

We're reorganising around this. Content people who used to report into the demand function are being repositioned as a peer pillar. They're being given the budget, the headcount, and the strategic mandate that the discipline now deserves. The CMO who treats content as the support function is going to find their brand invisible in the answer-engine layer in 18 months.

Genuinely useful, original, well-researched, with specific facts and figures the assistant can cite. The scraped-and-summarised template content that filled the open web for the last decade does not earn citations. The opposite does: original research, original frameworks, original customer data, original points of view. The discipline is investment in real intellectual capital, not content velocity for its own sake.

The agency-led model for demand generation and analyst relations is being rebuilt in-house. The reason: the work is now more strategic, more cross-functional, and more dependent on owned data and owned point of view. A demand agency optimising paid bids is doing valuable execution work, but the strategy of who to target, what message to lead with, what content to feed into the answer-engine layer, sits inside the brand. Same with analyst relations: the briefings have to come from the people who hold the strategic point of view, not from a third-party packager.

Specialist execution stays with agencies that have scale advantages: paid-media optimisation across many platforms, creative production at volume, market-specific localisation. The strategy and the owned content move in. Many CMOs are using the agency-fee savings to fund the in-house content function, which is the right move for where the discovery layer is going.

I'm Co-Head of Revenue alongside the VP Marketing title. That's deliberate. The CMO who only owns marketing pipeline is being measured against half the funnel. In B2B, the marketing function and the revenue function have to share targets, share data, and share accountability. The AI era makes that more urgent because the inbound funnel is compressed and the buyer arrives later in the journey. If marketing and sales aren't tightly aligned at that point, the conversion suffers and both sides blame each other.

The discipline we run: shared weekly pipeline review, shared monthly forecasting, shared quarterly target-setting. Marketing reports against the revenue number, not against the MQL number. That changes the conversation and changes the priorities.

AI inside the marketing function is doing the work AEO is making essential outside it: research at speed, summarisation at scale, draft generation, competitive analysis, content auditing. The skill that matters in the team is judgement: when to trust the AI output, when to override it, when to invest deeper. The senior marketer is becoming part editor, part curator, part strategist, with AI handling the volume.

The hire I would make first in any marketing organisation right now is a senior content strategist with a journalism or research background, comfortable with AI tools, comfortable producing original research. That hire is the lynchpin of the AEO move. Without it, the brand is producing volume-driven content that does not earn citation. With it, the brand becomes the source other people's AI assistants are pulling from.

If you are early in a B2B marketing career, lean into the content discipline. The content function is moving from support to strategic. The marketer who can produce, edit, and orchestrate original content in the AEO era is going to be very valuable. The marketer who can only run campaigns on top of someone else's content is going to find the work more commoditised.