How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Marketing Visibility
AI is no longer a tool, it’s the infrastructure; and the new battleground is who gets cited, surfaced, and seen.
Let’s not pretend this is still up for debate. If your marketing team isn’t using AI in 2025, it’s not being “cautiously traditional.” It’s just behind.
HubSpot’s latest State of AI in Marketing report puts a number on what most CMOs already feel in their bones: AI isn’t just part of the marketing stack anymore; it is the stack. According to the report, 91% of marketing leaders say their teams are actively using AI. And nearly two-thirds are building their own tools around it. Not whiteboard concepts—real tools. Tools that generate content, automate workflows, and push ROI in the right direction.
But even with that kind of adoption, two things keep popping up: lack of expertise and a big, foggy cloud of ethical questions. Which makes sense. Everyone’s racing ahead, but not everyone’s reading the map. The takeaway? AI fluency isn’t a nice-to-have anymore; it’s the price of entry. Teams that learn fast and build smart will pull ahead. Not just because they’re faster, but because they’ll be the ones showing up in the places that matter.
The New Front Page: AI Citations
And those places? They’re shifting. Fast.
Ahrefs just dropped a sprawling analysis of over 78 million interactions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. And the results are a little jarring. The content sources AI assistants cite most often aren’t necessarily the ones marketers have been optimizing for. Wikipedia, for example, is cited more than any other domain—especially by ChatGPT, where it accounts for a chunky 16.3% of citations. YouTube, meanwhile, leads in Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. Reddit and Quora also show up heavily in Google’s AI results.
So what does that mean for your content strategy? Well, if you’re still thinking in terms of classic SEO—title tags, backlinks, keyword density—you might be missing the bigger picture. AI assistants are quickly becoming the primary interface between users and information. And they don’t just “rank” content; they cite it. Or they don’t. And if they don’t, your brand might as well be invisible.
Optimizing for Machines, Not Just Humans
That brings us to a tough but necessary shift: marketers now need to optimize not just for human readers, but for machine readers too. That means rethinking content architecture, domain authority, and media format. You’re not just writing blog posts; you’re building machine-readable assets.
Inclusive Marketing Still Isn’t Getting Enough Air
And while we’re on the subject of visibility, let’s talk about inclusivity, because it still isn’t getting enough of the
spotlight.
HubSpot’s separate piece on inclusive marketing is a bit of a gut check. Brands that prioritize inclusive messaging see stronger loyalty and better revenue performance. That part’s not surprising. What is surprising is how underused those strategies still are. It’s one of those things that everyone nods along to, but when it comes time to build the campaign, somehow it ends up on the cutting room floor. Maybe it feels too complex. Maybe it’s hard to measure. Either way, it’s a missed opportunity, and a costly one.
Tactical AI: Real Examples That Actually Work
Meanwhile, over in the land of practical AI, HubSpot’s CMO shared a refreshingly tactical guide to using AI for website optimization. No fluff, just real examples of how AI operators are boosting conversions by tweaking page layouts, streamlining copy, and improving load speeds. It’s the kind of stuff you could actually hand to a team and say, “Try this today.”
AI Detectors: Imperfect, but Important
And finally, a quick word on AI detectors. Yes, they’re flawed. No, that doesn’t mean they’re useless.
Ahrefs makes the case that even imperfect detectors have value. They’re a bit like spam filters in the early 2000s—not great, but better than nothing. If you’re publishing AI-assisted content (and let’s be honest, who isn’t?), it’s worth understanding how those detectors work, and how they might flag or suppress your content. Not because you’re doing something wrong, but because the rules are still being written, and some of them are being written by machines.
That’s it for today, folks.
Catch you in the next post.
Until then, keep building.
– Perfect Sites Blog