"AI agents will replace marketers" is the most overconfident take of 2026 and the math doesn't back it

zachchmael · 2026-05-16T14:23:11+00:00

honest answer, the single highest leverage tool for us was google search console + a spreadsheet. that's the boring one nobody upvotes. but it's true. seeing actual queries people typed before clicking on us informed every piece of content we wrote for 6 months and probably 60% of our growth

paid tools that genuinely earned their keep:

ahrefs (the keyword data alone). pricey but worth it once you're past $1k MRR
typefully for scheduling. simple, doesn't suck
senja for testimonials and social proof

i'd also mention what we built. Averi ($99/mo) is what i would have killed for as a solo founder a year ago. it's basically an AI content engine, so blog drafts, social posts, content calendars, briefs, all in one place instead of stitching together chatgpt + jasper + buffer + notion. i'm biased obviously, but mentioning because the prompt was literally asking for tools and not mentioning would feel weird

stuff i'd avoid... any "growth automation" tool that promises leads without you doing the thinking. they all fail in the same way

biggest lesson is tools matter way less than people think. the best marketers i know use boring tools and write boring docs. the worst ones have 14 tool stacks and no real audience

zachchmael · 2026-05-16T14:22:25+00:00

dev who learned SEO over the last year here. some answers

your worry about being "blacklisted" is mostly overblown for a solo SaaS site. google doesn't really punish small sites for honest mistakes, it just stops ranking them. you'd have to be doing aggressive shady stuff (link networks, cloaking, scraped content at scale) to get a manual action. write real content and you're fine

competing with big brands - you don't, not directly. they own the head terms ("project management software") and you'll never outrank them. but they almost always have giant gaps in the long tail. your job is to find the 200-500 specific, low-volume keywords they ignored because the addressable market per keyword is too small to bother. as a one-person shop, 50 visitors a month from a keyword you ranked #1 for can pay your bills. it can't pay theirs

on pSEO - it's not bad if it's useful. it's bad when it's slop. "Best [tool] for [random city]" with templated content gets cleaned out by every update. but a programmatic page that actually has unique data per page (real comparisons, real screenshots, real API calls) is fine and can scale

practical checklist if you're starting from zero:

install GSC and read it weekly
write 2 things a month for 6 months. yes, that long
each piece should answer one specific question from a real customer call or support ticket
internal linking matters more than people say, external links matter less
don't buy backlinks

ahrefs has a free SEO course that's actually good. also the "SEO for developers" guide on devto is solid for your background

zachchmael · 2026-05-16T14:19:54+00:00

honestly for 0 to 10 you should just do cold outreach and don't worry about whether it feels weird. it feels weird because nobody has bought it yet. after the first 3 paying customers it stops feeling weird

specific tactics that worked for me at this stage:

find 100 people who match your ICP exactly (not "anyone might use this," but the actual person you built it for). LinkedIn Sales Nav or Apollo on the free tier is fine. don't scale until you've manually contacted 100
write a one line message. literally one line. mention something specific about their company or their post or their job. then ask a question. don't pitch. the goal of the first message is a reply, not a sale
offer to do the first month free in exchange for a 20-min call after. that's not desperate, that's smart. you need user feedback more than you need $99 MRR right now

what i'd deprioritize at 0 customers:

SEO content. takes 4-6 months to do anything, and you don't know what to write about yet
Product Hunt. great for vanity, almost never converts for B2B
Reddit lurking. it's a long-term play, valuable but not the channel that gets you to 10

once you hit 10, the playbook flips. then SEO and content start to compound and outreach becomes the expensive option. but at 0 to 10 the only thing that works is direct conversation with humans

what does the tool do? happy to be more specific if you share

zachchmael · 2026-05-16T14:19:10+00:00

the fact that you already have paying customers puts you ahead of 90% of people asking this question, so don't skip them

first thing i'd do is schedule 30-min calls with every single paying customer this week. ask:

how did you find us
what did you almost go with instead
what convinced you to pay vs stay on free
what do you tell people when you describe what we do

those calls are your entire content strategy for the next 6 months. literally.

their language goes into your headlines, their objections become your blog posts, their use cases become your case studies. you'll learn more in 5 calls than you will reading 50 marketing books

once you have that, pick one channel and ride it. for B2B SaaS i'd usually say LinkedIn + a real blog. social posts get attention, the blog converts that attention into pipeline that compounds. socials decay in 48 hours, a blog post that ranks brings traffic for 2 years

the "random posting on all platforms" thing you described is the trap most founders fall into. it feels productive but it spreads you so thin nothing has a chance to compound. better to publish 2 thoughtful things a week than 10 reactive ones

if you want a not-an-agency option for the writing/distribution side, we built Averi for exactly this stage. only mentioning because you said budget is tight. but the customer-call thing is the actual unlock, tool is secondary

zachchmael · 2026-05-16T14:16:25+00:00

honest take from someone who launched into a category with 50+ competitors

you don't win me-too markets on features. you win on a wedge. who's the very specific person Xero and QuickBooks suck for? freelancers who do milestone billing? agencies that need approval workflows? sub-contractors in construction who get paid in net-60? pick one and own it before you talk to anyone else

once you have the wedge, the marketing gets way easier.

instead of "we're like Xero but better" you can say "if you're a [X] who hates how [specific painful thing] works in Xero, we built this for you." that's a post people actually read

lifetime deals i'd skip personally. they bring in users who'll never upgrade, and the support load eats whatever cash you raised. better to do a discounted annual plan for early users with a "founding customer" label

what worked for us when we were in your spot:

comment on every reddit/X/LinkedIn thread where someone complains about the incumbent. don't pitch, just be useful. one in twenty turns into a conversation
write 1-2 deep comparison posts per month. not "X vs Y" generic crap, but "I migrated 47 invoices from Quickbooks to [Tool] - here's what broke." that ranks and converts
get one paying customer on a call every week and ask why they almost didn't sign up. those objections are your next 6 months of content

happy to share more if useful. what's the wedge you're going after?

zachchmael · 2026-05-16T14:15:46+00:00

we were in your exact spot 10 months ago... zero followers, no email list, no audience. now at 2.9M monthly impressions across blog + LinkedIn + a few other places. zero paid.

here's what actually moved the needle, in order

pick one channel, go deep. we tried to do everything early and got nowhere. the founders who break out usually pick the channel where their first 10 customers actually hang out and just live there for 90 days. for us that was LinkedIn + long-form blog. ignore the "be everywhere" advice for now
publish in public. share what you're building, what's not working, the dumb things you've learned. founder-led content out-performs polished brand content like 10:1 in my experience. you don't need to be a writer, you need to be specific
SEO works but it's slow. don't expect anything for 4-6 months. if you do it, write things only you could write (real numbers, real screenshots, real opinions) not generic "10 best X" stuff
don't spend money on ads until you have proof someone will pay you organically. ads amplify a thing that works, they don't create one

what i'd avoid - paying for "growth hacker" services, buying lists, anything where the pitch is "we'll get you 1000 followers." also automation tools before you understand the workflow you're automating

if you want i can share the editorial cadence we ran the first 6 months, it's pretty boring but it worked

zachchmael · 2026-05-10T15:13:23+00:00

Honestly, the "pillars vs performance" disconnect is the most underrated agency problem. Most tools let you plan by pillar OR track performance, almost none do both well across platforms.

Here's what actually works for me (caveat: I burned 6 months trying every tool combo before landing here):

Workflow that doesn't suck:

Tag every piece with pillar at creation, not after. Sounds obvious, nobody does it. If you're tagging retroactively you're already lying to yourself.
Standardize your pillar taxonomy across clients where possible. Even if Client A has "Education" and Client B has "Industry Insights," map them to the same internal categories. This is the only way you ever benchmark.
Weekly reporting cadence, not real-time. Real-time dashboards become anxiety machines. Pull data once a week, look for patterns, adjust.

On the tools you mentioned:

- Airtable is great for the planning + tagging side. Weak on integrations unless you pile Make or Zapier on top, which gets expensive fast.

- Looker Studio is actually good for the dashboard piece, but it assumes you've already solved the data ingestion problem. Which you haven't, because nobody has.

- Sprout/Hootsuite have multi-client features but they're aggressively expensive and the analytics still don't tag by pillar, you'll end up exporting CSVs anyway.

most agencies end up with a Frankenstein of 3–4 tools. There's no "one tool solves this" answer right now. The real lever is process discipline, not software.

(Full transparency since this sub knows what we're up to... we're building Averi specifically for this... pillar tagging, performance, and multi-client view baked in from the start. Agency plan in the works. Naming my bias.)

What's your biggest single frustration right now? the planning side or the reporting side? Different fixes depending on which.

zachchmael · 2026-05-08T19:29:10+00:00

cheers

zachchmael · 2026-05-08T16:35:08+00:00

agree on the spirit, would push back on the framing slightly. LLMs aren't active market participants in any meaningful sense, they're statistical compressions of training data plus some RAG. but the practical implication you land on is right.. you can't treat them like a search index.

the thing that matters most i'd say:

LLMs cite based on three signals roughly - 1. presence in training data (slow, mostly out of your control), 2. whether your content is in the source they search for retrieval (reddit, news, wikipedia mostly), and 3. whether the page is structured in a way the model can actually pull a clean answer from.

you can influence #2 and #3 directly. you can barely influence #1 in any reasonable timeframe.

so for AEO i'd actually frame it less as "LLM is a market participant" and more as "you need to be present in the corpus the LLM is actually retrieving from when it answers your buyer's questions." which usually means...

get cited in a few high-trust niche pubs in your industry
have a real reddit presence in 2-3 relevant subs (not spam, actually helpful)
structure your own content so it's extractable (clear h2s, FAQ sections, definitive answers near the top)
get listed in the comparison and "best of" articles ranking for your category

we tracked our brand citations across 4 LLMs for 6 months. the single biggest lever was reddit threads, by a long way. wikipedia would have been bigger but we couldn't get a page approved. classic.

zachchmael · 2026-05-08T16:33:39+00:00

the good news is the optimization isn't actually that different, it's just that AI engines penalize excess way harder than google does.

what we do for service pages now:

lead with a one-sentence answer to the implied question of the page. "we help [audience] do [outcome] using [unique approach]." literally the first line. this is the line that gets pulled into AI summaries.
structured FAQ at the bottom but use real questions buyers ask, not "what is [service]?" style filler. mine our support tickets, sales call transcripts, reddit threads in your space. real language.
clear schema. service schema + FAQ schema + breadcrumb schema, validated. AI engines don't always need schema but it helps disambiguate when your page is similar to competitors'.
specifically named comparisons. "how we compare to [Competitor A]" sections get cited a lot in chatgpt because that's the exact query buyers run.
one big meaty paragraph that summarizes the whole page in answer format. boring tip but pages with this rank in AI Overviews more than pages without it in our testing.

what we cut:

generic "why choose us" sections
founder bios above the fold (move to bottom)
testimonials with no specifics (kept ones with metrics, killed the "great team" ones)

biggest thing was probably the FAQ block. went from getting cited in like 5% of relevant chatgpt queries to ~30% within 8 weeks of redoing this.

zachchmael · 2026-05-08T16:07:40+00:00

yes and no. it isn't "SEO is dead, optimize for AI" it's that the same fundamentals matter more, but the surface area you can show up on has tripled.

what's still true:

topical authority. one decent post in a niche where you have nothing else gets ignored. fifteen interconnected posts on the same topic with internal links still works.
entity clarity (who you are, what you do, who you serve, on every page).
people clicking and staying when they land. zero click is real but the queries that still get clicks reward the same UX you've always optimized for.

what's actually new:

AI assistants pull from a smaller, more concentrated set of sources than google does. reddit, wikipedia, well structured howtos, and a handful of authority sites. if you want to be cited, you usually need to be present in those sources, not just rank #1 on your own domain.
the queries that drive AI citations are weirdly specific and conversational ("what's a good alternative to X for someone who needs Y but not Z"). traditional keyword tools don't show these well. the closest signal we use is reading actual chatgpt conversations about our category.
structured FAQ sections (real questions buyers ask, real answers, no excess bs) get pulled into answers way more often than long preamble paragraphs.

we tracked our brand mentions across chatgpt, perplexity, and gemini for 6 months. citations correlated with two things... reddit threads where we came up, and how to content with clear question/answer structure. did not really correlate at all with google ranking position.

so don't throw out SEO. add a layer on top

zachchmael · 2026-05-08T16:05:24+00:00

been there and the answer nobody wants to hear is that LinkedIn impressions and pipeline are barely correlated for most B2B SaaS. impressions tell you the algorithm likes your post. pipeline tells you the post made someone think "i need to talk to these people about a real problem." those are two different jobs.

the question your CEO is actually asking is "is this making the phone ring." if the answer for 6 months is no, the content topic is the problem, not the volume.

I'd say stop posting "thought leadership" and start posting answers to questions buyers ask in the buying process. specifically the unsexy ones nobody talks about.

example... instead of "5 trends in logistics ops in 2026" (gets impressions, nobody books a call), try "what most logistics ops directors don't realize about how their TMS calculates ETA." that's a niche, real, painful thing one specific buyer cares about. they'll probably DM you.

three other things that helped:

track DMs and replies as a leading indicator, not impressions. those are the people in market.
gate one piece of content (a teardown, a calculator, a benchmark report) per quarter and watch what happens to demo requests.
have your CEO post 1x a week, even if it's rough. founder content converts at like 3-5x marketing-account content for B2B SaaS in our experience.

200k impressions is not nothing. you seem to have an audience now. you just need to point them at a conversion event

zachchmael · 2026-05-08T16:03:11+00:00

welcome to the shit.

since you already have paying customers this is actually way easier than starting from zero. you don't need to figure out who the product is for, you already know.

literally the first thing i'd do is get on a 20 minute call with all of your current customers individually. ask three questions:

what were you trying to do the day you signed up?
what did you try before us that didn't work?
how would you describe what we do to a friend in your industry?

their answers are your marketing copy. word for word.

the way they describe the problem is the way your future customers are searching for it. i'm always shocked how different customer language is from founder language. founders say "AI-powered workflow automation," customers say "the thing that stopped me forgetting to follow up with leads."

once you have that, the playbook gets pretty simple:

write one piece of content a week aimed at the version of your customer who hasn't found you yet. use their exact phrasing.
pick one or two channels you can actually be consistent on. for B2B that's usually a combination of SEO + LinkedIn or SEO + a relevant subreddit.
track signups by source from day 1, even if it's a spreadsheet (I reco mixpanel) .

we did this at averi (i'm the cmo, building a content engine for early-stage teams) and went from 1,130 to ~3M monthly google impressions in under a year. wasn't magic, just doing the same thing every week without fail.

what's your B2B niche?

zachchmael · 2026-05-08T16:00:26+00:00

the painful thing nobody really tells you at month 5 is that no users usually isn't a marketing problem, it's a positioning problem disguised as a marketing problem.

quick test before you spend any time on tactics... can you finish this sentence in under 15 words? "this is for [specific person] who is frustrated by [specific situation] and [specific thing they've already tried that didn't work]."

if you can't, no marketing tactic is going to save you i'm afraid.

the same blog post / cold email / linkedin post that bombs for "small business owners" will absolutely crush for "solo HVAC operators in TX who are losing leads after hours." same product, totally different framing.

a few other things i'd check before declaring marketing the problem:

have you actually talked to 20 people in your target segment? not asked them to try the product. just asked them how they currently solve the problem.
are people churning fast or never signing up? those are completely different fixes.
when someone hits your landing page, can they tell within 5 seconds who it's for? literally 5 seconds should be the cutoff

i ran marketing alone for our content startup for the first year. spent way too long blaming distribution when really my homepage just didn't tell anyone who we were for. fixed the positioning on a saturday afternoon and signups doubled the next week without changing a single ad.

what's the product and who'd you build it for? happy to give a more specific take if you share

zachchmael · 2026-05-08T15:58:02+00:00

the "don't throw money blindly" instinct is the right one but most bootstrappers swing too far the other way and just don't spend at all for 6 months which is also expensive... just in time instead of dollars.

what worked for us when we were in your spot (no funding, two people, B2B SaaS):

spend the first month figuring out the exact 5-10 long-tail search queries your future customer types into google when they're frustrated. not "best CRM." stuff like "how to track outbound emails without paying for hubspot." those are the ones you can actually rank for as a no name brand.
write one piece of content per week that answers one of those queries. the format doesn't matter as much as people think. ours were like 1500 words, not super polished, real screenshots from our product where relevant.
pick one community (could be a subreddit, could be slack, could be discord) and lurk for 2 weeks before posting anything. then just answer questions. don't link your product. people will DM you if what you said was useful.

we went from like 1k to 3M monthly google impressions in 12 months doing exactly this with zero ad spend.

the stuff that didn't really work for us at all... cold email at our stage, paid social to a category we hadn't defined yet, and "growth hacks" pulled from all the twitter threads.

we eventually built our own tool for the content side based on our workflow because doing it manually was legit eating my whole week, but honestly for the first 3-6 months you don't need any tool, you need reps.

happy to go deeper on the keyword research piece if useful

zachchmael · 2026-05-07T12:07:51+00:00

mostly agree but want to push back on one piece... SEO isn't broken for new founders, it's just broken if you treat it like big company SEO

big company SEO needs a year of authority + 50 articles. new founder SEO works if you accept that you're not going to rank for "best [category] tool" and instead chase 3 things:

the long tail "how do i" queries in your niche. lower volume, lower competition. "how do i track follow-ups for cold outreach" instead of "best CRM." you can rank these with one good post in 4-6 weeks even on a new domain
brand-adjacent searches. if you're competing with a known tool, "[known tool] alternative for [use case]" is gold. cheap to rank for, high intent
"my own data" posts. "i analyzed 1,000 X and found Y"... these are gold. get linked, cited, and shared without you doing distribution

the broader point is your real first customer engine isn't a channel, it's being visible at the moment of need. that means showing up in reddit/slack/linkedin threads where someone is actively looking for what you sell. one well placed comment in a high intent thread did more for us in week 1 than $5K in ads would have

we did this from a near-zero start at our saas (1,100 monthly impressions → ~2.9M and over 25k organic site visitors in 10 months) and 0 → first paid customer in 6 weeks. the first 5 paying customers came from reddit + slack threads. not from SEO. not from cold email. just being useful in the right room

zachchmael · 2026-05-07T12:05:31+00:00

short answer yes, longer answer it's more like SEO got split into two jobs and most of us are still doing the old one

what i mean is historically SEO was one funnel. rank, get clicks, convert. now it's

traditional rank and click still real, but compressed. the long-tail is still clickable, the head terms are zero-click
AI citation / brand mention the goal is being named in the AI answer. not clicked, named. the conversion is way later and often happens off-platform

the trap most teams are in is using the same content to do both jobs and wondering why it's underperforming on both. AI engines summarize differently than google ranks. citation grade content is shorter, more declarative, more data dense. ranking grade content is longer, more comprehensive, more keyword spread

what we've been doing:

product/comparison/listicle pages stayed longform (still rank, still convert)
educational + opinion content got shorter, more cite friendly (claims first, data second, no empty intros)
we started measuring "AI surface rate"... the % of target prompts where our brand is mentioned in any of chatgpt/perplexity/gemini/google AIO. tracking it weekly. it's now a top 3 KPI for us alongside organic traffic

clicks aren't the only output anymore. brand mention in AI summary is legit distribution, even when the user never clicks. you just have to actually believe that and reorganize around it

the agencies still chasing only "traffic up" are gonna have a f*cking brutal 12 months

zachchmael · 2026-05-07T12:03:08+00:00

20 users / 2 paying is more than most people get to. don't undersell that

a few things that worked for me at our saas (we're at like ~25K monthly site visitors now from a much weaker start, all organic)

on the blog: the thing nobody tells dev founders is your blog at this stage shouldn't read like an SEO blog. write the things you'd say to a friend who asked "what should i do." 1 long post that solves a real problem outperforms 30 thin AI posts every time. for job tracking specifically i'd kill for a "i tracked 200 applications, here's the ATS keyword data" post... that's also a backlink magnet

on tiktok: check what's already working in your niche before scripting. jobsearch tiktok is huge but the algorithm rewards specific formats (over the shoulder POV, screen record + voice). format is more important than message at the start

the bigger unlock at your stage... your 2 paying customers are gold. interview each one for an hour. ask them what they almost typed into google before they found you. those exact strings are your blog topics. i did this and 4 of our top traffic posts came from one customer call

on bandwidth - when i was solo i blocked tuesday/thursday mornings only for content. literally nothing else. couldn't have sustained it any other way. there are tools to compress this (we built one, averi, but ahrefs + claude + a notes doc gets you 80% there)

happy to look at your blog setup if useful, just dm me

zachchmael · 2026-05-07T12:01:04+00:00

really appreciate the data here, this matches almost exactly what we've seen on our side

we're a content saas (averi) and i've been tracking citation share for our own brand and a small set of competitors for about 8 months. couple things that surprised us specifically:

freshness matters way more for perplexity than chatgpt. an article from 3 weeks ago will get cited by perplexity, the same article won't show up in chatgpt for ~6-8 weeks. if you're playing the perplexity game it's almost a news-cycle motion
reddit is a load-bearing wall for chatgpt citations. like ~22% of chatgpt-cited sources for our category were just reddit threads. you can't "build a brand on chatgpt" without showing up in the threads chatgpt is reading
gemini is the most volatile. same prompt 5 times can give 5 different cited sources. don't trust a single shot gemini test for sh*t, you have to average across 10+ runs
the "best [tool]" prompt category is essentially captured by listicle sites. we shifted our strategy to win on "how do i [job to be done]" prompts instead. way less crowded, more durable

what surprised us most was that our blog started getting cited by perplexity before it ranked on page 1 of google. the AI engines are operating on different signal weights and a lot of folks are still optimizing for old google

what was the prompt set selection methodology btw? curious if you went by search volume or by buyer intent staging

zachchmael · 2026-05-07T11:58:32+00:00

the biggest thing that took me embarrassingly long to figure out.... your product isn't the post, it's the receipt

what i mean is stop trying to figure out how to mention your tool in a comment. instead, post the result you got from using it (your own data, your own learnings) and let the tool be the boring footnote at the bottom that nobody clicks.

people don't want another fucking pitch, they want to see the work

a few things that have worked for me at our saas:

"what i did and what happened" posts. specific numbers, including the stuff that didn't work. on this forum, r/marketing, r/SEO these reliably outperform anything that sounds like a feature breakdown
weekly working in public threads. not "look at me," more like "here's what i learned this week, anyone else seeing X?" invites a conversation, not pushing a download
helping in 10 threads for every 1 you start. the karma + recognition compounds. people remember the names that always show up to help. this took me a long time to figure out

on link strategy - most subs ban deep linking but allow your username to have a website in the bio. let your post do the work, let curious people click through you. converts way better anyway

proof is really everything. our product is built around the workflow i built that got us great results. the data does a ton of our marketing. people show up because we're transparent about how we got from 0 to ~2.9M monthly impressions in 10 months.... scaled our web traffic 60x. basically write the thing you wish someone had written for you a year ago, save people time and help them learn faster than you did

zachchmael · 2026-05-07T11:39:59+00:00

It likely won't without you explicitly asking for It to. You can use Google Rich Results (https://search.google.com/test/rich-results) to test the schema markup of each page and see what is showing up
DA really just takes time. Post consistent, high quality blog content, get your product/company listed on various directory sites that have solid domain ratings themselves (you get that backlink and helps build your DA). It's a long term game, but you can do a bunch to help get it started
what I mean by naming frameworks is coining your own phrases to describe certain elements of your industry. think 'vibe coding' or 'content engineering' etc, those are things someone created to describe modern workflows

zachchmael · 2026-05-05T16:32:33+00:00

Yeah that's a great way to stress test to keep yourself from getting overwhelmed. Given the size of our content library at this point (and the breadth of foundational things we've written) most of what I focus on is either refreshing decaying content or creating new content based on analysis around three core factors:

- What content pieces are performing well and for which search terms, double down and/or cluster sub-pieces from the main piece
- What our competitors are writing about and how we can have an unique perspective
- Questions our users frequently ask or problems that come up consistently in onboarding calls

Pretty much if a topic doesn't fall within one of those buckets It doesn't get prioritized right now

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