We put on an annual event in Jackson Hole, WY each year for senior customer and product marketing leaders, and since we got back about a month ago, something has been heavily on my mind.
The event itself earned a 97 NPS score (insane, by all accounts). But the few constructive pieces of feedback we got this year all centered around one thing: we focused too much on AEO, and because AEO wasn’t something the customer marketers and product marketers in the room owned, it felt irrelevant.
I get the feedback, but I’ve been stewing on it for a month now. And I’ve come to the confident conclusion that I disagree with it.
Here’s the thing: customer marketing and product marketing are two of the most cross-functional marketing roles that exist today. Not by accident, by design. And right now, AEO is one of the biggest mandates across SaaS companies, and a huge opportunity for CMA and PMM to make a genuine impact.
The thing is, we actually believe AEO can be moved by advocacy programs. That’s why UserEvidence is focused on this from a product standpoint with our partnerships with AirOps and Profound. Not because we’re reaching for a new acronym or trying to own a function that isn’t ours. Because a big part of being successful in your career is meeting the moment that’s happening, and this is a moment product marketers and customer marketers can have a real impact on. It doesn’t mean taking on what isn’t ours to own, but it does mean seeing where the stuff we already do slots in.
I think that serves us in our careers. I also think it’s good for the business. And I think it’s a moment that customer and product marketers should be running at right now, not away from it.
So let’s get into why.
You don’t have to own it
I want to be careful here, because I’m not arguing that customer marketing or product marketing should “own” AEO or GEO. Honestly, chasing ownership of a new acronym is exactly the kind of turf-grabbing that makes cross-functional roles worse at their actual job.
What I am saying is that PMM and CMA have always been cross-functional by design. Our value has never come from a tidy job description, it’s come from noticing where impact is leaking out of the org and going and getting it. It’s why product marketing didn’t wait for someone to hand them a “narrative strategy” mandate, and it’s why customer marketing shouldn’t wait for someone to hand them an “AEO” one either.
The mandate for customer marketing is still loose. Most of us don’t have a clean, universally understood definition of what we own. Usually that looseness gets talked about as a risk. Nobody quite knows what to expect from us, budget conversations get harder, headcount is an uphill battle. I’d rather treat it as the opening it actually is. If the job isn’t fully defined yet, that’s an invitation to define more of it before someone else does.
And since when has “not my job” been in our vocabulary? We’ve never had the luxury of a narrow lane. The instinct to find the gap and fill it is the job.
Why this is happening right now
"Customer proof is 3.5x more likely to show up in decision-stage AI queries than early, top-of-funnel ones"
Tons of proof was shared around this from our Highline keynotes this year. Our own Evidence Gap research found that 58% of B2B buyers now start their research with AI. G2’s latest Buyer Behavior Report backs that up. 82% have sourced a software recommendation from an AI chatbot in the last two years. We’re past calling this “niche behavior.” It’s now the default starting point.
Christy Roach, CMO at AirOps, shared that 85% of AI visibility comes from third-party sources, not owned content. If an AI system is forced to rely mostly on what a brand says about itself, trust in that brand actually drops, because the model has learned that the rest of the world isn’t backing it up. Our own website talking about us isn’t enough. The model wants to hear it from someone else.
And the stat that ties this whole thing together, also from Christy’s research: customer proof is 3.5x more likely to show up in decision-stage AI queries than early, top-of-funnel ones. Decision-stage is our home turf. That’s the exact moment we’ve always shown up for with the case study, the ROI number, the peer quote that makes a skeptical buyer feel safe.
AI just moved that moment earlier in the funnel.
So even if we’re most comfy in that post-sale moment, the proof we’re surfacing there is now showing up in pre-sale moments more than ever. That’s something we have to lean into.
Three things we can do about it starting right now
None of this requires a new function, a new headcount ask, or a rebrand of our team. It requires pointing muscles we already have at a slightly wider target.
1. Treat verified proof as infrastructure, not campaign fuel.
AI systems favor verified, credentialed, specific content, and they favor it more when it’s fresh. Josh Blyskal, Head of Research and AI at Profound, shared that half of the content AEO systems draw on is from the last three months. That’s a brutal freshness bar for most of our libraries.
The good news: sourcing, verifying, and refreshing customer stories is already what we do. Now, we just need a slight mindset shift.
One-time asset → Always-on proof point
Every quote and story stops being a one-time asset for a single campaign and starts being infrastructure that stays live, gets refreshed, and keeps working in the background whether or not there’s a launch attached to it. We’re now writing for two buyers at once (a human and a model) and the way we document a story matters differently to each one.
2. Activate advocates on the channels AI actually trusts.
G2, Reddit, and LinkedIn now carry outsized weight in AI-driven answers precisely because they don’t read as brand-authored. A customer talking on Reddit is worth more to a model than the same sentence on our own website, because it looks organic instead of promotional.
This is advocacy work we already run. Again, this isn’t a huge change, but an important shift in mindset: we need to point our existing advocate-activation playbook at a few specific channels with AEO in mind: more reviews, more real customers talking in public, in their own words, in the places models are already listening.
3. Take ROI studies seriously again.
This one surprised me. I didn’t expect long-form research content to carry the weight it does, but AI systems love substantiated, data-backed proof. Seriously, go search “ROI of [any well-known product]” and watch how often a single research study anchors the answer.
The catch is the same freshness problem as everywhere else: a study that gets built once every couple of years and then sits untouched loses relevance fast. The fix isn’t abandoning these projects (if anything, they matter more now than they used to). It’s making them lighter, more continual, and less of a once-every-few-years bet.
The career case
Shandra Gemmiti, product marketing lead at BlackDuck, sat on the panel I moderated on the future of customer marketing. In our convo, she said pipeline and retention numbers are important, but they’re only a third of what customer marketing actually does. If those are the only metrics we bring to leadership, we’re underselling our own team by two-thirds.
AEO influence is a way to make the other two-thirds visible and provable. It’s a story about impact that doesn’t live inside a single campaign or a single quarter’s renewal number. It’s evidence, quite literally, that the work already in our wheelhouse is shaping deals we never touched directly.
The people who treat AEO as core to this role instead of adjacent to it or “someone else’s problem”, are the ones who’ll be able to walk into a leadership conversation with a different kind of case for the next title, the next headcount, the next seat at the table. Not “look how many logos we retained.” Look how many deals we influenced before anyone on the sales team knew the buyer existed.
We’re already doing most of the work. We just haven’t been telling the story of where it’s actually landing.
Let’s start telling it.
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