302 marketing leaders sounded off on how they're vibe coding.
CMO | AirOps
For most customer marketers, AEO still sounds like someone else’s problem. Christy Roach’s research says otherwise. As CMO at AirOps, she and her team studied how AI systems actually decide what to cite and recommend, and the answer kept coming back to the same source: customer proof. The stuff customer marketers make every day, for reasons that have nothing to do with search, is already shaping how AI tools describe and recommend brands. Which means the real risk isn’t AEO becoming your job. It’s not realizing it already is.
Why customer marketing already has more leverage over AI search than most teams realize. The evidence CMA produces for enablement, renewals, and case studies is disproportionately what AI systems pull from.
Why waiting for “official ownership” is the wrong move. Christy makes the case for why the teams who start treating customer proof as AI infrastructure now before it’s formally assigned to anyone are the ones who’ll get credit for the strategy later (hello, next promotion).
What AI systems are actually rewarding, and why it’s not what most marketers assume. The instinct is to chase more content or more SEO tactics. Christy’s data points somewhere else entirely, and it’s something CMA teams are uniquely suited to deliver.
How to reframe your existing work as strategic, not just supportive. Customer proof has always been treated as a supporting asset for someone else’s campaign. Christy’s research gives CMA a case for why that framing undersells what the work is actually doing.
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He probably shouldn’t send this. Join Alex Eaton as he shares his real-time struggles, challenges, and wins as a first-time VP of marketing, every other week. Subscribe to Evidently
He probably shouldn’t send this. Join Alex Eaton as he shares his real-time struggles, challenges, and wins as a first-time VP of marketing, every other week. Subscribe to Evidently
Build a more impactful customer marketing & advocacy program, one week at a time. Subscribe to The Outpost to learn with us in real time.
