Hey👋,
I'm Giacomo

Forget backlinks!

SEO in the age of AI is not about links.
It’s about mentions!

Ahrefs found that referrals and backlinks, the backbone of traditional SEO, barely move the needle for LLMs.

So what matters?
Your brand being mentioned online.
Unsolicited.

That means outside of a marketing context:
- a Reddit user recommending you.
- a comment thread dropping your name.

Even someone Googling your brand directly is good enough!

Not shady backlinks. Not hacks. Not shortcuts.

We’ve “nerdified” marketing for too long.

Now it’s time to get back to fundamentals:

👉 Real PR.
👉 Real brand building.
👉 Real conversations.

That’s what LLMs actually pick up.

Yet,
way too many marketers, even here on LinkedIn, are still in denial.

When they'll finally get it, it'll be too late.

ChatGPT will sell ads.

No, there’s no official announcement.
But I’m 100% sure it’s coming. And soon.

Why?
Because AI chatbots don’t need to send traffic anywhere else.
Users stay inside the walls of the bot.

The better the answers, the less need to click out, the better the user experience.

What I think it'll happen:
👉 GPT stops sending free traffic to outside websites.
👉 Unless you pay for it.

Think about it: agents can already handle tasks end-to-end.
No clicks. No browsing.

But…
if advertisers step in, you can bet the agent will “recommend” their sources. 😅

Sort of influencer marketing in the age of AI 😂.

Also,
only 4% of ChatGPT users pay for a subscription.

Do you really think OpenAI will pass on monetising the other 96%?

Sorry Perplexity, Chrome is not on sale anymore 😅

The landmark antitrust trial against Google is wrapping up.

And guess what?

They likely won’t have to:

- Sell Chrome
- Stop paying Apple billions to remain the default search engine on Safari

The judge pointed to the rise of AI chatbots as proof that Google isn’t really a monopoly anymore.

Which is ironic.

Because yes, AI chatbots are threatening Google’s core business model…
…except Google built one AI Chatbot itself 😅

And a pretty good one, too!

What’s next?
Google paying Apple even more billions to make Gemini the default AI assistant on iPhones 😂

The AI wars just got a new twist.

Time to rewatch Mad Men.

Because marketing is back to the 1960s. 🍸

Rand Fishkin saw it coming over a year ago,
and his piece is even more relevant today.

Marketing is undergoing a massive reshuffle.
In many ways, it’s going back to the old glory days.

Yet a lot of “modern” marketers are still in denial.
They can’t accept the shift.

I started my career nearly 10 years ago, right in the peak of the technical marketing era.

Back then, ROAS was the mantra.

But now…

Attribution is dead.
Clicks are dead.
Keywords in search are dead too.

That hyper-granular campaign structure I mastered for years? Irrelevant now.

Targeting specific user groups or positioning single products is now virtually impossible.

Broad Ai-driven campaigns like Google Performance Max are greatly over-performing any traditional campaign.

If you disagree with this statement, sorry but you're in denial too.

So where does this leave us?

Back to what the Mad Men did best!

Bold creative ideas.
Broad reach.
Simple, yet effective lift experiments.

That’s going to be the new (old) mantra of the Ai age.

Because everything else, the tech stack, the targeting, the mechanics, has already become a commodity.

Marketing as we know it is dead. ⚰️

RIP clicks.
RIP traffic.
RIP cookies.
RIP attribution.
RIP user targeting.
RIP marketing ROI?

So who's the killer? 🕵️

You'd think Ai.
And you'd be right. But...

the truth is,
Ai just joined a crime scene that was already crowded.

Social platforms and Google killed clicks long before ChatGPT.
They don’t want you to leave their walled gardens.

And when you do, they hide referral info.
Ever heard of “dark social”?

GDPR and privacy regulations buried cookies and tracking years ago.

Marketing attribution?
Let’s be honest. It never really worked.
Last-click was a lie, and by the time better models arrived, it was already too late.

Now, AI is simply accelerating the inevitable.

ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews are designed to keep you within the walls of a single conversation.

They often handle entire purchase journeys without sending ANY traffic.

Attributing sales to Ai conversations without traffic is virtually impossible.

We're left with lot of open questions and very few answers:

- How do we target users within Ai conversations?
- How do we target users who opt out of tracking?
- Do we even need to "target" users??
- How do we measure ROI without traffic and clicks?

We're at the beginning of a whole new era of marketing!

Who will find the answers first, will win.

Last week I presented what I call "The Great Marketing Reshuffle".

It's by far the biggest revolution in Marketing of the past 20/25 years.

The new age of Ai is completely reshaping the consumer journey and with it the way we do marketing.

Many things are dead:

- cookies are dead
- channel attribution is dead
- clicks are dead
- traffic is (almost) dead

Now consumers can perform the whole purchase journey within one single Ai platform. Without EVER clicking and visiting external sites/apps.

This happens in ChatGPT, Gemini etc, but also on Google itself with Ai Overviews and Ai Mode.

And if you add GPTAgent to the mix, then you really have a revolution unfolding before your eyes!

It's a huge disruption, that impacts every aspect of marketing.

From content, to media buying, to user targeting, even to how marketing teams are organised and their role within organisations.

It also impacts marketing measurement.
How can we prove marketing ROI without clicks or traffic?

I tried to make sense of all of this last week and I really enjoyed the deep discussion we had afterwards. Lot of food for thoughts!

But we're just at the very beginning of this revolution and I'm looking forward to what it'll bring next!

🚨Perplexity offers to buy Chrome!

If this isn’t the AI wars at full play I don’t know what else is.

Google was deemed a monopoly after loosing an antitrust trial earlier this year.

Splitting the giant up is one of the options on the table of antitrust officials.

Chrome could be separated and so Perplexity is making proposal.

The goal is to create the largest AI-powered browser on earth.

I strongly believe the internet of the near future will look very different from now!

🚨 SEO-hack alert.

Create a GPT conversation about yourself (or your brand) and make it discoverable.

Hopefully it'll rank on Google and serve as another piece of content.

Or maybe it's just a BS tactic? 😂

Workday you should do better!

HR had to revert my $1b salary increase because of you!

Imagine turning down a $1'000'000'000 offer 😅

And you're not Cristiano Ronaldo,
with all due respect to AI researchers.

What's even happening out there??

Now Meta is targeting the newly-founded Thinking Machines Lab for its hiring spree.

TML was founded by Mira Murati, former CTO at OpenAI.

It seems that so far NOBODY had accepted the offer.

Including the one for $1'000'000'000 😨

Marketing is EASY.

And AI is reminding us of that, loud and clear!

Until recently, marketing was all about complexity.

We were told it had to be about:

→ Overly complex campaign structures
→ Granular tracking and hyper-segmentation
→ Complex attribution models
→ Endless loyalty retargeting loops
→ Growth "hacking"

Technology and over-engineering hijacked marketing.
Overshadowing creativity and fundamentals.

But marketing scholars (like Byron Sharp) had already warned us:

If you want to grow your brand,
focus on maximising your brand's "mental availability".

Prioritise branding, mass-reach always-on advertising and mass marketing initiatives. Instead of over-targeted campaigns and loyalty loops/hacks.

Looks like those academics got it spot-on.

Fast forward to today,
two forces are pushing us back to the fundamentals:

👉 Privacy regulations killed granular targeting and reporting.
👉 AI rewrote consumer behaviour and advertising operations.

AI makes things simple again:

→ Consumers have a chat with AI bots instead of performing granular searches.
→ AI-driven campaigns outperform old-school media buyers.

Eg PMax and Demand Gen in Google Ads just need strong creative and a budget (more or less).

No complex targeting, personas, attribution etc.

Just press a button and enjoy 🏖️

But there's more.

The latest GEO (Generative AI Optimisation) guidelines emphasise omnipresence across digital and offline spaces, rather than SEO engineering and hacks.

AI doesn't care how meticulously your site is SEO-optimised.
AI cares about one thing:

💡 People talking about your brand.

On social media, Reddit, forums, reviews, offline interactions,
and subsequently, in AI-bot conversations.

The more your brand is discussed,
the higher the chance AI chatbots will mention it.

It's a virtuous circle even a kid could understand. 🔄
Brand Popularity → AI Mentions → More Customers.

What a news! 😅

So we're transferring human "mental availability" to an AI's "brand availability". (just because AI doesn't have a mind, yet!)

This leaves us with two choices:

1. Embrace the new reality and get back to the fundamentals of brand building.
2. Keep doing what we've done for the past 15 years and cross our fingers.

Any marketers out there with a different take?