Editorial
If you lead a marketing growth company (like me) or an organization that relies on generating leads and other “traditional” marketing tools, you know something is broken. You may not be able to put your finger on it, but you can sense the environment has changed:
- The same marketing spend buys less attention
- The same content generates weaker intent
- Your team is working harder, but lead flow keeps eroding
Think about it this way: the transformation isn’t based on anything you did or didn’t do, but because the terrain moved underneath you.
Here's what changed: AI systems now sit between your expertise and your buyer. The machines summarize, answer and often satisfy curiosity before a click ever reaches you. There is a long list of new AI-centric moves happening: search engines are supplying information to answer boxes, ChatGPT and Claude are fielding questions that used to drive traffic to your website and prospects are being educated, influenced and sometimes converted by systems that don't know you exist.
This is pretty harrowing stuff. But, you have a choice — either keep managing to last-click attribution and watch your customer acquisition costs spiral, or acknowledge a simple truth: in an AI-mediated market, authority isn’t declared. It’s conferred.
Table of Contents
- The New Credibility Economy
- Why LLMs Change Everything
- The Compounding Effect: Pipeline, Talent, Value
- No More Funnels. Light Your Loop.
- The Technology Is Ready
The New Credibility Economy
I have been advising clients and speaking to groups and organizations around the world, essentially telling them the same thing, “People and machines both decide who matters by watching for the same three signals.”
Let’s dive in:
Are you consistently seen? Real visibility means showing up with a clear point of view across the channels where decisions get made: podcasts, partnerships, public relations and publishing.
Are you reliably heard? When a prospect listens to your 30-minute podcast episode, reads your entire op-ed or attends the whole webinar, they’re not sampling, they are engaging (and believing) in your message.
Are you credibly cited? Large language models (LLMs) learn from huge amounts of text and increasingly rely on web search to answer questions. When tools like ChatGPT or Claude look across the web, they favor entities that appear consistently, in credible contexts and with clear attribution. They reward who has been seen, heard and cited.
When these three signals compound, belief follows. When belief follows, buying follows.
Related Article: When Bots Speak for Brands: New Risks & Realities of AI-Powered Engagement
Why LLMs Change Everything
Traditional SEO taught us to rank for keywords. The new credibility economy is teaching models to associate your brand with answers that matter.
LLMs don’t just crawl your website. They evaluate authority. They scan for:
- Repetition: Do you show up consistently with the same expertise?
- Citations: Are you referenced by credible third parties (media, partners, research)?
- Depth: Do people actually engage with your ideas, or do they bounce?
- Entity Consistency: Are your name, title and expertise tagged correctly across platforms?
When a CFO asks ChatGPT, “Who should I trust for enterprise AI governance?” the model doesn’t pick you because you paid for an ad, the choice is based on who has been seen solving the problem across multiple credible contexts. These may include a podcast series on governance, an op-ed in a trade publication, a partnership with a respected industry group or a content page with proper schema markup that makes your expertise machine-readable.
This is the intersection of human trust and algorithmic discovery. Sustainable results come from robust systems, not tactical workarounds.
The Compounding Effect: Pipeline, Talent, Value
The move I recommend is to stop chasing clicks and start compounding credibility. Then what happens?
Pipeline quality rises. Attention-Qualified Leads (AQLs), those prospects who finished your episode, fully read your content or attended your full session, convert faster and close better because belief is pre-sold. We are seeing 3x higher win rates on deals where credibility touched the buyer early in the process. Our data reveals that sales cycles shorten by 40% when trust precedes the first call.
Talent gravitates to you. The best employees don’t want to work for a company that shouts the loudest. They want to work for leaders whose ideas are public, sharp and respected. When the CEO is consistently seen, heard and cited, recruiting becomes inbound. Retention also improves, because people believe in the mission. By nature, humans want to be part of organizations they trust and admire.
Enterprise value compounds. Credibility shows up in every investor meeting. When analysts, media and partners already view you as the default expert, valuation multiples reflect that standing. From this vantage point, you are not just selling a product, but rather inevitability.
Related Article: Survive the AI Takeover of Search — 5 Moves Every Brand Must Make
No More Funnels. Light Your Loop.
The old funnel assumes linear paths (that actually were never as straight as conceptualized), from awareness to consideration, and then decision. However, buyers don’t move like this anymore. The journey is all over the place, in spirals, researching privately and consulting AI assistants. The path might also run from listening to podcasts on the daily commute or reading your op-ed while traveling to attending a partner webinar or visiting your website weeks later when they are finally ready to make a purchase.
That is not a funnel. That’s a loop. You need to run one that matches it.
The 4Loop Strategy is how you purposely manufacture credibility:
Podcasting provides leadership with a recurring expert stage, the place where you work through real buyer problems in public.
Partnerships borrow trust from communities your market already believes, multiplying reach you can’t buy.
Public Relations converts expertise into third-party validation. This credibility sends signals that both buyers and algorithms respect.
Webinar
On demand
Rebrand. Migrate. Optimize. How to Do It All (Without Slowing Down)
Cresta leveled up site speed, design flexibility and marketer sanity (in record time). Find out how.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
From Manual to Magical: How AI Transforms CX Teams
Learn how to replace manual support processes with automation that actually delivers.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
How to Build a Solid Knowledge Foundation for AI Success
See how leading brands keep their AI honest, compliant and actually helpful.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Fix the Content Bottleneck: Build a Better WebOps Strategy
Content stalled? Dev overloaded? You’re not the only one. Learn how streamlined WebOps bridges the publishing gap.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Beyond Storage: Smarter Content, Bigger Impact with DAM + AI
Discover how the DAM + AI duo makes content smarter, stronger and more accessible.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Agentic AI Playbook: Real-World Customer Service Use Cases You Can Deploy Now
Boost self-service by 30% and slash call volume by 63% with agentic AI.
Watch Now
Publishing turns those moments into durable, searchable assets that teach the market and the models to associate your brand with answers that matter.
Run as a loop, not a one-off list, these motions reinforce one another. Every quarter you become more findable, quotable and harder to ignore. Then you amplify only what already earned engagement by spending behind validated ideas, not intuition or misplaced ad spend.
The Technology Is Ready
Platforms and models are rewriting discovery. The only variable is whether you lead into it or wait for the continued erosion to force your hand.
Companies that adjust earliest won’t just spend differently, they will measure differently. These leaders will treat credibility as an operating asset. They will lead teams that engineer adoption, instead of just hoping for it. They'll become unavoidable, because they are consistently seen, reliably heard and credibly cited by the people and systems that shape their market.
Your competitors are still buying attention. You can sprint ahead by building belief.
Light your loop. The advantage goes to whoever moves first.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
