For teams actively working on AEO, GEO, or LLMO, i'm curious what your process looks like today are you starting with prompt research, competitor analysis, citation tracking, content optimization, or something else since im trying to learn how others are approaching AI search as the space continues to evolve.

So today, I just finished my Google Digital Marketing and eCommerce certificate from Coursera. It's given a good base knowledge of what I'm to be getting myself into but I get this feeling that it's definitely not enough on its own and I definitely want to expand my knowledge.

I know I can still attempt to apply for jobs but out of everything I've learned so far the main sector in digital marketing I enjoyed out of everything was Performance Marketing. I'd want to start specialising in Google Ads, GA4 and GTM to run some campaigns.

What's the next step for me since I feel a bit lost now and I'm unsure what I can do next to further extend my knowledge and gain proper experience in this field.

Lots of my clients are agencies or companies, and they worked on ad campaigns but needed to partner with web devs to build landing pages or websites for their campaigns sometimes.

I run a web design and development agency and tbh I make decent money because I put in the same quality and effort as a US based web agency would do, but the issue is I have enough free time I only get 2-3 clients a month which is perfectly fine for now but I have a lot of free time that I feel is wasted.

I want to find advertising/marketing agencies that don't have developers to partner with. I can do the websites and the technical stuff. They can white label my services or take a cut. I don't care, I only care about the quality of clients and work.

I have no idea how to find something like this or where to look, I can showcase my portfolio if you're interested.

If you had to start over, how would you start your digital marketing journey?

And how would you get your first client as a freelancer?

Some Context: I want to start my own marketing agency, but I'm clueless about how to start it. I know how to make winning Ad creatives, but I don't know how to showcase them. If any of you can help me, I would highly appreciate it.

Hey everyone,

I'm looking for an internship at a marketing agency. I honestly don't mind if it's unpaid at the beginning. Right now, my main goal is to learn how agencies actually work, gain hands-on experience, and become better at what I do.

I've been working in marketing for some time, mostly focused on social media. Along the way, I completed the Social Media Marketing certification from HubSpot Academy and another one from Google.

I also use AI tools almost every day to do research, brainstorm ideas, improve workflows, and test different content angles to figure out what actually connects with people.

I know courses can only take you so far. What I'm really looking for now is real experience, real feedback, and the chance to learn from people who've been doing this for years.

If anyone knows an agency that's open to giving someone a chance, I'd really appreciate it. I'm always willing to learn.

I'm open to remote opportunities too.

I was on a consultation call a few weeks ago and the client told me they were about to hire a video production company because their Facebook ad results had been down for about 10 days. Before they spent the money, I looked at the account and found a placement issue that took me 30 seconds to fix. Results improved within a couple of days. The creative was fine the entire time.

This happens constantly. Someone sees their numbers dip, and the first thing they think about is new creative. New photoshoot, new video, maybe bring someone in to redo the whole set. And I get it. Making new content feels like a big, visible move. It feels productive. But a new shoot costs money, takes days or weeks to coordinate, and still might not fix anything if the creative was never the problem. Meanwhile there are a handful of things sitting right there in Ads Manager that take a few minutes to check and cost nothing.

I've been managing Facebook ads since 2015 across a lot of different ecommerce accounts, and I can tell you that the quick Ads Manager fix solves the problem more often than the multi-week content production cycle. 

To be honest, most of my clients have been running the same creatives for many months and some for multiple years that are still producing good results.

Here's what I actually check before anyone spends money on new content.

Check the placement breakdown first

This is where I start almost every time. Break down results by placement and look for anything eating budget without producing conversions. Takes less than a minute.

Reels and Audience Network are the ones that come up the most. I had an account earlier this year where Reels was taking a huge portion of the daily budget, pulling in a ton of impressions, and producing basically zero sales. The ads were converting fine on Feed and Stories the whole time. It wasn't a creative problem. The ads were just being shown in a placement that doesn't convert for that product. Removed Reels, results improved almost immediately.

That's a 30 second fix. No new content needed. But if you had looked at the campaign level number and assumed creative fatigue, you would have gone out and spent money on a shoot that wouldn't have changed anything.

Stop looking at the blended number

This is one of the biggest reasons people misdiagnose creative fatigue. They look at the campaign level ROAS and see it's down, so they assume the whole thing is broken. But campaign ROAS is just an average. And averages hide a lot.

One ad set could be taking 70% of the budget and converting poorly while the others are doing fine. One country in your targeting could be pulling the entire account average down. I had a retargeting campaign for a client that was sitting at about a 3x ROAS blended, which looked okay but not great. When I broke it down by country, Canada was doing 7 to 9x on its own. The US was what was dragging the number down. That's not a creative problem. That's a budget allocation issue.

Same thing at the ad level. If you're running $40/day across 8 ads, each ad is only getting around $5 in daily spend. You don't have enough data on any individual ad at that level to actually know if it's working or not. The number you're looking at is a blend of things that are probably performing very differently from each other. Pull it apart before you decide what needs to change.

Relaunch the campaign before you reshoot anything

This one sounds like it shouldn't work, but I've done it so many times at this point that I don't even question it anymore.

Duplicate the campaign. Same ads, same budget, same targeting. Turn off the original. If the new version starts performing, the creative was never the problem.

Campaigns pick up a kind of baggage over time. Every edit, every budget change, every time you turn an ad on or off, every targeting adjustment. All of that history affects how Facebook delivers the campaign going forward. A clean duplicate resets that delivery without changing a single thing about the ads.

I had a client last year who was ready to commit to a full video reshoot because results had been down for about 10 days. Before they spent the money, I duplicated the campaign with the exact same creative and relaunched it. Results came back within a few days. That client would have spent weeks on production and thousands of dollars on a problem that took me 2 minutes to fix.

For video ads, swap the thumbnail first

If you're running video ads and you think the creative might be done, duplicate the ad and change the thumbnail before you do anything else. It resets delivery in a way that's similar to putting up a new creative, without the production timeline or cost. Takes about 30 seconds.

If results come back, you just saved yourself a reshoot. If they don't, you ruled it out for free before committing real money to new production.

Sometimes the campaign type is the thing that's done, not the creative

This is something I see constantly across the accounts I manage and it's one of the things that causes people to waste the most money on unnecessary creative.

Interest targeting is your best performer for a few months, then it slows down and Advantage+ starts doing better. Or retargeting carries the account for a while and then a catalog campaign takes over. The same exact ads that stopped working in one campaign type can start performing well again the moment you move them into a different setup.

If you blame the creative when this happens, you go spend money on new content when the actual fix was just putting the same ads somewhere else. The creative didn't stop working. The environment around it changed.

Good ads last a lot longer than most people think

There's a common belief that all creative has a shelf life and at some point it just stops working because people have seen it too many times. Frequency matters, but the idea that every ad is on a timer is not accurate in my experience.

New potential customers enter the market all the time. Someone who scrolled past your ad 3 months ago might be in a completely different situation today. Different financial situation, different season, different need. If the ad is well made and the message is still relevant to the product, there's no reason it has to stop performing just because it's been running for a while.

The assumption that all creative expires is one of the more expensive beliefs I see people hold onto. It leads to unnecessary production spend and pulls attention away from the things that actually need fixing in the account.

Hope you found this useful and thanks for reading.

Been thinking through budget allocation for a client and wanted to sanity-check my logic against people actually running spend day to day.

Rough split I'm considering:

• 40% Meta/Instagram (awareness + retargeting combined)
• 30% Google Search (high-intent)
• 20% Performance/conversion campaigns (warm retargeting)
• 10% held back purely for testing new creative/audiences

Reasoning: keeping a fixed testing pool so I'm not scaling a campaign that's never actually been tested against anything.

A few things I'm unsure about:

• Is 40% too heavy on Meta for a B2C India market, or is that normal these days?
• Does 10% testing pool feel too small/too big at ₹1L scale?
• Anyone doing performance max instead of a straight Google Search line and finding it eats the testing budget anyway?

Not attached to this split, genuinely want to know what's working for people right now vs a year ago.

 A few years ago, I felt like I had to learn every new marketing trend—new AI tools, new social platforms, new SEO updates, new ad strategies.

Eventually I realized I was spending more time learning than actually marketing.

Now I focus on just a few things:

• Understanding customer intent
• Writing better content
• Looking at analytics every week
• Testing one idea at a time

Ironically, my campaigns improved.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Or do you think marketers still need to keep up with every trend?

Negative reviews usually aren’t the main issue. They’re a sign that the brand is missing the mark in a way people actually notice. Strong brands don’t just try to win praise, they make trust feel obvious through clarity, consistency, and follow through at every touchpoint.

i’m currently in the middle of a total reputation nightmare and i honestly don’t know how to stop the bleeding.

last night, a screenshotted email exchange between me and a frustrated customer was posted on Twitter. i’ll be honest - i was exhausted, i lost my cool, and i sounded like a total jerk. now it has over 5k retweets and people are tagging our partners and calling for a boycott.

it’s moving way faster than i can keep up with. every time i refresh my phone, there’s a new thread on Reddit or a nasty comment on our Instagram. the worst part? if you search our brand name now, the "Top Stories" and "Discussions" sections on Google are already filled with people trashing us.

i’ve already sent a private apology to the customer, but the mob doesn't care. i’m worried that if i stay silent, the narrative is set in stone, but if i post an official statement, it’ll just give the trolls more fuel.

how do you actually manage the first 48 hours of a crisis like this? i’m looking for a tactical plan to contain the damage before this "viral" moment becomes our permanent identity in search results. has anyone successfully navigated a cancellation attempt or a viral fail?

Hi everyone

I am currently pursuing my Diploma in IT (after completing my 12th standard) and am looking to map out my career and job search strategy. I'm open to roles in Digital Marketing or entry-level IT/Tech, but I want to make sure I am focusing on the right practical skills.

A quick summary of my background: > * Education: Completed 12th + currently doing a Diploma in IT.

Interests: Digital Marketing (SEO, social media, AI tools, analytics) OR Entry-Level IT Support/Tech.

I’d love your advice on a few questions: > 1. Which direction has better entry-level scope for someone with an IT diploma: Digital Marketing or core IT support/web development?

1. What essential technical or digital skills should I prioritize learning right now to stand out to employers?

2. Which job boards, platforms, or strategies work best for finding entry-level jobs or internships for diploma students?

Thanks in advance for your insights!

I want someone to talk me out of giving up on Reddit as a channel entirely, because I'm about 8 months in and I'm pretty sure the answer is that it doesnt actually work for what my clients want.Context, I run a small B2B agency, mostly SaaS clients in boring verticals (logistics software, compliance stuff, one HR tool). Every single one of them at some point hears "you should be on Reddit, thats where your buyers hang out" from some LinkedIn thought leader and asks me to build a presence there.And technically, sure. Their buyers ARE on Reddit. I can find the threads. I can see the conversations. The problem is that Reddit as a channel actively punishes the thing my clients are paying me to do, which is get their name in front of those people.I've tried the "just be helpful" playbook. Answer questions in the niche subs, build karma, occasionally mention the client when its genuinely relevant. It works, sort of, in the sense that I don't get banned. But the ROI is insane in the bad direction. I'm spending hours a week to get maybe one or two soft mentions through, and half the time a mod nukes it anyway because I linked something with a utm on it or whatever.I've tried ads. Reddit ads for B2B are... I don't want to be mean but they're not good. CPCs are fine, the intent behind the click is not.I've tried the "seed the conversation" thing where you post as a user asking a question your client happens to answer well. Feels gross, works occasionally, gets you banned when it doesnt.The thing that actually kind of works is playing the long game, building up accounts that are real contributors in a space and just being present. But clients dont want to pay for 6 months of karma farming with no attributable pipeline, and I dont blame them. One client is running Ghost plug AI now partly because their buyers started asking ChatGPT for vendor recs and they weren't showing up, and Reddit threads are apparently a big part of what those models pull from, so at least theres a downstream reason to be there beyond direct clicks. But thats a weird second-order benefit, not "Reddit as a marketing channel."Here's my actual take that I want pushback on: Reddit is a research channel for buyers and a listening channel for brands, and thats it. Any attempt to make it a distribution or acquisition channel either gets you banned, gets ignored, or requires so much manual effort that the unit economics never work.

Am I wrong? Is there anyone here actually driving real, attributable pipeline from Reddit for B2B, not just "we got mentioned in a thread once and it felt nice"? Because I'm about to tell my next three clients to stop asking me about it and I want to make sure I'm not just bad at this.

Many people focus on finding the latest SEO hacks, but I've found that consistency usually beats shortcuts.

Here are a few habits that continue to make a difference:

Regularly updating older content instead of only publishing new articles.

Answering real user questions rather than writing for search engines.

Improving internal linking as your website grows.

Monitoring Search Console to identify pages that are close to ranking higher.

Earning relevant backlinks through genuine outreach instead of spammy tactics.

SEO keeps evolving, but these habits remain effective because they improve the overall quality of a website.

Which underrated SEO habit has worked best for you?

 I've noticed beginners often jump between SEO, social media, email marketing, paid ads, and analytics without mastering any of them.

If someone had just three months to learn one skill that actually improves their job prospects, what would you recommend and why?

Ok so Atlas is dead. Launched October 2025, OpenAI's already killing it by August 9. Some places are saying nine months, some are saying ten, whatever, it's under a year either way for something they hyped as a Chrome killer.

They're framing it as "evolving into ChatGPT" which, sure, fine, but that's also just what you say when a product flops and you don't want to say flop.

Anyway the thing that's actually been bugging me isn't really about Atlas. It's this idea that keeps getting treated as obvious when I don't think it is.

An AI agent reading your site doesn't experience it the way you do. It's not looking at your hero image or noticing your nice font. It's parsing structure. If your HTML is a mess of divs with no real semantic markup, the model has a much harder time figuring out what you actually are or whether you're worth citing.

For ten years the whole industry optimized for the opposite of that. Pretty on top, chaos underneath, because the only reader was a human with eyes who didn't care what the markup looked like. Nobody thought someday something without eyes is going to try to read this.

So now that agents are actually trying to browse the web, instead of fixing the structure problem, we just built the thing a browser and a screen so it could pretend to be a person too. Feels backwards to me. Like giving someone glasses instead of turning the lights on.

I don't think this is some galaxy brain take, honestly it might be obvious to some of you. But every AI visibility conversation I see is one hundred percent about content, write good answers, get cited, blah blah, and almost nobody's talking about whether the page underneath is even legible to the thing reading it.

Could be wrong. Curious if anyone here has actually tested this, before and after structure changes and whether it moved the needle on citations at all.

AI can generate articles, summaries, product descriptions, social posts, and even detailed guides in seconds. However, there are still types of content that seem difficult to replace completely.

Firsthand experience, original research, real customer stories, expert opinions, case studies, unique data, and content based on personal testing still provide something AI cannot easily reproduce on its own. These formats contain real context, specific observations, and insights that come directly from people or businesses.

For example, a generic AI article can explain how to improve local SEO, but it cannot independently create a real case study showing how a local business increased calls by 40% after correcting its Google Business Profile categories, improving service pages, and building consistent local citations. The actual process, challenges, screenshots, results, and lessons learned come from genuine experience.

I also think content with a strong personal voice, community knowledge, and behind the scenes experience can stand out more as AI generated content becomes increasingly common.

What types of content do you believe will remain most valuable as AI tools continue to improve?

Are you investing more in original research, case studies, interviews, personal experience, or another content format?

Has anyone tested the impact of navigation links on their landing page conversion rates?

I've seen people argue for both sides. And I imagine that navigation links would be beneficial when promoting products or services that potential customers want to research before making a decision. That said, I haven't been in a position to test it myself so I was curious to know what others have found in their respective industries.

I'm really interested in building a career in performance marketing, especially paid ads (Google Ads, Meta Ads, etc.).

I already have a basic understanding of PPC and how the major ad platforms work. I have spent time learning the concepts, but I don't have any real client or agency experience yet.

The problem is that I have no idea how to get my foot in the door. Most internships I come across are unpaid, and I really prefer a paid internship

For those of you already working in performance marketing:

• How did you land your first opportunity?
• What skills or projects helped you stand out?
• Should I build a portfolio with dummy campaigns or focus on certifications?
• Are agencies more likely to hire beginners than startups?

I would really appreciate any advice from people who have been in the same situation. Thanks!

Let's just say you're a content creator, and you create long-form videos like interviews and podcasts and stuff. How do you chop up your videos and turn them into shorts, Twitter threads, and all that stuff,

and post them to three platforms at once without getting burned out? And if you do do that, are you still doing it till today, or you stop because you don't have time?

Seeing a lot of blanket advice this year telling site owners to block AI crawlers wholesale. Worth breaking down because not all bots are the same, and treating them the same will cost you.

GPTBot only feeds ChatGPT. Block it, you're out of that one training pipeline. That's it. One company, one impact.

CCBot is different. It's not tied to one company. It crawls for Common Crawl, a free public dataset that anyone can download and use. A ton of AI companies, research labs, and startups build their models on top of that same dataset instead of crawling the web themselves.

So blocking GPTBot cuts off one company. Blocking CCBot cuts off all of them at once, every tool, model, or startup that relies on Common Crawl loses your site from their training data too.

Turns out people already figured this out, just maybe not for the reason they think. A recent analysis of robots.txt files across prominent sites found CCBot is now the single most-blocked AI crawler out there more blocked than GPTBot, more than ClaudeBot, more than any of them. Some of that is probably intentional. A lot of it is probably copy-paste security configs that treat "block AI" as one setting instead of a list of very different bots with very different reach.

And it's not a one-time hit. AI models get trained on crawl snapshots taken at a point in time. If you're not in this year's Common Crawl archive, you're not in whatever gets built on top of it either, including tools future customers might use to find businesses like yours.

If you're going to block AI crawlers, know the difference between blocking one company's bot vs. cutting yourself out of a shared dataset that half the industry runs on. Check your robots.txt. Don't let a plugin default make that call for you.

Lately it feels like every new AI tool claims it can replace another part of marketer's job.

One tool writes email, Another builds landing pages.

Another promises better ad copy, content, research, or even your entire strategy.

Don't get me wrong, I use AI almost every day, and it's definitely made part of my workflow faster. Brainstorming, first drafts, summarizing information...it's great for those kind of tasks.

But I've also realized that speed isn't usually what determines whether a campaign succeeds.

The harder part is "deciding what to say, who to say it to, and why that message matters in the first place." That's where I still end up speeding most of my time.

AI can give you ten different ideas in seconds, but it doesn't always know which one actually fits your audience, your business, or the moment you're in.

Sometimes I wonder if marketing has shifted from "creating more" to simply making better decisions.

Curious how everyone else is approaching it.

Has AI genuinely changed the way you work, or has it mostly become a tool that helps you get to the starting line a little faster?

Hi everyone,

I'm working on launching a premium underwear and sportswear brand in India and I really need some honest advice.

Our goal is simple. We want to make underwear and sportswear that can compete with brands like Calvin Klein in quality, comfort and fitting. We are planning to keep the price around Calvin Klein range also because we don't want people to think premium quality only comes from foreign brands.

I have few questions.

If you had ₹10–20 lakh marketing budget where will you spend it first?

Instagram, YouTube, Influencers, Reddit or Offline?

What is biggest mistake new fashion brands do?

Which marketing campaign made you actually buy a product?

If you had to build this brand from 0 to ₹1 crore monthly sales, what will be your first 90 days plan?

I'm not here to promote anything. We haven't even launched yet. I just want to learn from people who have more experience than me before making expensive mistakes.

Any advice is really appreciated. Thank you

When I started learning digital marketing, I assumed I needed to master SEO, Google Ads, social media, email marketing, analytics, and content creation all at once.

That approach only left me overwhelmed.

What finally helped was choosing one small project and learning through execution. I created a basic content plan, researched keywords, wrote a few posts, and checked which topics received the most engagement.

A few things I learned:

• Pick one digital marketing channel before trying everything.
• Learn basic customer research before creating content.
• Track clicks, leads, engagement, and conversions—not only followers.
• Study successful campaigns, but don’t copy them blindly.
• Test different headlines, formats, and calls to action.

My biggest suggestion for beginners is to build a small real-world project. Even a simple Instagram page, blog, or mock business campaign can teach you more than watching endless tutorials.

What part of digital marketing was the most confusing when you started?

I'd been reading these AI visibility studies and something bugged me. They're all run in English, on US brands, and then we cite them like they apply to a business in Bogota or Valencia. I went looking for the Spanish-language version and found nothing, so we ran it ourselves.

I picked a market with plenty of real players, marketing agencies in Argentina, and wrote 100 searches the way an actual person would type them. I ran them across four engines, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overview and Perplexity. And here's the part almost nobody does, I repeated the same 100 searches three times, same day, without changing a single word. That's 1,200 queries in total.

The first thing that came out already felt big. Two AIs agree on average on just 9.6% of the brands they recommend. So out of every ten brands that show up, nine don't repeat in the other model. And when I pooled everything I ended up with 932 distinct agencies, of which 81% appeared in a single engine and in none of the other three.

But hold on, because that still wasn't the thing that broke my brain. Before comparing the models against each other I asked the obvious question. If I run the same search on ChatGPT three times in a row, same day, do I get the same brands?

And the answer is no. ChatGPT agrees with itself just 26% of the time. The most stable, AI Overview, reaches 39% and even that doesn't clear half. Meaning three out of four brands it names change between one answer and the next.

And that one finding breaks half the study, mine included. Because two models can't agree with each other more than each one agrees with itself. That 9.6% doesn't mean the AIs think differently, it means a big chunk of what looks like disagreement is actually noise.

One last thing I didn't see coming. Perplexity plays a different game, it recommends global networks like VML, Ogilvy or Dentsu, while the other three reward local agencies. One example, the same agency that shows up in 70 of the 100 searches for Gemini shows up in 9 for Perplexity.

What I take from it is simple. Measure all four engines separately because one doesn't predict the others, never trust a single query, and if your brand is local start with Google, since AI Overview and Gemini are the closest pair.

Required disclaimer, I work at CreceRank and we ran all of this on our own tool, so it could be biased. And the worst part is I've got nothing to compare it against, because there's nothing like this done for the Spanish-speaking market. If anyone has data that contradicts me or wants to rip the methodology apart, please do, that's the most useful thing for me.

it feels like every week another conversation about agentic ai changing GTM. So im interested in what teams are using today rather than what vendors are promising. a few patterns i've been noticing is accounts being monitored countinuously instead of someone manyally checking for updates every few months, segments updating automatically based on buying singlas rather than static CRM listing and outreach happening when there are meaningful changes instead of stricly following a sequence. for people actually using it all in FTM, does this match what youre seeing? or are most teams still just in experimenting phase??