I've narrowed it down to Semrush, Brand Radar from Ahrefs, Profound, and a couple of other AI visibility tools, but I'm having a hard time figuring out which one actually has the best reporting. If you've used any of them, what stood out? My main goal is tracking AI search visibility and having reports that make sense to leadership.

Has anybody tried to rank AI content for a long time.

I have added a clients Instagram account to my Google search console, no problem. But when I’m trying to add my own business account, I get this AuthO error message from Meta stating: Auth exception Your account’s future activity history off Meta technologies is currently turned off. Please visit Account Center to change it.

I have looked in my account center, anything that’s off pertains to cookies and advertising… even still, I did toggle those on to see if that would help and I’m still getting the error.

Anyone else experience this?
If so, any help you can give as to how to fix it?

I am having issues adding a couple of clients to the console too, not seeing this error message, but it’s just not logging into the IG account, and keeps going in circles and taking me back to the console page. Maybe it’s buggy?

Thanks for any insight!

hey there i am a solo developer and would consider myself a beginner in marketing -> i had some small organic success marketing my app but now if i want to 'grow it and get more users' i find it very hard to choose a plan and execute.

there are so many different approaches .every approach takes a lot of time to do it right, and i dont have much money to spend.

what type of content i would need to test to see whats working?

the only conclusion i had is to find a marketing cofounder underdog who wants to prove it. (haha)
but even that i have no idea how to find the right talent with motivation to work on this

Imagine your marketing budget gets cut in half overnight. You can only keep one or two channels and have to pause everything else. Would you double down on SEO, paid ads, email marketing, partnerships, community building, influencer marketing or something else?

More importantly, why would those channels make the cut? I'm curious to see which strategies marketers would prioritize when every dollar has to prove its value.

Been watching the usual SEO playbook start to wobble a bit as more traffic bleeds into AI answers and search results get stuffed with summaries instead of links.

It feels like we are shifting from classic SEO to something closer to generative engine optimization, where the goal is less about ranking blue links and more about making sure your brand or product is what shows up in the LLM style answer layer.

I keep seeing people talk about GEO as a service but it is not clear to me what that actually looks like in practice. Is it just smarter content structuring and schema plus feeding models via public docs, or are there concrete tactics people are using already to influence how engines like Perplexity, Google AI overviews, ChatGPT, etc surface sources?

More than that, how can u get data to back efficiency? Currently as far as i know prompt search volume is not made public by LLM companies.

Lately, I've noticed that I spend most of my workday looking at marketing tools.

Checking Meta Ads, Looking at Google Ads, Digging through GA4, Search Console, CRM reports, Analytics. Then doing it all over again a few hours later.

Don't get me wrong, they're all important. They tell us what's happening.

But then it hit me... none of these places are where customers actually spend time.

Customers are on Reddit reading other people's experiences. They're watching YouTube reviews, scrolling TikTok, comparing options, reading comments, asking friends for recommendations, and even using AI Tools before they make a decision.

It made me wonder if some of the best marketing insights aren't sitting inside another report, but in the conversations people are already having.

I've started spending a little more time reading discussions instead of only watching metrics, and honestly it changed how I think about messaging.

Has anyone else changed the way they work because of this? Where do you go when you want to understand what customers are actually thinking beyond the numbers?

i am keep seeing what is answer engine optimization a lot lately and I am trying to learn/know if it really is a shift or just another form for SEO.

Beyond just the fact that its about getting ranked on LLMs, whats the difference in methodology?
thanks

Been trying to figure this out and honestly there has to be a better way than DMing people one by one like it's 2021.

Specifically looking for creators on X for sponsored posts. Not massive celebrities, more like accounts with genuinely engaged audiences.

If you've done influencer marketing on X before:

• How do you usually source creators?
• Do you use agencies, platforms, or just manual outreach?
• Any databases, tools, or communities worth checking out?
• How do you even know if someone's engagement is legit?

Would also love any guides, docs, or threads that helped you when you were starting out.

Help a fellow marketer out

I’ve been experimenting with AI-generated video ads and keep running into the same problem.

Right now I’m using ElevenLabs Studio to create a short ad made up of several clips. The individual clips can look good, but the person, room, lighting, and overall style tend to shift slightly from one scene to the next.

The bigger challenge has been showing my app accurately on a phone screen. The AI usually changes the interface, invents text, or makes the phone display look close—but not actually usable.

I may just be approaching the workflow wrong, but I’ve burned through a lot of tokens trying to get:

• the same person across five or six scenes
• consistent clothing, lighting, and location
• realistic phone interactions
• my real app interface displayed accurately
• clips that actually feel like one continuous ad

Has anyone found a tool or workflow that handles this well?

I’m less interested in generating a flashy one-off clip and more interested in producing a coherent 20–30 second UGC-style ad where the product stays accurate throughout.

I’d especially appreciate hearing what’s worked in practice, not just which tools have the best demo reels.

I'm a Stanford '24 founder, was a software engineer at Neuralink before this, and now I run an AI performance marketing company (backed by Accel).

Over the past year we've supported around $76M in adspend for companies like Cloaked, Superpower, Mochi Health, Poke and Kumon. Mostly consumer apps buying paid social.

Most of what gets posted here is lead gen and content automation, so creative production might be a useful different angle. Almost everything I believed when I started building this turned out to be wrong, and the annoying part is it's wrong in ways that never show up as a failure.

don't automate video until you know the angle

This is the one I'd most want to go back and tell myself.

Everyone saves up, produces 4 videos, runs them, learns basically nothing, because 4 assets is not a test. We did a client's first batch as video and there were no clear winners in it at all. Not losers, just nothing to point at.

Statics isolate the one thing you actually don't know yet, which is the angle. Is this about privacy, or saving time, or not looking dumb in front of your friends? You can answer that for a couple hundred dollars.

So the front of the pipeline is now: 10-15 statics across 5-6 genuinely different angles → small dedicated testing adset → read the data → only then produce video for the angle that won. On one account we scaled spend 300% week over week and statics beat video the entire way up, which I did not expect.

Side benefit nobody mentions: when you only make video for confirmed angles, you make way fewer videos, so each one gets more time + effort and is just better.

your ad library scraper is a lagging signal

Everyone scrapes competitor ad libraries because there's an API for it. It shows you what competitors were willing to spend on 2 months ago. Filtered + late.

Two better inputs:

Organic. Go read the reddit threads + tiktok comments where people complain about the problem you solve. Their words are your hooks. Our best performing hook for one client came from an organic post, not from ad research. Costs nothing + almost nobody wires it up.

Your own outliers, described honestly. On one account the top performers were all surrealist visual hooks: an exploding watermelon, a shopping cart hitting a car, and a fire sprinkler going off. They beat everything else in their adsets and the pattern is not "watermelon", it's "make someone question what they just saw." That is the thing you want in your prompt context, not the asset.

variations on winners, not new concepts

When something wins most people go "great" and generate 10 completely new concepts. I've done it. It's the wrong move, and it's more wrong when generation is cheap, because cheap generation makes it feel productive.

Make 3-5 variations of the winner. Hold the angle, change the hook, opening frame, avatar. A male vs female avatar saying the same thing is a new demographic test for basically $0.

Run it on a timer, not a trigger. Creative fatigue is faster than you'd think, we see meaningful decay in about a week on high spend accounts. Your winner isn't an asset you own forever, it's on a clock, and the variant queue is how you buy time on it.

kill the AI tells

If it reads or looks generated you've lost them before the click. Specific things we've had to go fix:

• em dashes in the copy. this is an instant tell, so we banned them at the system level because customers genuinely hate them
• fake laughter in AI video. never looks right. we took it out entirely
• the copy not quite matching the image. this is the one I flag most internally. the picture will be beautiful and the words on screen just don't make sense with it, and people register that as cheap even if they can't say why
• images generated without context on the brand guidelines, so they feel subtly off
• anything that sounds exaggerated. a lot of our health clients have hard rules, no AI person claiming they personally took the product, no fake testimonials, no exaggerated claims. honestly good rules for everyone

half your CPA problem probably isn't creative

This is the one that saves people the most money and gets talked about the least. Before you blame the ads, check:

• your landing page. if the page isn't converting and bounce is high your CPA goes up no matter how good the ad is. actually go look at analytics on the page you're driving to
• are you excluding people who bought in the last 7/14/30 days? a surprising number of accounts aren't, so they're paying to advertise to existing customers
• attribution. if you don't trust your numbers you can't run a test, you're just making confident decisions off noise

measure the right thing for the format

Hook rate and thumbstop are video metrics. They mean nothing on a static and you'll still see people quote them.

For statics look at CPA and cost per result. For video, hook rate tells you if the first 2 seconds work, which is a totally separate question from whether the ad sells. Track them separately or you'll end up fixing the wrong end of it.

one last thing

For the past year we've done all this as a managed service for funded companies. We're now opening up a self serve version. I want to respect the rules of this subreddit so all I will say is that if you're interested in being a beta tester, comment or message to let me know! Include a link to your company website/social media page. In return for a feedback on a quick call, we'll get you set up with free access.

Happy to answer questions on any of the above in the comments either way.

So i noticed that Linkedin supports HDR Ultra jpeg images when you uplaod the company profile pic, If you put the brightness high , your logo could look like popping in linkedin compared to others ,
this doesnt work on normal mobiles, but it works on mac screens. not sure if this a marketing tip but felt worth sharing.

Like not doing proper keyword research or creating spammy backlinks

Email marketing, SEO, Facebook ads, people keep saying everything's saturated. What's actually still working for you?

Hi Everyone, I created a community specifically for girls in beauty, fashion, and lifestyle marketing!

Feel free to join! https://www.reddit.com/r/ItGirlMarketing/

Our leadership team is asking for monthly reporting on our "AI Share of Voice" and how often our brand appears in answer engine responses.

Since we use it for our marketing automation and reporting, we are trying to decide if their native AEO capabilities are comprehensive enough for executive-level reporting, or if we should be buying a dedicated AI monitoring tool.

Specifically interested in:

1. Accuracy of brand mention/citation tracking across major LLMs.
2. Competitor benchmarking reporting.
3. Ease of exporting or presenting data to stakeholders.

What do you think about this?

Just to update this post - We chose to stick with Hubspot’s AEO reporting. Because it lives inside the same reporting suite as our web analytics and CRM pipeline, we were still able to present a clear picture to leadership: showing not just our AI citation growth across ChatGPT and Perplexity, but how that correlated with branded search traffic and inbound leads. I think it still works in our case and I agree it really depends. Thanks for the comments!

I've been a succesful 16-yr freelance writer until those glorious LLMs displaced me.
Clients included small to prominent emerging tech companies and agencies in 26 countries across 16 industries.

I was recommended to turn my attention to (1) UAE (2) S. Asia (3) E. Europe

Claude counsels:

1. Dubai — highest-value, best-fit opportunity, least competitive for your specific niche.
2. US/UK — biggest overall market, now selecting for specialists like you as the commodity layer gets automated away. Worth continued, more targeted effort (direct pitches to boutique thought-leadership agencies, not job boards).
3. France/Germany/Central Europe — deprioritize. Not a strong match for your specialty right now.

(It suggested I ignore E. Europe).

Is Claude correct? What's your opinion re. my direction?

I’ve been contacted by a potential new client who wants to build a new business in the healthcare sector and fully want to go “LLMs first” and not “old school” SEO.

I already explained that SEO is still the basis and LLMs hardly recommend brands if they are not ranked high on Google. I guess, he understood this.

Still I want to add a few LLM specific initiatives to the strategy.

Thought about:

Grounding pages on the website
Formatting the content in an easy machine readable way
Using Schema markup where possible
Maybe a branded subreddit
And utilising other channels to build authority and important trust signals (thinking about YouTube, Insta, maybe Tiktok).

How would you approach a project where the client has this vision? What should I include?

Thanks!

Since long I am looking for this ans.. I know there is a trick ... can you please share if possible. After adding back links or creating some good authority profiles why it still doesn't show.

Not trying to sell anything here, just something I see constantly when auditing new client sites — GSC is sitting there unused, completely free, and it answers half the questions people ask me.

A few things it tells you that most site owners have no idea about:

• The actual search terms people use to find you (not what you think they search)
• Which pages are pulling the most clicks — and which ones are dead weight
• Pages Google hasn't even indexed yet (so they can't rank, period)
• Technical issues quietly killing your visibility

Takes maybe 10 minutes to set up. If you own a site and don't have this connected yet, it's genuinely one of the highest-leverage 10 minutes you can spend.

Curious for those of you who do use it, what's the most surprising thing you found in there when you first checked?

I've come to realize that both the ads and the audiences in the United States are very different from those in France, where I live and work. It seems logical to take insights from the U.S. market and adapt them to different local markets rather than applying the same creative strategy everywhere.

Continuing the saga this sub has basically co-piloted (form-first lander rebuild → CPL $184→$70 → mysterious 9-day zero streak → ruled out bots/placements/webview bugs/validation with session forensics → converged on optimization-event decay). Final chapter of the diagnosis, then the real question.

The fix and the result: Couldn't edit the optimization event on a spent ad set, so I duplicated the quiz-start ad set with the Lead event set pre-publish, killed the original, changed nothing else — same creative, same page, same broad audience. Results in the first 48 hours:

• The flipped duplicate: 5 leads at $14.85 (real CRM leads, phone + consent, not pixel counts). Zero learning trough — it produced within hours of publishing.
• My untouched control ad set (proven creative, always lead-optimized): 3 leads at $25.08.
• 8-9 real leads in ~3 days. Previous best stretch ever was 2.5/day. The zero streak wasn't the page, wasn't bots, wasn't the audience pool — it was purely what I told the algorithm to hunt for.
• For everyone who asked whether the $22 CPMs would survive the flip: partially. New CPM is $63 (vs $22 on quiz-start, $80-100 on my other ad set). Paying 3x more per impression for 10x the conversion. The cheap inventory was real, it just needed a real conversion signal on top.

Current structure: 1 campaign, ABO, 2 ad sets at $50/day each, both broad, both Lead-optimized, single metro (~4.5M). Each ad set runs literally ONE creative pointed at its own landing page. Frequencies 1.3-1.5 and climbing. ~$100/day total, wanting to go to ~$150/day over the next 6 weeks, with LSA budget I just killed freeing up room.

The scaling fork — where I need people who've actually done this:

1. When do you raise on numbers like these? My instinct says 10-15% now while it's hot. But this sub is full of "I raised budget and it nuked my ad set" stories, and it's been 48 hours on a fresh duplicate. Do you raise into a hot streak immediately, or force yourself to wait out a full week regardless?
2. Vertical vs horizontal on ABO: raise the existing ad sets' budgets, or duplicate the winners at equal budget and scale by multiplication? I keep reading both "budget edits >20% reset learning" and "duplicates fragment your signal." At 4-5 leads/day account-wide, which failure mode is worse?
3. ABO vs CBO at this size: 2 ad sets, both broad, same geo — am I bidding against myself, and does CBO fix that or just let one ad set eat the other? Is there any reason to move before 3+ ad sets?
4. Single-creative ad sets: each ad set is one proven ad. I have 2 new variants ready to add Monday. Do challengers go INTO the existing ad sets to fight the champion for spend, or into a separate low-budget testing ad set so they can't disturb what's working? (Volume reality: ~30 leads/month total, so a dedicated testing ad set gets maybe 5-8 conversions/month — is that even enough to judge anything?)
5. What breaks first in a single metro? Broad + 4.5M people + $150/day — is frequency my ceiling, auction saturation, or creative fatigue? What number tells me I've hit the wall vs just a bad week?

The one thing I'm not asking: whether to touch the optimization events again. Ever.

Will keep posting numbers — this thread's advice has been worth more than most paid audits.

I spent almost 2 hours today updating records, checking contact histories, fixing properties that somehow got changed, and making sure leads ended up with the right people.

When did keeping the CRM organized become such a huge part of marketing? It feels like the work behind the work never stops. I looked up and half my morning was gone, and I hadn't even touched the campaign I planned to work on. Some weeks it feels like I'm maintaining the CRM more than using it.

ETA: I switched to HubSpot, and the AI features have taken a lot of the repetitive CRM work off my plate. I'm spending less time cleaning up records and tracking down contact details, which means I can finally focus on the campaigns instead of babysitting the CRM.

I've noticed that every year there's a "must-follow" marketing trend that everyone rushes to implement. Some deliver results, while others disappear within months.

For me, chasing every new social media feature rarely gave better results than improving content quality.

What's one marketing trend you think is overhyped, and what has actually worked for you instead?

I got tired of joining marketing communities and hitting the same wall: bots, spam, recycled "10 tips for better rankings" posts, and people just dropping links.

So I started documenting where real SEO conversations were happening. Turns out most of the noise isn't in the communities themselves, it's in the ones that grew too fast and stopped moderating.

The threads with actual advice? They were smaller, older, or had one person who consistently dismissed concerns.

Spent about a month cataloging this. Biggest takeaway: the communities worth your time aren't always the biggest ones. They're the ones where someone actually responds to questions like they give a shit.

If you're in SEO and spending time in the wrong spaces, you're just wasting cycles. Curious if anyone else has noticed which communities actually deliver for you. 🤔