The AI-First CMO: Every Marketing Leader Needs an LLM Strategy

Customers don’t search and scroll anymore. They ask. If your brand isn’t in the answer their AI serves up, you’re not even in the reckoning.

The Shift No One Planned For

For twenty years, visibility was rigged in your favor. If you had the right budget, you could buy visibility. Google and Facebook were the only gates that mattered. Every CMO I knew has forever lived inside two dashboards. All you needed was to master them and you controlled the game. Entire careers were built on ranking high and outbidding rivals. But today, that playbook doesn’t hold anymore.

Discovery has slipped out of the search bar and into the hands of machines that don’t care how much you spend. All that matters is whether you’re credible enough to be mentioned. Ask a 20-year-old today how they decide what to buy, and they won’t talk about keywords or feeds at all. They simply ask ChatGPT. The neat little box it returns with three recommendations in one click is what is erasing billions in ad spend in a single second.

A friend of mine was shopping for sneakers for his daughter starting college. He didn’t Google it. He didn’t check Instagram for reviews. He asked ChatGPT: “What’s the best sneaker for a teenager going to college?” In seconds, the model handed him a neat summary with a few brands. One caught his eye. In less time than it takes to brew coffee, the choice and the sale  were done.

Most of the global sneaker brands (including the ones spending millions a week on ads) weren’t even in that answer. They didn’t exist in his buying journey. That’s the part most CMOs haven’t grasped yet. Customers aren’t browsing. They’re asking. If you’re not in the answer, you’re not even in the race.

Now stretch that example beyond sneakers. Procurement managers are asking assistants which ERP to choose. HR heads are asking Perplexity which payroll platform saves the most time. CFOs are asking Gemini which FP&A tool works best for mid-sized firms. If your brand isn’t cited, you don’t make the shortlist. Simple as that.

From Search to Answers

For two decades, marketing was all about being found. Google taught us the religion of search. If you weren’t visible on page one, you didn’t exist. But discovery doesn’t start with search bars anymore. It starts with questions. And the answers don’t look like ten blue links. They look like a single verdict.

This isn’t fringe behavior. A recent Pew survey shows 34% of U.S. adults have already used ChatGPT. Among adults under 30, it’s nearly 60% and a third of those say they use it weekly. That’s not an experiment. That’s a shift in habit.

The mechanics of it are brutal. Search rewarded optimization; AI assistants reward authority. They don’t care who spends the most. They pull from the sources they trust.

That’s why Wikipedia pages and Wired explainers often get cited before a brand’s own site. It’s why Reddit threads on skincare or CNET’s gadget reviews show up in AI answers more often than glossy ad campaigns. And it’s why New York Times health coverage is more likely to be referenced than a supplement brand shouting on Instagram.

This shift signals the beginning of a new kind of marketing mindset called LLM Optimization. Traditional SEO focuses on how to rank, while LLM Optimization is about being referenced. The difference may sound small, but it changes everything. As highlighted in Virtual Employee’s deep dive on optimizing for LLM discoverability, the next stage of visibility belongs to brands whose content is clear, credible, and structured in a way that AI systems can understand and quote with confidence. It is no longer just about keywords. It is about trust, clarity, and creating content that earns authority.

On the business side, you see the same pattern. HubSpot’s marketing guides or Stripe’s developer docs show up in Perplexity responses because they’ve invested for years in producing clear, trustworthy content. The models treat them as safe to cite.

It’s not only the giants. Mid-sized players are moving too. Remote staffing firm Virtual Employee has started publishing structured explainers about offshore hiring models that AI systems can parse. When executives ask, “How do I build a remote marketing team offshore?” VE has a shot at being in the answer. That’s visibility no ad budget could buy.

Why CMOs Can’t Wait

Marketers are used to slow cycles. Budgets are set in January, campaigns planned by the quarter, media bought in advance. But this change isn’t waiting for your calendar. Customers are already moving. They’re asking assistants right now, and every answer either includes you or deletes you.

The old reflex of trying to outspend competitors doesn’t work here. You can’t bid your way into AI answers. You have to be recognized. Meanwhile, recognition is already getting locked in. Klarna rolled out an AI assistant to handle customer queries. It now takes two-thirds of their support volume and saves the company $40 million a year. Coca-Cola ran an AI-generated creative at global scale to test how brand storytelling could stretch. HubSpot and Stripe have quietly structured their content to surface consistently in assistants.

These aren’t experiments. They’re moves to own the new visibility layer before others catch on. Meanwhile, ad budgets keep ballooning. Global digital ad spend hit $740 billion in 2024. But not one dollar of that guarantees a mention when someone asks ChatGPT about your category. That’s the risk: billions spent, and no presence where the decision actually gets made. For CMOs, waiting isn’t neutral. It’s choosing invisibility.

What Adapting Looks Like

So, what does a real strategy look like? The first is being quotable. Assistants pull from sources they trust, and trust isn’t built on clever SEO hacks. It comes from authority which in turn comes from publishing in places that carry weight. That’s why Harvard Business Review shows up in answers: decades of credibility make it a safe reference. CMOs need to think the same way  and not just what do we publish? but where do we publish so it sticks?

The second is writing for both machines and humans. Stripe’s developer docs and HubSpot’s guides are consistently cited in AI outputs not because they’re flashy, but because they’re structured cleanly with clear headings, FAQs, data tables. These are easy to parse, and easy to reuse. If your content isn’t legible to an assistant, it might as well not exist.

The third is treating “share of answers” as the new visibility metric. You already track share of search and brand recall. Soon you’ll need to know: when someone asks about my category in ChatGPT, do we show up? If you’re not monitoring that, you’re not managing it.

And finally, you have to test boldly. Coca-Cola’s AI campaigns weren’t gimmicks. They were controlled experiments to understand how brand storytelling lands in this new environment. CMOs should be running the same kind of trials and not just to chase hype, but to learn how to plant their brand in the places assistants are drawing from.

Firms of all sizes are making moves fast. Virtual Employee, for instance, has reshaped its explainers on offshore staffing so they’re easy for AI engines to recognize and reuse. That’s not about clicks. That’s about making sure they don’t get erased from the conversation when executives ask assistants how to build a remote team.

The lesson is simple: the brands that adapt fastest to being part of the answer will have their own visibility. Everyone else will be invisible by default.

The AI-First CMO

The CMO role was always a mix of art and science. Creative instincts on one side, analytical discipline on the other. Now there’s a third dimension: AI fluency. You don’t need to write code. But you do need to know how these systems decide who to trust. Which signals matter. Which content gets reused.

That shifts the questions you ask. It’s not just: “Will this campaign drive clicks?” It’s: “Would an assistant cite this?” The best CMOs need to treat AI as a partner and to stress-test ideas, generate variants, and surface blind spots. But judgment stays human. The psychology of persuasion and the feel for culture can’t be automated. The leaders who thrive won’t be the ones with the biggest budgets. They’ll be the ones who brief their teams with both people and machines in mind.

Google created the winners and losers of the last marketing era. Large language models are already deciding the next. Here’s the part too many leaders are ignoring: this isn’t “coming.” It’s here. Customers are already using AI assistants to pick what to buy, which tools to shortlist, which brands to trust.

Picture this: Someone types your category into ChatGPT. The assistant lists three competitors. Your brand isn’t there. There’s no ad campaign that fixes that. No media spend that can buy your way back in. That’s the moment CMOs need to plan for now. Because you’re not just the chief marketing officer anymore. You’re the chief visibility officer. And in a world where customers no longer scroll, they ask, and the answers decide who matters.