AI search, automation, and shrinking teams are stripping away the two things CMOs were once hired for:

1. Building and scaling a large marketing team
2. Budget allocation through campaigns & tooling investments

Startup CMOs now get less than 18 months to prove they matter—half the time it takes Google to sunset a product. Meanwhile, AI Overviews steal the click onone in eight US searches and rising. Stay the same, you and your budget are next.

Evolve or Risk Irrelevance

Today, AI is steadily eroding both core CMO functions.

Building a 30-person team in 2025 is malpractice.

I’m seeing smaller teams — like Ramp’s lean content pod — ship more now than they did at 2× the size. High leverage beats high headcount.**And even for someone like me, predicting which platforms will matter in 6 months is a coin toss. The ecosystem is volatile. AI search is eroding visibility in ways most boards haven’t even noticed — yet.

This shift isn’t theoretical. It’s here — and it’s reshaping how CMOs need to lead, what they measure, and where influence comes from.

The CMO who fails to evolve becomes irrelevant.

As Kieran Flanagan put it, the “slide-deck CMO” is being replaced by a craft-driven, prompt- and story-fluent operator — someone hands-on with AI tools, scaling impact through agility.

Put bluntly: we don’t need CMOs. We need VPs and Directors who ship workflows that move the business.

The Speed Gap Is Brutal

This cycle is unlike any other. Everything is measured in months instead of quarters.

And yet? New tech adoption still takes forever.

You start a 6-month platform migration — and halfway through, the platform is already irrelevant.

You’re stone-skipping.

Same goes for playbooks.

Who can build a 12-month marketing plan in these conditions?

Many marketing leaders feel like they’re falling behind. They are.

Traditional timelines, layered approvals, and high-effort execution are being made obsolete. The playbooks that work now are leaner, more experimental, and built for speed.

The pace of change is compressing outcomes: the gap between those who adapt and those who don’t widens by the day — not the quarter.

Headcount Leverage is Declining

Being a talent-builder no longer guarantees edge. The right operator with AI tools, from workflows to agents can now do the work of a five-person team.

Across high-performing orgs, we’re seeing a consistent shift: smaller teams, smarter workflows, more hybrid automation.

Some examples of outsized outcomes from <2-person teams:

• Attention 8x’d inbound demand from LLMs creating differentiated content from sales transcripts that their audience (and agents) love.
• Josh Grant, VP of Growth at Webflow recently noted that they 10x’d their content production with AI tools and are seeing 5x signup growth from AI search.

The old model rewarded talent builders. The new model rewards leverage.

The CMOs who understand this shift will scale with precision. The rest will scale headcount and miss goals.

Channel KPIs Are Disappearing

Search used to be predictable. Scalable. Reliable.

But the metrics that once made marketers look successful — traffic, clicks, MQLs — are losing value fast.

• AI Overviews appear in >45% of search results
• Position-1 CTR drops by 34.5% when they do
• AI is shifting buyer behavior across all intent levels

Your traffic dashboard isn’t broken; the window moved.  …

Even the CEO and CFO know it.

They’re asking why your brand isn’t showing up in their daily ChatGPT query.

Google’s AI Overviews are widely deployed, and appear in >45% of search results. Combined with rising usage of ChatGPT and other LLMs, AI interfaces are intercept a growing share of buyer intent.

If you extrapolate only the last 12 months, the crossover happens mid-2026.

When buyers get complete answers inside AI interfaces, attribution dies. Zero-click searches force optimizing for brand visibility and influence, rather than getting the click.

CMOs who rely on traffic dashboards are going blind. CFOs and Boards now want proof of influence and pipeline efficiency, not traffic volume.

If you can’t prove influence, no one cares how many people clicked.

Budget Scrutiny is Increasing

When performance stalls and attribution weakens, marketing spend becomes the first target.

CMOs already have the shortest average tenure in the C-suite. In this environment, that timeline compresses further. Budgets are being reevaluated in real time. Initiatives that can't prove value are cut faster than ever before.

It's not enough to build brand. You have to prove impact. You have to defend spend.

The pressure is rising. CMOs who don't evolve their measurement strategy will struggle to survive the next board cycle.

Trust and Agent Visibility Are the Moats That Matter

So what replaces the old levers?

There are two distinct AI-proof channels that are emerging. Interestingly, they both take us back to the principles of great marketing.

The best CMOs are now building around these two ideas:

1. Social proof. That can be influencers, or trust earned through referrals (Who’s building a social graph for outbound?)
2. Amazing content, maximized for visibility

These are nothing brand new, but the tactics behind #2 in particular will change more in the next 6 months than the last 10 years.

Where previously Google was the middle-man, now you need to build winning content that prepares agents to speak and sell on your behalf.

Customer-led referrals/advocacy/events and answer-engine visibility (AEO) scale credibility even as algorithms shift.

Holding the mindshare of your audience, both digitally and in their conversations still holds true. Only the “how” has changed. But it’s changing very quickly.

Early movers who are rapidly experimenting around these initiatives are already seeing healthier pipeline despite falling session and traffic counts.

Speed is winning.

Appear in ChatGPT or Disappear

Click through rates are already down 34.5% and we’re just at the start of the Great Google Reset.

With ChatGPT and other AI search engines quickly becoming the default destination for queries,  commerce will shift to be directly through these agents without touching your site in the next 12 months.

If your brand isn't showing up inside these responses, you won't just miss clicks. You'll miss the buyer entirely.

This is where Answer Engine Optimization comes in.

AEO is the strategy of making your content discoverable and trustworthy to AI agents. It requires:

• Structuring your content to be readable and extractable by LLMs
• Building brand authority so your content gets cited
• Measuring presence inside AI-generated responses

Brands finding success are optimizing for influence and tracking Brand Visibility.

That builds in monitoring GPT citations, branded mentions in AI Search, and measuring how often their content is used as a source in agent-generated answers.

Tools like AirOps are already enabling this. Their workflows help content teams design, structure, and publish content that earns citations in the places buyers now start their journey.

This isn't SEO 2.0. It's visibility insurance for a future where clicks are no longer guaranteed.

The Inflection Point is Here

CMOs have a choice.

You can keep operating the way you have been—managing large teams, chasing traffic metrics, scaling tactics that worked in 2021—and slowly lose strategic influence, and your job.

Or you can shift:

• Focus on trust
• Invest in visibility inside AI agents
• Build compact, high-leverage teams that move fast
• Measure what matters to the CFO and the board

The CMOs who do this will become the most valuable GTM leaders in their org.

The rest? Passengers.

The CMO role isn’t dying; the slide-deck CMO is.

Pick your path:

• Operate: small crew, high leverage, prove influence inside AI answers and AI resilient channels.
• Decorate: decks, traffic goals, headcount growth.

Only one keeps the job next year.

Guillaume Cabane is a Partner at Hypergrowth Partners. He has advised high-growth companies including Ramp, Drift, Gorgias, and Segment.

AirOps helps brands win AI search.

We monitor how you show up in answer engines, show you exactly what to do, and help you do it at speed with the most precise content execution both on and offsite.

Book a demo and turn AI search into your next great revenue channel.