What 250+ Marketing Leaders Learned About AI Search at AirOps Next 2026

On May 13, 2026, AirOps brought together 24 speakers, 10 sessions, and a room full of marketing leaders at City Winery in New York City for AirOps Next.

Here's what you missed, and catch every session on demand.

Discovery Has Moved On Without You

More than 250 people joined the AirOps team in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan to connect, share what's working for AI search, and to get insights into why AirOps is the growth platform for AI search. The crowd was buzzing and minds were open to what the next era of AirOps and AI search would hold.

AirOps CEO Alex Halliday opened the day with a clear thesis: buyers are no longer browsing their way to your brand.

The data behind this shift is striking. From nearly 2 billion observed citations, Halliday showed that SERP rank still matters. But the game has expanded to five new surfaces: model citation preferences, brand voice preservation, off-site presence, content freshness, and attribution. Off-site alone accounts for up to 85% of top-of-funnel AI influence.

Buyer journeys and discovery has been delegated to AI agents, and the inputs those agents rely goes beyond traditional SEO and search. The enterprise teams that embrace new content and search goals with agents will have the edge.

The New AirOps: Meet Quill

Right after the keynote, the product team took the stage for AirOps' largest launch to date. Dillon Hong and Amr Shafik walked through a live demo of a platform rebuilt around three pillars: Context, Insights, and Actions. They unveiled Quill, the AI agent captain at the center of it all.

Quill scans 24/7 for the highest-value opportunities: stale pages, competitor content gaps, and prompts you should be cited for but aren't. It surfaces those in a new Inbox and learns from every accept and decline. Human review isn't optional. It's core to the design, especially for brand tone, claims, and positioning.

Want ot know about early results? Asana saw a 71% increase in AI citations. Parallel AI saw a 130% increase in citation rate in just two weeks.

As we said on LinkedIn the day of the launch: "Your team stays in the driver's seat. Quill executes the work."

What Real Teams Are Actually Building

The customer panel grounded the morning in real numbers. Bitly CMO Tara Robertson reported 14-15x efficiency gains, with reclaimed time reinvested into better ROAS and LTV to CAC. Bridget Nelson at Chime described how a routine Reddit analysis uncovered a competitor with a 300% citation surge from Q4 to Q1. That discovery that shifted Chime's entire strategy and earned new leadership engagement.

‍
Two pieces of advice stood out: start with the tedious task, not the flashy one (tedious wins prove ROI), and remember that every output has a human at the end. Content Engineering is what separates AI slop from AI strategy.

Airbnb's Wake-Up Call on Off-Site

Antoine Sochat from Airbnb delivered one of the day's most memorable moments. Despite being one of the world's most recognized brands, Airbnb had a 0% mention rate for "things to do in Paris" just two months ago. Competitors like GetYourGuide were getting cited. Airbnb wasn't.

The fix wasn't more brand spend. It was a systematic off-site investment. Airbnb built 50+ structured hub pages by topic cluster and matched them with off-site mentions in the same language. The result: from 0% to 5% mention rate in a week, and from competitive position six to position one. Brand authority is a tailwind, not a substitute for active off-site strategy.

The Search Disruption Scoreboard

Growth advisor Kevin Indig presented fresh research on who's winning and losing as AI has altered the way users interact online. Some surprising stats that Kevin shared:

• YouTube is now the most-cited domain in AI answers, surpassing Reddit.
• "How to" and "what is" content has lost 35-60% of click-through rate over the past 12 months.
• Buyers are going direct to merchants. NerdWallet lost 70% of organic traffic in two years while Chase gained 10%.
• HubSpot lost 70% of organic traffic but their stock doubled, because they built a media empire instead.

Kevin's post-conference LinkedIn reflection captured the room's energy well: "Brand finally gets the spotlight it always deserved. AI marketing leans heavier on brand, audience, and trust than SEO ever did."

Brand in the Age of Retrieval

The brand panel brought together voices from HelloFresh, Ramp, COLLINS, and Notion/Brex/Later to tackle a question keeping brand leaders up at night: what does brand-building mean when your audience is increasingly an LLM?

James Hurst from HelloFresh reframed the challenge. Brand used to be about creating memory structures. Now the question is how to build a brand around retrieval mechanics. Paul Jun at Ramp put it practically: his team built a self-serve white paper tool that generated $5.6M in sales-qualified pipeline in 2025. His mantra: make the brand easy to love and impossible to misuse. Kira Klaas offered the anchor: AI isn't what accelerates shipping. Alignment is.

Attendee Alli Guerra captured the spirit of the session: "Every conversation I had affirmed why stories matter more now in the age of AI. It's what sets a brand apart from a sea of sameness."

The Afternoon: CMOs, Growth, Anthropic, and Storytelling

One stellar highlight of the venue was the great food, but also the great merch from the AirOps team. Everyone could grab a hat or shirt and even take home a tote bag. All for free.

After a nice lunch with good convos (including with my agency pals Will Leatherman and Alex Birkett), the afternoon brought four more sharp sessions.

The CMO panel was direct: the org chart is rewiring, and marketing leaders are now building, not just briefing. Kexin Chen built an internal agentic platform called "Claudia." Ashley Kemper is building an MCP as a new content distribution channel, a phrase that didn't exist a year ago.

The growth panel went deep on tactics. One person now runs what used to take a 5-6 person pod. The new GTM team splits between data and agent operations on one side, and brand, creativity, and relationships on the other.

Anthropic's Austin Lau closed with a builder's mindset: the gap between "I wish this existed" and "I built this" is smaller than most people realize. The unlock for teams is the ability to clearly explain your problem. Check out his full talk here.

Kyle Poyar closed the day with a session on narrative. His argument: storytelling is the new content marketing, and it's also AI search strategy. The same archetypes that build human trust (Analyst, Teacher, Builder, Advocate, Provocateur) generate AI citations. The brands that become destinations for humans become destinations for machines.

Perhaps the most honest line of the day came from attendee Amanda Alcamo from Kong: "The most refreshing thing I heard all day was: nobody has this figured out yet. Not the marketers. Not the operators. Not even the people building the tools."

That honesty, and the shared commitment to figuring it out together, was what made the room feel different.

After-Party

The day closed out with a round of drinks and a epic view of the Hudson River. More ideas were shared and new relationships formed as marketing leaders from across the globe talked about how to navigate all of these changes together.

Watch Every Session Now

Every session from AirOps Next 2026 is available at nextconf.airops.com. 10 sessions. 24 speakers. 3 hours and 45 minutes of content on the future of agent-driven growth.

Want to see what Quill can do for your brand's AI visibility? Start here.

‍