I’ve worked in tech for more than two decades. You get good at sensing when the ground is shifting. 

In early 2023, AI Overviews started rolling out and most marketing teams didn’t know what to make of it. But something stood out to me as soon as I joined Carta in 2024: our content wasn’t getting buried in search results. It was still surfacing, reaching our core audiences and driving them toward conversion. While others were panicking about losing search visibility, Carta was gaining it.

That was the first signal.

We had a strong foundation and a window to move before the rest of the market caught up.

So I paid attention. I tested tools, watched demos, stayed close to AI product launches, and compared notes with other CMOs. I didn’t have a playbook right away, but I saw a pattern: LLMs were changing how people discover, trust, and engage with content.

I asked my team a simple question: How do we make sure Carta’s expert content is seen and cited, and remains a leading, go-to resource?

AI Isn’t a Threat. It’s an Amplifier.

Many marketing teams are still using old tactics built for the human-first discovery of their content. But that’s not how search works anymore. Discovery is being reshaped by AI agents.

You have to write for both humans and agents, and that means creating new, different content formats and a different set of tactics. 

Great content still matters—but if it isn’t designed to be parsed, extracted, and cited by AI systems, you risk missing key moments to be found online.

At Carta, we've published trusted, educational resources for years. SEO has been a proven growth engine for us, and we have essentially mastered it. But now that the rules were changing, we knew we needed to make decisions that moved us into the world of AI search.

Instead of thinking of AI as a threat, we saw it as an amplifier. While others were losing visibility to AI Overviews, we were gaining it. LLMs began surfacing our content—proof that expert, high-quality content could still cut through in the world being shaped by AI and LLMs. 

That was our moment to lean in. We wanted to continue to build on that strong foundation of authoritative, high-performance content.

Before we added any new tools into the mix, it started with enabling our people and helping them understand the new content frontier we were all a part of now. We trained teams across content and product marketing, editorial, SEO, and web to understand what visibility looks like now. We aligned on structured content, clean data, and shared systems. We created a common language across functions.

The New Playbook: Investing and Operationalizing

CMOs know that things like paid search and brand aren’t just afterthoughts—they're core parts of a marketing strategy. Answer engine optimization (AEO) and AI search should be no different. It deserves the same level of focus, planning, budgeting, and ongoing experimentation. 

We were prepared for this shift because of the foundational content work we had already done. Unlike many of our peers, we weren’t starting from scratch.

We had invested early in the right assets, like deep guides and trusted explainers, which made Carta a credible source for information and allowed us to move faster, with more confidence. We could skip some aspects of the “test and learn” phase and go straight to operationalizing.

We made a deliberate shift to treat AEO as a real, strategic investment. That meant building structured workflows, reusable building blocks, and scalable systems, not just for net new content, but to get more leverage out of what we’d already built.

It also meant better use of our subject matter experts. Our team wasn’t creating more content alone. They were extracting and amplifying knowledge from across the business more efficiently. The rise of AI was making it easier to produce content, while for others it was harder to rise above the noise with truly excellent content.

Ranking #1 in SERP is no longer the sole marker of success. The goal isn’t just to publish more content, but to make our content AI-ready, designed to be discoverable, and suffused with expertise. 

This shift gave us a new level of distribution. We aren’t just optimizing content. We are optimizing for how discovery actually works today.

The 10x Content Engineer Mindset

This is where the changes started to take root.

In most orgs, the strategist writes the brief. The marketer hits publish. The SEO manager comes in later to clean things up.

But with new AI capabilities, you need to connect the dots, which requires new skills and thinking.

I would suggest that the content engineer is the person who owns all the automations and workflows.

At Carta, we’re investing in this function. You can think of content engineers as full-stack builders for organic search. They think in systems. They connect strategy to production to optimization to measurement. They ask not just what to say, but how to structure it, how to reuse it, and how to make it visible. We also brought the understanding of AI into how we hire. Every final-round candidate I interview—regardless of role—is asked about AI. If they don’t have a point of view, or at least deep curiosity, they aren’t the right fit for our team. This isn’t optional anymore.

A content marketer on our team, Lucy Hoyle, was an early champion of this mindset. She recognized the shifts in content marketing, learned about the most efficient processes and strategies, and built workflows that delivered immediately.

But she’s far from alone. Our entire editorial team is starting to think like content engineers. This is a cultural shift beyond one person. Across Carta, more people are connecting strategy to execution, thinking in systems, and building with extractability in mind.

That’s what it looks like when someone takes ownership of this evolution. Lucy saw the general direction and ran with the baton. Now, it’s paying dividends and changing how we operate and build out teams and systems for this new era of discovery.

Turn Workflows into Reach

We’re seeing the results.

We’re moving faster, incorporating more expert opinions, and generating content assets more efficiently—all leading to actual pipeline.

Take Carta’s recent move into private equity and private credit, for instance. Breaking through to new audiences requires resource-heavy work to create a library of content built on trust and legitimacy from scratch. But we were able to build and launch quickly by combining existing high-quality content with AirOps workflows.

That means we got tailored content that was accurate and on-brand to market quickly, representing our fastest topical launch without burning weeks of effort.

What We Measure Has Changed

The way we measure content performance has changed as well.

AirOps is streamlining the work that we were doing for AEO/LLM optimization. Same strategy, but faster execution and more generated content.

We still look at rankings,traffic, and conversion metrics. But we’re also tracking new signals: extractability, share of voice in AI answers, citation rate, and traffic from tools like Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT. These are core KPIs now.

We’ve seen consistent double-digit growth from LLMs. These trends show up in our weekly web reviews, in our top-of-funnel meetings, and in my regular check-ins with the executive team. This is no longer a speculative discussion. The numbers are real.

Go From Ideas to Systems to Pipeline, Fast

If you're a CMO looking to move faster, don’t start with tools—start with systems.

The hidden cost of poor enablement—when teams don’t have the right tools, processes, or alignment to execute effectively—is chaos: missed handoffs, duplicated work, and content that never ships. To eliminate the noise, we invested in structured workflows and clear frameworks rooted in discovery principles—how AI parses, extracts, and scores content. We built a shared language across marketing. That alignment became our velocity engine.

So how do you start?

Step one: Run a workflow audit. Identify the cracks between strategy and execution.

Step two: Pick a single asset. Restructure it for extractability. Make it your system blueprint.

Step three: Empower your team beyond templates. Teach them to think like system builders. Once they understand how AI systems interpret information, they’ll not just build more—they’ll launch smarter, faster, and with greater impact.

Velocity isn't about working harder. It’s about enabling AI to work with you, not around you or against you.

The most successful marketing teams in the AI era will be those who build content for how the internet actually works. This isn’t a transition. It’s a transformation.

We didn’t just protect our strengths: We made them future-proof. And in the process, we built new muscle for distribution, measurement, and velocity.

Because the truth is: If you're waiting for clarity, you're already behind.

-------------

Nicole Baer is the CMO of Carta, the leading provider of world-class software purpose-built for private capital. She oversees marketing efforts for the Carta brand and all product lines and is responsible for global brand, product marketing, demand generation, creative, digital, content, field marketing, communications, events, and social media. Prior to Carta, Nicole was the CMO for Logitech’s collaboration business, as well as Global Head of Integrated Enterprise Marketing at Zendesk. She is the founder of two successful marketing advisory firms. 

Carta's world-class fund administration platform supports nearly 9,000 funds and SPVs representing over $188B in assets under administration on fund administration, SPV formation, and more. Trusted by more than 50,000 companies, Carta helps private businesses in over 160 countries manage their cap tables, valuations, taxes, equity programs, compensation, and more.

‍

‍