Hi Reader,

I hate to say it but, your prospects have changed how they discover solutions and it's an important time to address the repercussions of that change.

Think about it... Most people ask ChatGPT before they even think about going over to Google... and when they do ask Google - they almost always stop at the AI Overviews.

Like it or not, AI decides which companies are getting seen.

This isn't a tomorrow thing either. It's here and now. In fact, 44% of SaaS brands that have pages ranking in Google Search's top 10 get zero mentions from ChatGPT for the exact same searches. (EMGI discovered this by analyzing 150 SaaS companies across 120 keywords in April 2026.)

What this comes down to is this... you can absolutely rank #1 on Google for any given search query, and still sit utterly outside the space where your buyers start looking when they're searching for solutions to the problem your startup solves.

The fact is - right now - whoever wins the AI citation wins the shortlist. And everyone else is left in the dust.

I saw this same issue play out years ago in my own business.

If you've been around the community for a while then you're aware that for over a decade I stood on stages as "the data expert." I wrote the books. I trained more than 2 million people. And, I watched an industry crown its influencers.

Unfortunately, the most prominent "leaders" on stage were usually the best self-marketers in the room, while the people doing the real work stayed in the background.

But here's what most folks never saw about my brand. While the brand on the door said "data," about 70% of my actual work was always marketing and growth for data and AI solutions. Instead of trying to explain, I'll let my client roster tell the story:

• IBM hired me in month 6 (content creation)
• Domino Data Lab brought me in to grow their Twitter community
• Electrolux came to me for the market research behind a new product line
• SingleStore is where I generated 1,100 organic marketing qualified leads at $50 each
• AWS brought me in on a product launch (remember the DeepLens camera?)

And alongside all of that, founders kept showing up for growth leadership, so I kept delivering the wins on positioning, messaging, and pipeline. Eventually I took my first role as a SaaS CMO, running growth end-to-end for a data software company, coding maybe 3% of the time (and only for side projects).

It was then that I knew I'd found my calling. And I finally named the thing I'd been dancing around for years: in the data world, being the best at the work never got you seen. The people who understood visibility won. The people who just did great work stayed invisible.

I happened to have both. So I stopped hiding the marketing half of me and rebuilt my brand around one truly-aligned sentence: I engineer growth for technical companies.

What does this have to do with AI search in 2026?

Lots actually.

The exact same "backwards visibility" thing is playing out in AI search, except now the invisible ones are whole companies (and not just super talented ICs). A well-built product with no visibility strategy gets ignored, while the companies that engineer their AI visibility win the citations and the shortlist.
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Being good was never enough on its own. You have to be seen too, and with AI search, being seen is an engineering problem.

Which is the whole reason I do what I do.

Fact of the matter is that, for most technical companies, growth is stalled in just one place... I see it all the time, where product runs deep while the growth lacks the commitment that's required to drive the revenue outcomes that are available. In situations like these, I come in as a fractional CMO and rebuild growth into a clear, repeatable and predictable system. I leverage these following four playbooks:

• Outbound to build a pipeline
• AI search visibility engineered as a system to drive inbound leads
• Partnerships that put you in front of your ICP in a way that makes them know, like, and trust you
• GTM engineering that ties it all into one measurable machine

Want your company to be the one AI names? Let's map it out together.

​Book a discovery call here to get started.

Lillian

Lillian Pierson, P.E.
Fractional CMO & Founder, Data-Mania