Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo’s Exclusive Interview with MarTech Pulse on AI Search and GEO Strategies

In this exclusive interview with MarTech Pulse, Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo reveals his “Search Everywhere Optimization” playbook & how to fix AI search blunders and master GEO for ChatGPT & Reddit.

Tim, you’ve grown Ahrefs from SEO roots to a MarTech giant navigating AI search. What 2–3 career pivots shaped your CMO journey most, and how do you stay sharp amid constant disruption?

The biggest thing that shaped my journey was learning how to build, trust, and rely on strong leaders. Being able to hand over ownership of a channel and trust that someone will run it better than I ever could is essential. For any marketing leader, that’s the hardest skill to learn. Strategy, tactics, tools, those are relatively easy. Finding people who are self-driven, accountable, and willing to take responsibility is much harder.

Another constant for me has been staying very close to the product. I’ve done this from day one at Ahrefs. I’ve always worked closely with the product team and tried to act as a bridge between customers and development. That keeps the roadmap focused on things that actually matter, features that help customers do their jobs better and reach their goals.

I don’t believe marketing’s role is just to promote whatever the product team ships. Marketing should help shape what gets built in the first place by understanding the market, listening to customers, and feeding that insight back into product decisions.

As for staying sharp, marketing is both my job and my main interest. I enjoy other things, time with my kids, sports, reading, but marketing is still what I gravitate toward. In most spare moments, I’m reading, watching, or listening to something related to marketing or business. Because of that, staying current doesn’t feel forced. It happens naturally.

Brand Radar’s fresh YouTube and Reddit tracking is live. What’s the wake-up call for CMOs on where 2026 brand buzz truly ignites?

Honestly, this wake-up call should have come years ago. I started Ahrefs’ YouTube channel on my first day at the company. Later, we handed it over to Sam Oh, who’s done an incredible job. Today, the channel has close to 500,000 subscribers, and many videos easily reach 50,000 to 100,000 views.

So this isn’t about YouTube suddenly becoming important. It’s been one of the biggest platforms on the internet for a very long time.

As marketers, our job is to earn attention. To do that, we have to show up where attention already exists. YouTube and Reddit have both been massive platforms for years. If your brand hasn’t been active there, you’ve been giving up a huge amount of visibility and discovery.

What makes both platforms especially powerful is that they work as search engines and discovery engines at the same time. People actively look for answers, but they also discover content passively through recommendations and feeds.

Brand Radar helps you understand how visible your brand currently is on these platforms, how that visibility compares to your competitors, and what you can do to improve it. It gives you actionable insights into what kind of content to create, which creators to partner with, and which communities to engage with to increase your brand’s discoverability.

Read More: Ahrefs Launches Custom AI Prompt Tracking for Brand Visibility

Social, SEO, and community still siloed? How should Brand Radar’s unified view flip your channel budgets and strategies?

For a long time, SEO was treated as a standalone tactic. Even when I started in SEO about 15 years ago, that never felt right to me. Traditional SEO focused on content, links, and technical setup. All of that matters, but it’s only part of the picture.

To really win in search, you had to do more. You had to build a brand, grow a community, and be visible beyond your own website. Search has always been influenced by what happens around your site, not just on it.

With the rise of AEO, this is becoming obvious to everyone. Search no longer lives only in traditional search engines. AI tools pull information from social platforms, communities, forums, and many other sources. They try to understand whether a brand actually matters. Is it talked about, recommended, trusted?

That’s why narrow, tactical SEO isn’t enough anymore. Budgets and strategies are shifting toward a broader view of search. Some people call it search everywhere optimization. The idea is simple. It’s no longer just about ranking pages. It’s about being visible and credible across the entire web.

What’s your dead-simple playbook for teams to set up Brand Radar and turn insights into content, PR, and campaign wins within 90 days?

The playbook really is that simple. The first thing I would do is plug your brand and your website into Brand Radar and look at your most cited pages. When we did this for ahrefs.com, we discovered that one of our most cited pages was a blog post about pricing changes that was already two years old. That meant ChatGPT was pulling information from an outdated page. As soon as we saw that, I asked our product marketing team to update the article to make sure AI tools weren’t citing outdated claims.

Once you’ve identified those citations and made sure your own pages are accurate, up to date, and provide clear, comprehensive information, the next step is to look beyond your own website. You want to understand where else your brand is being mentioned in AI chatbot responses and which external websites those tools are pulling information from. This is almost like reputation management. You need to make sure that the pages AI relies on don’t contain outdated or misleading information about your brand.

The third step is to do the same analysis for your competitors and compare the results. Which websites mention them but not you? Which prompts, questions, or queries surface your competitors while your brand is missing? Brand Radar makes this very clear.

From there, the actions become obvious. If competitors show up for questions your product genuinely solves, you’ve found a content gap. You can create new content, update existing pages, or work with external sites to expand coverage. You can also reach out to sites that already mention competitors and ask to be included. These are practical steps that can drive real results within 90 days.

AI search like ChatGPT and Perplexity is battleground zero. What are brands’ top two GEO blunders, and their quick fixes?

The first mistake is focusing on the wrong AI platforms. I wouldn’t put much weight on Perplexity compared to Google, OpenAI, or Microsoft. Google has massive distribution through Search, Android, Chrome, and now Gemini, including deeper integration with Apple’s ecosystem. Microsoft has similar reach through Windows and Copilot. Perplexity is a standalone product. Long term, it’s hard to see it competing at that scale. The fix is simple. Focus your efforts where the distribution actually is.

The second mistake is letting outdated information about your brand live across the web without realizing AI tools are pulling from it. That leads to incorrect recommendations and stale messaging. The fix is to actively monitor where AI systems source their information and make sure those pages are accurate and current.

One extra mistake I see is playing purely defense. Brands focus only on fixing existing citations. These systems change constantly. Instead, play offense. Identify the most trusted sites in your space and work with them to publish accurate, educational content about your brand. That way, as retrieval systems evolve, you’re already positioned well.

YouTube and Reddit mentions unlocked. What two underrated B2B tactics explode AI visibility for lean teams?

I’m not sure they’re underrated, but content marketing and influencer partnerships matter more than ever.

AI tools work with content. If you’re not consistently publishing high-quality, educational content about your product and your industry, you’re already behind. Content that teaches, explains, and gets referenced naturally is a major driver of AI visibility.

The second lever is influencer partnerships. Many teams focus almost entirely on owned channels, their website, blog, and social accounts. But AI systems don’t rely on a single source. They look for consensus across independent sites.

Your own content is inherently biased. When influencers or independent creators talk about your product, AI tools treat that as a stronger signal. It helps them form a more balanced view of who you are, what you do, and why you matter.

Which three metrics should CMOs obsess over daily, and which vanity stats can they finally ignore in this AI-first world?

The most important metric for any CMO is revenue. Not necessarily daily, but consistently. That includes revenue growth over time, such as annual recurring revenue, monthly recurring revenue, and month-over-month growth. Everything else ultimately flows from these numbers: how many customers you acquire, what they buy, whether they churn, and whether they expand. In the end, it all comes back to revenue and revenue growth.

From a marketing perspective specifically, one framework I focus my teams on is output. Output is the one thing marketing teams fully control: both the quantity and the quality of what they produce. A marketing team can’t promise that a page will rank number one on Google or that ChatGPT will cite it as a source. But they can promise to consistently create a high volume of high-quality content, guided by a clear strategy and best practices that increase the likelihood of success.

So the metrics that really matter to me as a CMO are: how big our revenue is, how fast it’s growing, and the quantity and quality of our marketing output.

Read More: How AI Tools Are Empowering E-Commerce Content Creators to Scale Without Burnout

How will marketing teams restructure around AI search and cross-channel visibility, and what’s the one step readers should take today to get ahead?

If there’s one key takeaway readers should have from this interview, it’s that your website is no longer the single source of truth when people search online. In the past, the page that ranked number one in Google captured most of the clicks, traffic, and attention, and effectively became the source of truth. Today, AI search changes that completely. AI systems pull information from many different sources and combine it to give users a more well-rounded answer, something that previously required a lot of manual research.

Because of this, marketing teams need to stop thinking about content as something that lives only on their website. They need to expand their presence across platforms where AI chatbots are likely to source information, such as YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, X, and other major social and content platforms.

The second shift is embracing what used to be called reputation management. That means actively monitoring what other websites and platforms are saying about your brand and shaping that narrative. It’s no longer enough to look good on your own site – you need to make sure your brand is accurately and positively represented across the entire web.

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