Tag: AIinMarketing

The GEO Revolution: What Every Content Marketer Needs to Know Right Now

A growing percentage of searches—particularly for informational, advisory, and how-to queries—are now answered directly by AI engines.

SEO gets you a spot on a list of links. GEO gets you cited by an AI. Here’s the difference and why it changes everything.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC  

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of structuring and presenting content so that AI-powered search engines including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, and similar systems are more likely to surface, cite, and reference it when answering user queries. Unlike traditional SEO, which aims to rank content in a list of links, GEO aims to make content the direct source of an AI’s answer, appearing not as a link to click but as the authority being quoted.

Something has changed in how people find information online. Most content marketers haven’t caught up yet.

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Prompting Your Prompts: A Simple Strategy for Getting Better Results from AI Tools

Write a prompt you were already going to write. Add these two sentences at the end. See what the AI does with it.

What if the fastest way to improve your AI prompts was to ask the AI to do it for you?

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC

Prompt engineering is the practice of crafting precise, well-structured instructions for generative AI tools—specifying context, desired format, tone, audience, and output type—to produce more accurate, relevant, and useful responses. As AI tools become standard in professional workflows across every industry, the ability to write effective prompts is rapidly emerging as one of the most consequential skills in the modern workplace. And like most skills, it improves with deliberate practice not just use.

I’ve been an early adopter of AI tools. I’ve used tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity extensively in my own work and for clients, and I’ve been intentional about trying to improve my prompt writing skills along the way.

More specific context. Clearer output instructions. Better framing of what I actually need.

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The Freedom to Be Real: Why Authenticity Is Your Best Content Strategy

Authenticity is what’s present when the content you create is genuinely yours.

Everyone says ‘be authentic.’ Almost nobody explains what that actually means—or how to do it consistently.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC

Authentic content marketing is the practice of creating content that genuinely reflects your organization’s real perspective, earned expertise, and distinctive voice—rather than content optimized to appear credible, sound authoritative, or match what competitors are publishing. It’s grounded in what you actually believe, what you’ve actually experienced, and what you genuinely understand about your audience—not in what performs well in the abstract.

Authentic, admittedly, is one of the most overused words in marketing. It’s also one of the most important and consistently misunderstood.

When most brands say they want to be ‘more authentic,’ what they usually mean is: they want to seem more relatable. More human. Less corporate.

Those are reasonable goals. But that’s not really authenticity.

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The Human Touch: What Content Creators Can’t Outsource

AI-generated content is often dull, repetitive, and prone to inaccuracies.

AI is a powerful content tool. It’s not a content strategist, a storyteller, or a brand voice. Here’s the distinction that matters.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR, Strategic Communications, LLC

Human content creation is the development of original content drawing on lived experiences, domain expertise, audience empathy and understanding, and brand judgment. These are human capabilities that AI tools can approximate but not replicate.

Yes, generative AI (GenAI) has great value and application for content creators. But it’s not a replacement. As GenAI is used more and more in the content production and distribution process it’s important to understand where it’s best applied—and where humans still have an important and unique role to play.

I’ve been writing since I was a child and writing for publication since I was 18. I’ve seen a lot of changes over the years. Most recently, of course, the rapid advancement of GenAI and tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude (my current favorite).

GenAI does have a place

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Brand Voice: The One Thing AI Can’t Clone

Voice is the underlying personality of your brand that shows up across every piece of content you publish, regardless of topic or format.

In a content landscape flooded with AI output, your voice is your fingerprint. Here’s how to protect it—and use it strategically.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR – Strategic Communications, LLC

Brand voice is the consistent, distinctive personality and perspective that an organization expresses across all of its content—regardless of topic, format, or channel. Unlike tone, which shifts situationally (warmer in a condolence message, more energetic in a product launch), brand voice is stable: it is the underlying character that makes a brand’s content recognizably its own. In 2026, with an estimated 57% of all online content now AI-generated, brand voice has become the primary differentiator available to content marketers who want to be heard.

Last fall I wrote a post about Pinterest’s decision to give users controls to reduce AI-generated content in their feeds. The stat that prompted it was startling: an estimated 57% of all online content is now generative AI (likely even more now…).

That number has stayed with me.

More than half of what’s published online was produced by a machine.

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