2 Hottest Topics in Digital Marketing: AI and Search

Success in digital marketing seems somewhat elusive, especially for small and mid-sized businesses (SMEs), where it’s a daily struggle just to stay ahead of the bill collectors. Unfortunately, when you don’t learn about what’s going on in this critical area, you’re likely to fall increasingly behind in the highly competitive arena you’re in. That means each year, you work harder for the same (or even diminished ) returns. And that’s where we come in. We write every weekday about some of the hottest topics in digital marketing.

We also provide in-depth coverage that helps you implement these trending tactics so your business can continue to survive, even grow, against increasingly challenging economic conditions. Today, we’ll discuss two of the hottest topics in digital marketing: AI and generative engine optimization (GEO), also known as AI-first search. Even better, we’ll provide a 90-day action plan to help you start your journey toward more effective marketing today.

The hottest topics in digital marketing today

We chose generative AI and GEO as our two hottest topics in digital marketing, although there were a host of other contenders for this title, including:

1. Measurement, which used to be impossible with traditional media (except direct marketing), but now provides the insights that guide data-based decision-making to explode performance. This includes enhanced attribution so you know which channels, which campaigns, and which content perform best for reaching your goals. Also, marketing mixed models enable a business to understand factors driving business outcomes using unified algorithms and enhanced testing.
2. Shoppable videos and social commerce are becoming a bigger factor in retail every day. Viewers can click on products in videos (and likely TV programs in the near future) or purchase products promoted in their social media feeds without ever leaving the platform. Imagine seeing a cute sweater and buying it without interrupting the video.
3. Hyper-personalization is a trend we’ve seen increasingly over the last few years as technology has allowed businesses to customize an experience based on a deep understanding of their target market. Because deep personalization dramatically improves performance (resulting in a 15% increase in revenue), businesses are increasingly investing in this technology.
4. The ethical use of AI is a big topic in both marketing and other areas today. Businesses must use AI ethically, which means understanding the potential for disinformation, fake user-generated content, and the erosion of trust that result from using AI unethically.
5. Sustainability and values remain critical decision variables for consumers around the globe, and this trend doesn’t appear to be diminishing anytime soon.

These make up the hottest topics in digital marketing. Expect to see future posts that dig into these hot topics to help you stay abreast of these trends.

Two of the hottest topics in digital marketing: AI and GEO

Generative AI

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last three or four years, you’ve heard of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. These tools, built on large language models (LLMs), gobble up information found online to develop answers to your questions, provide business or personal materials, and even produce code. We’ll discuss the inherent risks of using these tools later in this post, but for now, recognize that these have changed the marketing game, making them our top pick from among the hottest topics in digital marketing.

GEO

AI has changed the nature of SEO (search engine optimization), as well. Unlike pre-AI SEO, you optimize your content not with backlinks (although these are still important), but by providing clear, structured answers to the type of questions asked by your target market. For instance, you might add a Q&A section to your posts, focus on providing authoritative content, and write in a voice that resonates with your target market. Thus, rather than backlinks, focus on providing statistics and reliable sources for the content you share.

Generative AI for SMB marketing

Generative AI models get more effective and easier to optimize every day. For SMBs, using AI tools to generate content for websites, ads, marketing emails, and even for other business needs, like job postings, saves time and provides expertise that are often in short supply with the limited resources available for most of these businesses. AI tools can even improve personalization to make your marketing more effective.

An analysis by McKinsey found that AI tools can increase marketing productivity by anywhere from 5-15%, which means you gain a fair share of the $2.6 to $4.4 trillion uplift created by generative AI globally. Moreover, even though the majority of consumers can detect AI content, it doesn’t have a dramatic effect on purchase intentions.  Of course, exceptions exist, such as the Coke ad created using generative AI that simply lacked human warmth and emotion.

As a content creator, I find tools like ChatGPT invaluable for drafting everything from text to images and infographics, as they provide ideas, help me think more creatively about a topic, and organize my ideas into a coherent document. Even though I must make significant edits to the original draft, this saves me hundreds of hours every week.

Best practice when it comes to optimizing generative AI is to focus on your niche, because information provided by these tools is often wrong, incomplete, or misleading. It relies on your expertise to know what’s needed to optimize your content, based on your knowledge and understanding of your target market. Never use an AI tool to create content without this expertise. The best AI content creation involves a conversation with the tool to gain clarification, find sources for the information, and refine aspects of the initial results so you can provide a more accurate and comprehensive view of the topic.

Using generative AI to speed and reduce the cost of market research is an emerging area, currently used by enterprise businesses, but might help SMEs with training in building simulations and sufficient data to prevent misinterpretations or false findings.

GEO

GEO is another of the hottest topics in digital marketing because it turns SEO on its head. Today, when you enter a query into the Google search engine, for instance, rather than a results list containing hyperlinks to content that addresses your query, you get the answer without a click. This inherently reduces the number of visitors to your website, which reduces your chances of achieving your goals.

Counteracting this, research suggests that brands discovered via AI search results are considered more credible and remembered better than with traditional search results. Also, they’re more likely to engage with this content [source]. Google has also recently changed how it cites sources of information within the provided answers, requiring users to visit the website rather than simply copying the reference from the search results.

Optimizing GEO requires a different approach to structuring your content if you want to capitalize on one of the hottest topics in digital marketing.

• Consider user search intent when constructing content by adding Q&A, how-to, and citing reputable sources.
• Consider incorporating intent into your titles by reformulating them as answers to common questions, such as “What’s the best brunch restaurant in my town?”
• Maintain an author bio that emphasizes E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authority, and trust)

Gartner predicts that as early as 2026, 25% of search traffic will come from AI.

A 90-day step-by-step plan for the hottest topics in digital marketing

This step-by-step guide focuses on the first two topics, but also includes several other of the hottest topics in digital marketing.

Phase 1: Foundation (days 1–30)

Goal: Build awareness, audit your assets, and set up the right tools.

• AI tools setup
  • Select a core AI assistant (ChatGPT, Jasper, Writesonic, etc.) for content ideation and drafting.
  • Explore AI SEO tools (SurferSEO, Clearscope, or MarketMuse) that can optimize for both search engines and AI summarizers.
• Content audit
  • Review your top 10 blog posts and landing pages.
  • Identify gaps in structured data (schema markup, FAQs, clear headings).
  • Collect questions your audience asks most — these will fuel Q&A snippets for AI-first search.
• Baseline measurement
  • Implement GA4 events to track traffic and conversions per channel.
  • Set up attribution modeling (start with GA4’s data-driven attribution, then layer incrementality tests later).

Phase 2: Implementation (days 31–60)

Goal: Create AI-ready content and optimize visibility.

• AI + GEO content creation
  • Rewrite 3–5 cornerstone blog posts with:
    • FAQ sections
    • Conversational Q&A snippets
    • Schema markup (FAQ, HowTo, Product, Article)
  • Use AI to generate supporting assets: images, video scripts and short social posts to amplify visibility.
• Experiment with AI-first search
  • Test how your rewritten posts appear in Google’s SGE or Bing AI.
  • Ask ChatGPT/Bard/Bing questions your customers would ask and check if your brand surfaces.
• Attribution & ROI checkpoint
  • Run a simple incrementality test:
    • Pause one ad channel for 2 weeks.
    • Measure conversion lift to see true ROI.

Phase 3: Acceleration (days 61–90)

Goal: Scale, personalize, and refine.

• Personalization & real-time engagement
  • Deploy AI chatbots on your website/social to capture leads with personalized answers.
  • Create dynamic landing pages that adapt content/offers to visitor type.
• Scale AI content
  • Publish two new AI-optimized blog posts per month.
  • Repurpose them into short videos (such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts) with shoppable elements.
• Deep ROI Analysis
  • Layer Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) on your attribution.
  • Compare spend across channels (search, social, email) to optimize your channel mix for Q4.

Deliverables at 90 days

• 3–5 cornerstone pages optimized for AI-first search.
• AI-powered content pipeline (blogs → social → video).
• First set of incrementality results to guide ad spend.
• AI chatbot/live engagement pilot running on your site.

By the end of 90 days, you’ll have a future-proof digital marketing system: content discoverable by both traditional SEO and AI search, attribution clarity to maximize ROI, and AI tools to scale without extra headcount.

FAQs

Can these generative tools replace humans? 

No, it still requires a human with expertise and knowledge of the company’s target market, industry, and niche to direct the tool and edit the results.

Does using AI-generated content hurt SEO? 

It depends. If you copy and paste, you’ll get penalized by search engines for duplicate content. If the content is inaccurate or misleading, your target market won’t trust you and your reputation will suffer. Also, thin content, like the bullet points, often produced in response to your AI query, won’t meet the criteria for GEO.

How should I use generative AI? 

First drafts of content
Ideation
Repurposing content, such as blog posts, for social media

What are the risks of using generative AI?

There are many risks and the less a human is involved in the final product, the bigger the risk. Among them are:
* Diluting your voice
* Plagiarism and duplicate content penalties
* Bias
 

How do I know if my AI strategy is working? 

While these are among the hottest topics in digital marketing today, they might not work for every business in every industry. That’s where tracking, analyzing, and building insights come into play. Proceed as you would with traditional analytics that assess your performance.

Will GEO replace traditional SEO? 

Potentially, over time. It’s going to be a slow transition, which means you must still create content that meets the criteria to rank well with search engines.

Conclusion

These are two of the hottest topics in digital marketing today. Spend some time learning how to implement them as part of your daily work process to save time, reduce costs, and improve performance.

Obviously, digital marketing is a discipline that’s always in flux. Today’s hottest topics in digital marketing give you an edge over even enterprise firms that haven’t adopted them. But tomorrow might mean a change in what works. Hence, you should always scan for today’s hottest topics in digital marketing (hint: you can use generative AI to identify them).

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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.