Lessons from Semrush Spotlight 2025: How AI, Creativity, and Focus Are Reshaping Marketing

At Semrush Spotlight 2025 in Amsterdam, one theme connected every conversation: the marketing playbook is being rewritten – and not just by AI.

Across main and enterprise stages, experts shared how brands can adapt to a world where visibility depends on both algorithms and authenticity.

Here are the key insights from four keynote sessions – and what every B2B marketer should take away from them.

1. Cracking the Code of LLMs: Data-Driven Tactics for Brand Success

Marcus Tober, SVP Enterprise Solutions at Semrush

Marcus Tober challenged one of SEO’s most common misconceptions: that SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) are the same.

They’re not.

Traditional SEO rewarded backlinks and domain authority. GEO – optimization for AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini – rewards relevance, recency, and mentions.

Only 6% of top ChatGPT sources are also top-mentioned brands. That means even the most well-known companies can be invisible to AI models.

Tober shared a few tactical lessons:

• Position yourself as the niche leader on your own blog. Brands like SentinelOne and ClickUp publish neutral, comparison-style content that ranks as trusted “sources” for AI answers. They publish listicles, where they analyze multiple competitors objectively – outlining pros and cons – yet still position themselves as the #1 solution. The content reads like an independent review, which AI models recognize as a trusted “source.”
  
• Own your mentions. Visibility in LLMs depends not just on links, but on who talks about you – Patagonia’s brand authority in AI search results comes from consistent owned media, not strong SEO.
  
• Prioritize freshness. LLMs show a strong recency bias. Regularly updated content and active media ecosystems help maintain relevance.

Reddit has become the #1 cited source for ChatGPT – used nearly 25× more often than Google’s AI Mode. Why? Because LLMs prioritize relevance over authority. They surface what’s contextually useful right now, not necessarily the content coming from the most authoritative domains.

The bottom line: AI search rewards context and conversation, not just keywords. To stay visible, brands must optimize for how AI interprets their credibility – not just how Google indexes it.

2. How to Run Marketing If You’re the Only Marketer

Sara Stella Lattanzio, B2B Marketing Leader and Advisor

Not every company has a team – sometimes it’s just you.

According to industry data Sara shared, 21% of marketing teams consist of a single marketer, and 40% of all marketers report being constantly overworked. The top three pain points? Unclear leadership direction, endless task switching, and gaps in specialization.

Sara Lattanzio’s talk was a reality check for solo marketers juggling strategy, execution, and expectations. 

Her three-rule playbook hit home for every Head of Growth and Marketing Generalist:

1. Set expectations before saying yes. 

Interview your company like they’re interviewing you. Some teams think they want marketing – but really need sales.

Before taking on a marketing position, ask fundamental questions:

• Why does this role exist right now?
• What’s the purpose of marketing at this company?
• What tactics worked in marketing so far, what hasn’t and why?
• Is there historical data?
• How confident are you in your product–market fit – and why?
• How do sales and marketing actually collaborate week to week?
• What resources – budget, tools, or agencies – will I really have?
• What support can I expect from the leadership?

2. Diagnose Before Acting

The second rule: understand before you execute. In the first 30 days, your goal isn’t to launch campaigns – it’s to diagnose the ecosystem. Sara outlined a process of discovery she calls “Company Dynamics & Ecosystem Diagnosis.”

• Company Dynamics: Learn the unwritten rules – the politics, product, GTM and marketing maturity, internal “burning houses”, and culture. Understand how the business really works and its unwritten rules to set the foundation for marketing success.
• Ecosystem Discovery: ICP and clients, competitors and alternatives, partner ecosystem, and key channels. Your goal is to build a grounded picture of the company's ecosystem to anchor your strategy in reality.
• Diagnosis: Conduct a grounded marketing audit. Look at the systems, stack, processes & analyze the funnel. Get an understanding of the current setup, uncover gaps, and map the foundations you’ll build on.

3. Balance Context and Impact

Sara’s third rule centers on prioritization – something every marketer struggles with. She shared her Context vs Impact Matrix, a tool that helps solo marketers (or lean teams) decide what to own, what to delegate, and what to automate.

• High Impact / High Context: Guard these with your life – your brand narrative, messaging, and GTM strategy.
• High Impact / Low Context: Review closely – final approvals for copy, reviews of creative work.
• Low Impact / High Context: Delegate to agencies, freelance specialists or teammates – link building, running paid campaigns, event management.
• Low Impact / Low Context: Automate or outsource – analytics, scheduling, content formatting.

Marketers who burn out spend their days in the “low impact” part of that Matrix, and the nights in the “high impact” zone. So be careful here. Getting help with “low impact / high context” tasks can be a game changer. Niche experts will handle them better and faster than a stretched generalist.

Friendly note from the Aimers team: if you ever find yourself in that spot – juggling strategy, execution, and everything in between – that’s exactly where we come in. From growth strategy and paid campaigns to landing pages and CRO, our team helps companies scale without burning out their marketers. You don’t have to do it alone.

Being a solo marketer is tough – but it’s also liberating. Sarah’s closing thought sums it up: the biggest perk of being a solo marketer is focus. You choose what matters most.

3. Influencer Marketing That Actually Delivers

Sarah Adam, Head of Partnerships & Influencer Marketing at Wix

Sarah Adam’s session pulled back the curtain on how to run influencer programs that scale without losing authenticity.

At Wix, she leads a program of over 300 influencer collaborations a year that produce thousands of content pieces – but her approach is clear: the key is precision, not volume.

• Discovery takes time. Block several days in your calendar just to understand your niche and identify the right creators. 
• Authenticity + value = trust. Two important questions to ask: “Authenticity: do I believe this creator?” and “Value: do I get anything of value?”
• Give great briefs. The best influencer content starts with clear KPIs and freedom to be creative.

Here are 5 components of a great influencer brief:

1. About the Brand or Product – Explain the “why” behind the campaign and what makes the product genuinely useful.
2. Content Goals & KPIs – Define measurable outcomes and explain what “success” looks like. As Sarah put it: “If you give creators clear KPIs, they’ll understand whether it’s working or not.” Even if the numbers aren’t hit in the first campaign, this sets a strong foundation for future collaborations.
3. Dos & Don’ts – Keep it concise. Share your non-negotiables (like legal mentions, tone, or brand alignment) without restricting creative freedom.
4. References – Include examples that capture the desired tone, pacing, and storytelling style. It helps creators align faster with brand expectations.
5. Brand Assets – Provide everything upfront – logos, product links, campaign visuals, and guidelines – in one easy-to-access space.

4. How to Build an AI Search Roadmap

Aleyda Solís, Founder of Orainti

Aleyda Solís highlighted that AI isn’t killing SEO – it’s expanding it. While “SEO is dead” LinkedIn posts keep trending, Semrush data tells a different story:

• 95% of ChatGPT users also use Google.
• Google still sees 18× more traffic than ChatGPT (97.2B vs. 5.4B visits in September).
• Search itself is evolving – from keywords to conversations, from pages to passages, and from rankings to synthesized answers.

AI search is not a replacement for SEO, it’s an additional layer – one that rewards structure, authority, and adaptability.

Aleyda summarized this new search landscape through five key shifts:

• Search Behavior: Queries are now conversational and multi-turn, not one-off keywords.
• Query Handling: LLMs break one question into multiple subqueries – the “fan-out” effect.
• Optimization Target: Relevance is now evaluated at the passage or chunk level, not across entire pages.
• Authority Signals: AI models value mentions, citations, and entity relationships over backlinks alone.
• Results Format: Instead of a ranked list of links, users get a synthesized answer citing multiple trusted sources.

For brands, that means visibility is shifting from ranking pages to being recognized as a cited, credible entity in AI-generated results.

Aleyda’s 10-Step AI Search Optimization Roadmap

1. Research your AI audience. Use tools like Semrush’s AI Visibility Index to identify which models (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) already cite your content and where competitors have the edge.
2. Ensure crawlability and indexability for AI bots.
   Not all AI systems render JavaScript. Check robots.txt, CDN, and firewall settings to ensure accessibility.
3. Establish on-brand topical authority.
   Cover the full customer journey – awareness, consideration, and decision. Include reviews, comparisons, FAQs, and support content to become citation-worthy.
4. Structure for chunk retrieval.
   AI doesn’t read linearly. Use clear headings, concise paragraphs, and direct answers for sub-queries.
5. Write for synthesis.
   Focus on clarity and credibility – AI models prefer content that’s accurate, structured, and quotable.
6. Optimize for EEAT and credibility.
   Use Aleyda’s EEAT Content Quality Checklist to validate expertise, accuracy, and freshness.
7. Grow off-site signals.
   Aleyda’s research shows 85% of brand mentions in AI search come from third-party sources. Strengthen Digital PR, community mentions, and partnerships.
8. Support multimodal content.
   Ensure your videos, podcasts, and visuals are crawlable and properly tagged – AI search is increasingly multimodal.
9. Build personalization resilience.
   Cover multiple user intents for each topic (awareness → consideration → decision) to stay relevant across audience types.
10. Monitor AI visibility.
    Track your brand’s performance in AI results using dashboards like this AI Looker Studio template.

Rethinking Metrics

You can’t set the same goals or rely on the same metrics for AI search as you do for traditional search – it’s no longer a performance-only channel. Aleyda recommends balancing performance metrics like traffic and conversions with brand indicators such as visibility, sentiment, and citations. 

• Traditional search: rankings, SERP feature inclusion, traffic, conversions/sales, revenue, customer acquisition cost (CAC), ROI
• AI Search: visibility, sentiment, citations, share of voice, conversions/sales, revenue, customer acquisition cost (CAC), ROI

Marketers who want to stay ahead should track both sets: traditional KPIs to monitor conversions, and AI visibility indicators to measure how often – and how positively – their brand appears in generative search outputs.

Wrapping up her talk, Aleyda left the audience with a call to action: Long live SEO – not as a Google-only discipline, but as a framework for visibility across AI search, ChatGPT, YouTube, TikTok, and every emerging platform where discovery happens.

For teams ready to start optimizing, Aleyda has made her AI Search Optimization Checklist available for free – a practical tool to evaluate your site’s readiness for AI-driven visibility.