Hey friend, how’s it going? 🌻
I have been noticing a pattern in my 1:1 calls: some of the questions, though in different formats, keep repeating again and again. So I thought of answering them on my newsletter once and for all.
Let’s get into it 👇
📌 TL;DR
Confused about GEO? Stop reading about it and start watching one tool report on prompts you picked yourself
Not getting cited? It’s rarely your formatting. It’s that nobody else on the internet mentions you
Not seen as strategic? You’re being qualitative in a room that runs on numbers
Losing ground to SEO folks? It’s not a turf problem, it’s an evidence problem
Not sure where AI fits? Hand over the workflow. Keep the point of view
Q1. “I have no clarity on GEO, and I can’t tell what’s noise”
First question back at you: what’s your lens?
Because a writer asking “what kind of content actually gets pulled into AI answers” and a GEO owner asking “how do we move share of voice this quarter” need completely different reading lists. A lot of the confusion I hear is just people reading the wrong material for their job and feeling confused about it.
Read, definitely. But treat all of it as directional. Even the credible sources are publishing a new study every week right now, and one study a week does not mean one truth a week. Pick two or three sources that match your lens and ignore the rest without guilt.
Here’s the honest thing though. I didn’t understand GEO from reading. I understood it when I started using Otterly and watching it report on prompts I’d chosen myself.
Three things I learned there that no article told me cleanly:
It’s usually not your writing
Writers keep getting told their structure and formatting are why AI isn’t citing them. Sometimes true, rarely the main reason. You have to be mentioned by other people. Your page can be perfect and still invisible if the rest of the internet has never heard of you.
Your prompt choice decides what you see
Track only bottom-of-funnel prompts, and a low citation count will feel like failure when it’s completely normal. Track only top-of-funnel, and you’ll see plenty of citations that convert nothing. Read your numbers against the funnel stage you chose, or you’ll panic over the wrong thing.
Citations aren’t the last metric
The tools show you sentiment and intent too. Someone arriving from an AI answer ready to buy and someone arriving to compare five options are not the same visit, and treating them as one number hides the whole story.
Can’t get a tool approved? Do it manually.
Fixed list of prompts, fixed day of the week, one sheet, log what you see. It’s slower, and it’s more effort. It teaches you the same thing.
GEO stops feeling like noise the moment you’re looking at your own data instead of everyone else’s conclusions.
Q2. “I understand content strategy, but I can’t show up as a strategist in the room”
If this is you, I’d bet the problem isn’t your strategy. It’s that you’re being qualitative in a room that runs on quantitative.
I’m not being clever here; this is my own gap. I have the instinct for what’s good, what will hold up in twelve months, which piece is doing the work. And for a long time that’s all I had when someone senior asked me why.
Gut feel is usually right. Gut feel also loses to a slide with a number on it. Every time.
So start where it’s easy. Google Search Console, GA, Ahrefs/Semrush. These are not hard tools, and I say that as someone who avoided them for longer than I’d like to admit.
Get comfortable, then go one layer out: your CRM, then attribution and customer journeys, then something like Factors.ai or RB2B.
The shift that actually changes how you’re seen isn’t using more tools. It’s making the data the base of your strategy instead of the defence you scramble for after someone challenges you.
One more thing here, because it comes up on the same calls. Think horizontally. My instinct is organic, organic, organic (yours might be too), and that instinct isn’t always right.
LinkedIn works differently. Events work differently. Newsletters work differently. Search is full of AI-generated content now, and the smart people already know it, so original thinking shared in places people actually trust is what holds up.
Not pausing organic. Just not treating it as the entire plan.
Q3. “SEO folks keep sidelining me, and I’m losing creative ownership”
Same root cause as the last one, different symptom.
Before anything else: I don’t encourage friction here. SEO and content live together and die together. If you’re building a case against the SEO team, you’ve already lost the interesting part of your job.
What’s actually happening is that they’re fluent in a language you haven’t learned yet. They can say “this page lost 40% of its clicks in six weeks and here’s the query set” and you’re saying “this angle is better.” Both can be true. Only one of them survives the meeting.
So learn how they build an argument, and learn it from them directly. Ask what they’re looking at. Ask why they weighted one thing over another.
Then run your own experiments, small ones you fully own. Publish the piece you believe in, write down what you expect to happen, check it at 30, 60, 90 days. Do that four or five times and you stop being the person with opinions and start being the person with a track record. Creative ownership follows evidence. Nobody hands it over because you feel strongly.
Q4. “How do I actually move from writer to content marketer?”
This one’s slightly funny to answer because it’s basically everything I’ve written for the last year. So the quick answer is: go read the archive, it’s all there.
The real answer is shorter than people want it to be. Think like a marketer at every step, not just at the drafting step.
That means the shift happens in research, not in the writing. Before you ask how long the piece should be, ask what it’s supposed to do. Who’s meant to read it, at what stage, and what happens next if it works.
If you’re freelancing, this is the highest-leverage change you can make this month. Stop waiting for briefs. Pitch topics. And when you pitch, explain why that topic, for that funnel stage, for that business right now. Companies are not short of people who can write. They are very short of people who can tell them what to write and why.
Q5. “How do I use AI tools as a content marketer?”
Two ways people get this wrong, and I see both.
One is resisting AI entirely, which is a position you can hold for maybe another year before it costs you. The other is handing over the exact part of the work that made you worth hiring.
What I’d actually do: learn one tool properly instead of sampling nine. For me that’s Claude. Learn how skills work, how Cowork works, how to point it at a workflow rather than at a sentence. That’s the difference between using prompts like “write me an intro” and “pull every competitor’s pricing page, tell me where our positioning is weak, and draft the outline that fixes it.”
Research, competitor pulls, reporting, repurposing, first-pass structure. All of that can be handed over. The point of view can’t. That’s the whole asset.
And this is where question five loops right back to question one. Original thinking is what gets other people to mention you. Mentions are what get you cited. So the thing that makes you hard to replace is also the thing that makes you visible.
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Onwards and upwards,
Sreyashi