AIでクリックが消える時代のマーケティング計測 ― Salesforce のジリアン・ヒンクル氏と語る

Welcome, everyone, to the Emoj AI in Business podcast. Today's guest is Jillian Henkel, Senior Director of Marketing for Demand Generation, Account-Based Marketing and Growth at Salesforce. Jillian joins Emoj of Matthew D'Amelio to discuss how marketing teams can adapt as buyers increasingly find answers through AI tools. She explains how her team evaluates content, coordinates messaging across channels, and measures conversion as website traffic becomes a less complete picture of brand visibility. Just a quick note, how audience of the views expressed by Jillian on today's program do not reflect those of Salesforce or its leadership. In this episode, we cover how AI-generated answers are changing search visibility and marketing measurement. To go deeper on this topic and learn how to identify real AI trends by tracking where venture funding is flowing and by listening to how leading CEOs describe risk and competitive strategy,

download our pre-PDF report, Three Ways to Discover AI Trends in Any Sector at emerge.com slash AIT1. That's emerj.com slash AIT1 to download your copy. Now the conversation with Jillian. Jillian, welcome back to the program. It's a great pleasure having you. Thank you, Matthew. I'm so glad to be here. Yes, absolutely. We're diving a little bit more on multi-channel visibility in this episode, what's traditionally been called SEO. We're going to pull apart why that's not really what it is anymore, even for the business goals involved. We're hearing from marketing leaders all the time that as AI becomes embedded across marketing ecosystems, teams are struggling to integrate it meaningfully at the pace vendors are really shipping these new capabilities.

Leaders must determine when AI enhances judgment and when automation is sufficient, all while safeguarding brand quality, data integrity, and customer trust. But before we explore specific applications, I think it helps to clarify kind of the core distinction shaping the shift. We talked a little bit about this in the last episode in a more general sense, but specifically for modern marketing teams, what do you see as the difference between treating AI as a tool rather than a form of automation? And why does that distinction matter for modern marketing? Sure. We have used automation in marketing for a long time now. And there are moments right now in the past, what, 18 to 24 months where AI tooling has increased so much. It often exists outside, right? Just 24 months ago, it was all outside of our business systems. And there was a lot of excitement. And so people tend to now ascribe things to AI that actually can be resolved with automation.

So that's our first thing. And our other thing that we really need to consider always is what are our systems of trust? What are our places where we should be doing work? And when is it acceptable to incorporate a new system? So for me, it's leaning heavily into those existing policies, redefining them where appropriate when we're incorporating those new systems. And so much of the tooling has changed. Like when we look at a lot of the core marketing systems, they are now incorporating those models that exist out there, whether it be from OpenAI or Cloud or whoever. They're often in those tool sets. So I really like to lean into our existing tool sets because it means I'm not retraining employees. It means that we have standards in place. We're just expanding what we're doing. Absolutely. And we've been talking about, even through the last episode, we made that comparison to the customer service space.

We were talking about how these technologies don't just mean a difference in how to do things, but really what the goals are. 30 years ago, especially customer service was kind of seen, especially in financial services, as this place where problems went to die. And because we have the capabilities now, customer service work is a lot more about having meaningful conversations. We've seen a paradigm shift, some might argue, in the opposite direction when it comes to what's been traditionally called SEO. I don't think I need to tell the folks at home that search engines are not what they used to be, even in the last three years. but this is really changing the discipline as we've described SEO for the past few years, but also opening up the floodgates into other ways of search and visibility in ways that are inextricable from AI. Tell us what's happening in this space and what has traditionally... AI have been wildly disruptive. The TLDR, there's been so much disruption, particularly in the past year.

I read a stat that said for the first time in, I forget how long, more than a decade, I think it was, Google market share has dropped below 90 which that tells you how different people patterns are right now They going more often to tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity For those marketers in charge of a website, that means you've got to really think about how you're shifting, how you think about what you're doing with SEO. While you're on top of that, releases like Google's AI overviews. You can get what you need without actually visiting a website. So we have suddenly changed how we're thinking about websites from not just being about SEO, which is, as always, extremely important.

Having your content be well-structured, easily read by both humans and machines, is essential. And so now we're thinking about other things too. And the other two big areas that have popped up have been what we're calling GEO and AEO. So GEO is really your generative engine optimization and AEO is your answer engine optimization. So it's all about getting cited at the end of the day? What are we doing to ensure that we're showing up? Because suddenly our funnels are much shorter. People aren't clicking into the website. So how do you get whatever your ultimate goal for conversion is to happen, even if they don't visit your site three times before they convert or whatever your metric is? Certainly true for anybody who has been using Google the last 30 years, I'll date myself a little bit, like I was at least old enough in the internet

adoption revolution to see Google in its prime. And I'll tell you, like even going back to 2018, and more than just like, oh, hey, the advertised options really go to the top. It's been on the decline. But this is, you know, for the folks who know, it really search writ large as seeing this problem, even enterprise search, even internal search is becoming more difficult with a lot of these technologies, as we're all trying to make this transition into AI retrieving the information rather than the search engine internally, externally, Google, whoever, where do we need to see employees or even just end users really double clicking into answers from AI systems and LLMs rather than taking them at face value? I know we talked a little bit in that last episode about that unhealthy valley, I kind of call it, of the end user is checking out because there's assuming the system is doing the rest of the work when there might be a huge gap there. Yeah. For marketers, this is a total change in how we have to think about that brand visibility for our websites that we own.

And I say websites because for many marketers are owning either multiple subdomains or multiple sites. And you, as a digital marketing leader, need to better collaborate and work with your brand teams, your PR teams, your AR teams to have unified messaging. What are those keywords suddenly and how we talk and communicate about the business need to better align across all channels? So that means making sure that if you are working with AR relations companies, understanding how they talk about it, incorporating on the website, because sometimes you can't control how that company is going to be talking about your brand. So what are the pieces that you can align to on the website? And the reason why this becomes important is because when you think about these large language models,

models, they are looking at your website, sure. They are scraping the web, but they're not just looking at your website. They're also identifying, hey, this company has appeared in this analyst report. They were on the news. They were here and there. Oh, this is very high authority. They're appearing in multiple places. They're appearing in places that are paid responses, and they're also occurring inorganic. Yeah, and this is a whole new paradigm shift. I know that's even one of the more abused phrases of the last few years, but it truly is. I think maybe there's a sense of, and this is always difficult to tell, but what's the degree of confidence you mentioned these AI relations companies? I take it, or we can get into the definitions of this, but it sounds like a PR firm for this new dynamic of AEO, like a company that specializes in how you're coming up in these systems. Is there a sense of we're in very early stages of this done a decent job summarizing so

far, even the phases that Google search engine capabilities went through over the last 30 years, which was not a straight line at all. But I'm wondering the degree to which the confidence that marketers have that this is the new reality. This isn't going to change anytime soon. And this is the time to really build the long-term skills because even as much as flux and change as we've seen in the formerly RIP SEO space, that the new boss is staying the new boss. We not getting another one anytime soon Sure It changed Yeah Yeah It changed It here It will remain It is a best practice Like when there are there are definite SEO standards. There are plenty of people who will argue that good SEO begets good GA. Right. Okay. So you start with the original, all is not lost. The original skills are the foundation and we've got to take it in these specialized new directions, given the new technologies that are not going away anytime soon. Right. And the evidence is there that it has changed by the fact that those actual click-throughs have drastically dropped.

And so the early signal indicator that you're doing the right things suddenly went away. So how do you begin to measure that you're still putting the right content out there, that it's well aligned with your PR team, that it's well aligned with what your product marketers are doing with analyst relations. And for me, that's the bottom line. That's conversion. You just have fewer touch points to understand it. And so part of how we are looking at this strategy is identifying pillar topics and conversion rates within those topics. Right. So, and then doing the gap analysis. You might be doing really well on your alignment in one area and not with another. And what I've seen most people who are in this space who are experts in SEO say is that if the conversion is there, you're doing the right things.

Begin to inspect that. Oh, hey, you know what? That topic that we talked about, it appeared in these different places. Any additional frameworks or ways of at least setting the table for folks in this uncertain space where this sea change just kind of mixing metaphors here, but pulled out the rug from everybody that you're finding are very helpful to bring that sort of clarity and identify those gaps. Yes, in this time of uncertainty. Yeah, so for me, it was a real shift this year of stopping just thinking about SEO and instead thinking about all three measures. So leaned into the tools that we already have and used AI to begin to understand those. Talk seriously about I'm a big fan of, with generative AI, using it more as a tool rather than something that we disengage with and just trust. So we have specific workflows and AI tools that we use that help us grade and understand content gaps.

So leaning into those and instead of saying, hey, how do we understand if this will rank well for SEO and is clearly readable by humans? But how do we balance that? So we've written a tool that allows us to say, hey, instead of just going for SEO, tell us about ways we could improve across all three measures. And so that has become part of the process of how we produce our digital content. And then layered on top of that, we also now regularly choose to include those secondary topics where possible within our digital content. Keep it on the same page so it's more likely to rank. So that means doing things like recognizing that there's an article that was written for an analyst firm.

that really relates to a topic on your website. And while we might have just put a widget on that page in the past, these days we might be referring to it much more contextually. We might have deeper FAQs at the bottom of the page, different things. We might have TLDRs at the top of the page, things that help both the people and the machines read the page. Right. And make sure that they have a real understanding of the content, not just a surface-level pass-through. Only that kind of surface-level understanding that not knowing where to double-click is kind of thwarting, at least in this process. And that can be really hard to tell if you don't have the right institutional, organizational support of saying, hey, we do want you to double-click, but not even aimlessly. Here's the places that we want you to focus on. I know it might be very early stages to kind of know where this goes, even in the next five years.

Nobody likes to predict what's going to happen in the next five weeks. But where do we see AI transforming what is left of search engines? And what do you see as kind of the long-term play here for business leaders to know, especially in the marketing space? Sure. I don't think search engines are going anywhere. Yeah, themselves, right. It's kind of like, yeah, they might be ghost towns, like, I guess, to some people, Facebook in a way. Yeah, I don't think search engines go anywhere. I think they get augmented, like we've started to see. And I think what that means for owners of digital marketing spaces is that you'll need to come up with new KPIs. It can just be about the traffic that hits your site it has to be about the quality of the traffic which supposedly if you good at SEO you should be concerned about that anyway You should be concerned about those engagement metrics, those bounce rates, all of those things. AI has just shined such a huge light. It is no

longer something that that digital strategist can do alone. They can't just say, but I made the website perfect. And so therefore, we're going to show up in all the right places. That is no longer possible. You have now absolutely, in order to define and hit the new metrics around conversions, you will need to be closely aligned to every other aspect of the full marketing organization. them. Right, right. And do you see that as silos kind of coming down? I know that's kind of often repeated phrases we're seeing AI move through the enterprise. But do you see that as not just, hey, we all need to get in the same room and really put our heads together, but all of our data is being combined, our initiatives are being, yeah, you're nodding a lot. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I do see, and I'm seeing this internally, where I'm working more with

those other teams, it's definitely breaking down silos. I think more and more our KPIs will depend on each other. We will be interlocked as we begin to see those things because my pages will only convert well because they're showing up in AI overviews, which is only going to happen if I'm understanding, hey, PMM team has this analyst plan. They've got interviews scheduled, this event. I'm going to get a mention in these different places. Oh, how do we align our topics? None of us will be successful without the other. Right, right. And I think that's becoming a huge driver of AI within the organization. You reach that threshold, hey, it's brought us together. Now we need each other just as much as we might need. And it's that same kind of codependence that I was referring to in dispelling the zero-sum myth of AI integration versus job displacement of,

no, you become reliant on those, whatever system you're using, deterministic, generative, agentic. You become dependent on those systems to perform more meaningful work, and that meaning, the meaningfulness of that work will lead to efficiencies that you can't just boil down to think, oh, hey, we bought a bunch of robots, and for every five robots we bought, you know, we do five times the business. It doesn't work that way. You need to build that cross-dependence first to build meaningful work, and that's the part that's really hard to talk about. Why we have a podcast all about it, which we're glad to have you back on to really pull apart these topics. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there if you were going to answer. No, I think you're correct. The team has to be well coalesced, and I would say for me that's why, you know, we talked a lot about how do we use AI as a tool, right? How do we lean into that idea that it's a skilled tool? And for us, you know, having a tool that helps us align our content so that we can feel confident.

I totally trust my team members. They're going to talk about this in ways and shape the conversation in ways that support what I'm doing on the website. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Jillian, very fascinating stuff between both episodes, especially pulling apart SEO, this space that is really just have the carpet pulled out from under it. And we're all trying to make sense of it. I think this is the first SEO distinct episode that we've done. So really get these updates, especially direct from Salesforce is really, really great for the audience here. Thank you so much for being with us again on this week's show. Thank you. Have a Okay, okay. Wrapping up today's episode, let's look at the three key takeaways from our conversation with Jillian. First, retain the foundation of search engine optimization while evaluating whether content also helps people find answers through AI tools.

Second, examine conversion and traffic quality by topic, using those results to investigate content gaps rather than relying on website visits alone. And finally, align website content with public relations, analyst relations, and product marketing so that messaging supports a consistent understanding of the business across different channels. In this episode, we covered how AI-generated answers are changing search visibility and marketing measurement. So go deeper on this topic and learn how to identify real AI trends by tracking where venture funding is flowing and by listening to how leading CEOs describe risk and competitive strategy, Download our free PDF report, Three Ways to Discover AI Trends in Any Sector, at Emerge.com. That's Emerge.com. To download your copy. For further executive level analysis and to join our network of leaders delivering workflow impact with AI, visit Emerge.com. On behalf of the team at Emerge, we'll see you on the next episode.

Thank you.