"Marketing is flattening" is the doomscroll take of the moment. Every CMO community, every newsletter, every panel: AI is going to make every brand sound the same, look the same, and blur into one giant beige blob. Mordy and Miruna think that take is missing the actual point — and quietly letting marketers off the hook.

Miruna's rant: AI isn't a person. It's a tool. And like any tool, the output is a function of what you put in. Going back to Amanda Natividad's line from Episode 1 — AI is a magnifying glass. Crap in, magnified crap out. Nothing in, magnified nothing out (a.k.a. bland AI slop). The "marketing is flattening" framing treats this like something happening to us, instead of a result of what we're choosing to do with the tool.

Mordy's piece of it: a lot of the flatness is coming from the top. Google, OpenAI, and the rest are pitching agentic in the most vanilla way imaginable — "use it to refresh content, fill brand gaps" — because they're optimizing for investor confidence, not creative use. If marketers buy that framing wholesale, the flattening is self-inflicted. The unflat work is still possible. It just requires you to bring your own creativity, judgment, and standards into the tool — not outsource them to it.

Bianca Dragan, Head of Marketing at Clove, joins with the frame that landed hardest in the episode: think of brand trust as a bank account. Every piece of AI slop you push out is a withdrawal. Do enough of those and the account closes. The real fear isn't that AI is flattening marketing. It's what marketers are willingly trading their trust balance for.

Every conference talk, every LinkedIn thread right now: agents, agents, agents. Mordy and Miruna think that framing is hiding the actual problem.

The real struggle for most marketing teams isn't the technology — it's that the team is built for a world that doesn't exist anymore. Marketing orgs are still structured by channel, the way digital marketing was set up 25 years ago. SEO owns one lane, social another, content another, PR another. A monthly sync gets called "alignment," and everyone goes back to their lane.

That setup is what's breaking under AI. LLMs pull signals from every channel at once. An agent answering "best place to buy X" might read your site, scan your reviews, and check your social in a single task. No siloed team owns that. And if you build agents inside the existing structure — a social agent here, an SEO agent there — Miruna's line lands hard: you're automating, but you're not future-proofing.

The opportunity is bigger than tooling. When agents take execution off the team's plate, you finally get to redeploy people for strategy, judgment, and cross-functional thinking. But only if you restructure around goals or funnel stages, not channels.

Talia Wolf, CEO of GetUplift, joins to push performance marketers somewhere uncomfortable: accept that not everything valuable is trackable anymore. Buyers now move through zero-click content, AI overviews, podcasts, communities, word of mouth. Future performance marketers can't think like media buyers. They have to think like brand builders.

Brand Isn't Dying. You're Just Looking at the Wrong Part of the Funnel.

Every few weeks, somebody declares brand dead because AI is going to handle the discovery, the research, and the decision for the user. Convenient theory. Also one that conveniently ignores about 80% of how marketing actually works.

Mordy and Miruna take this one apart. The "brand doesn't matter anymore" argument only holds up if you pretend the funnel ends at the first interaction — no research, no comparison, no loyalty, no retention, no unconscious association. None of that disappears because the search interface changed.

A few things that break the theory in practice. AI summaries aren't neutral oracles — they're a mirror of how the internet already perceives your brand. Ask an LLM what Verizon is like to deal with and you'll get hidden fees, aggressive sales culture, inconsistent customer service. That's not an AI visibility gap. That's a brand problem leaking into a new channel. And if the future really is agents talking to agents? Agents will still evaluate brands on the same things humans do — satisfaction, support quality, trust. Every one of those is brand equity in a different outfit.

Anthony Barone, Co-Founder & Managing Director at StudioHawk UK, joins to push the conversation somewhere most AI-vs-brand debates never go: loyalty and retention. AI might one day influence acquisition. It doesn't keep customers. Brand does.

Clearly Saying

Brand will still matter at whatever level — and the vibe-y stuff companies were doing in the name of brand was never brand to begin with.

SEOs are doing what SEOs do. And Mordy has some feelings about it.

Two tactics have become the go-to playbook for gaming LLMs right now. The first is chunking: stripping your entire site down to bite-sized snippets — nothing longer than two sentences — so AI models can grab and cite them easily. The second is self-serving listicles: publishing “best [category] tools” posts where you rank yourself number one and fill your competitors in below you. Big companies are doing both. Google has explicitly said they know about both and are working to stop them.

And here’s the part people are underplaying: these hacks are working in LLMs — while quietly tanking organic search traffic at the same time. Glenn Gabe, one of the sharpest SEO analysts tracking this, has a name for it. He calls it Mount AI: sites that optimize hard for LLM visibility and watch their Google traffic fall off a cliff. So before you double down on the hack, the question worth asking is: which channel are you actually willing to lose?

Mordy and Miruna don’t say never hack. They say understand what hacking costs you — in positioning, in credibility, and in the organizational mindset it creates. Growth hacking strategies don’t build momentum. They borrow it from the future.

Nick Leroy, founder of Nick Leroy Consulting, SEOjobs.com, and the SEO for Lunch newsletter, joins to answer how Google will most likely get a handle on LLM quality — and why the timeline is shorter than most people assume.

Here’s an uncomfortable conversation no one wants to have with their CMO.

When AI visibility became the next big metric to chase, most marketing leadership did what felt instinctively logical: handed it to the SEO team. Rankings, citations, mentions — that’s what SEOs do, right?

Wrong instinct. And in this episode, Miruna explains exactly why.

LLM visibility isn’t a ranking problem. It’s a brand perception problem. When you audit why your company isn’t being cited by AI, what you often don’t find isn’t a technical gap — it’s a positioning gap. A signal that the market doesn’t fully understand who you are, what you’re best at, or why you matter. That’s not something an SEO team fixes with an outreach campaign and a few listicles. That’s a CMO problem. Or — as Mordy points out — a CEO problem, because the CMO is usually just absorbing pressure from above.

Miruna shares a candid example from Planable’s own experience: their LLM audit didn’t reveal a citation problem. It revealed that the market still perceived them as a niche collaboration tool, not the fully equipped platform they’d since become. The SEO team was never supposed to fix that. It was always a brand repositioning conversation that no one had escalated to the right level.

Laura Little, founder of the British Chick Marketing Agency, joins to answer the question that makes a lot of org charts uncomfortable: if LLM visibility is just a symptom of brand visibility, then who should actually own it?

Short answer: yes. Long answer: this episode.

ChatGPT is running ads at $60 per impression. Not per click — per impression. That’s Super Bowl money, for a platform where the majority of users still aren’t seeing any ads, you have almost no visibility into who you’re reaching, and the audience came specifically for an answer — not an ad.

Mordy and Miruna break down why this feels less like a media buy and more like a fundraising mechanism for OpenAI’s investors — and why the brands currently signing up tend to be the AT&Ts of the world, not the Verizons. Second-tier players in their categories spending Super Bowl budgets for approximately none of the Super Bowl upside.

The bigger point: if your brand isn’t showing up in AI results organically, an ad won’t fix that. It’s a brand problem, not a budget problem — and the solution is building the kind of presence that AI wants to mention without being paid to.

Jordan Koene, founder of Previsible and host of the Voices of Search podcast, joins to talk about exactly what that looks like in practice.

“How much more can we produce with AI?” is the wrong question.

Everyone is measuring AI adoption by output: more content, more copy, more campaigns, more. Mordy Oberstein and Miruna Dragomir argue that framing has teams convinced they’re getting value from AI when they’re actually getting the least interesting thing from it.

The smarter move? Use it as your audience.

Miruna built a custom GPT trained on her brand’s target personas — not to generate content, but to push back on it. The AI’s job wasn’t to help. It was to simulate a skeptical reader and flag where the messaging wasn’t landing. The result? More useful than any creative brief.

From stress-testing a strategy pitch against a simulated CEO to understanding how LLMs reflect internet-wide perception of your brand, this episode makes the case that AI’s real value isn’t in the output it produces — it’s in the thinking it forces.

Amanda Natividad, VP of Marketing at SparkToro, joins with her own take on using AI for audience research and strategic input rather than task automation.

At SEO Foresight 2026 on December 9, join widely respected voices in search—Barry Schwartz, Melissa Popp, Erin Sparks and Grace Frohlich—for a grounded discussion on how teams are planning budgets across today’s multi-engine landscape.

With Google’s AI Mode reshaping results and “answer engines” gaining traction, this session compares real-world approaches without one-size-fits-all prescriptions.

What’s on the agenda?

• Ways teams prioritize among content, citations/PR, technical work, and partnerships/data—plus common trade-offs.
• What “impact” can mean in 2026: inclusion in AI answers, citation quality, and durable brand visibility.
• Practical considerations for planning and measurement across multiple surfaces (no one-size-fits-all).

Join to hear different perspectives and gather ideas for your own 2026 discussions. Grab your free seat now.