For decades, the CMO's job was to make the brand.
Define it. Express it. Push it through every available channel — paid search, paid social, outdoor, print, PR. Reach humans. Control the narrative. Measure the funnel. Repeat.
The mandate was clear because the mechanism was clear: you owned the message because you owned the distribution. Spend enough, be consistent enough, and the market would know who you are.
That job still exists. But there's a second job sitting next to it now — and almost no one is staffed for it.
What Changed
When a buyer skips the search bar and asks an LLM which vendor to trust, which firm to hire, which product to buy — the model constructs an answer before the buyer ever visits a website.
That answer isn't shaped by your ad spend. It isn't shaped by your creative. It isn't shaped by anything you broadcast.
It's shaped by what others have said about you. Third-party sources. Structured signals. Consistent, credible information distributed across the web in places AI systems are trained to trust.
That's not advertising logic. That's PR logic.
The New Mandate
The old CMO made the brand.
The new CMO makes the brand and earns its place in AI outputs — and earning that placement works like PR, not advertising.
In traditional PR, you don't buy coverage. You pitch. You build relationships with journalists and editors. You give them reasons to write about you — credible angles, third-party validation, a story worth telling. Coverage comes from earned trust, not paid placement.
LLM visibility works the same way. You can't buy your way in. You have to earn it: through authoritative sources that reference you, through structured information that AI systems can reason from, through consistent signals that establish your brand as the credible answer to a specific question.
The CMO who understands this isn't just a brand architect anymore. They're also a brand publicist — pitching the brand to systems that will only repeat what they've been told by sources they trust.
Why This Matters for Founder-Led Businesses
Large enterprises have PR departments. They have agency relationships. They have the infrastructure of earned media already in place.
Founder-led businesses usually don't — which means the AI discoverability gap hits them harder, and the solution requires building something most of them have never had to build before.
The good news: the principles of earning coverage translate directly. Identify the right sources. Build the right signals. Make the brand legible to the systems doing the recommending.
The businesses that figure this out aren't the ones with the largest budgets. They're the ones whose expertise is easiest for an AI to verify, cite, and trust.
The Implication
If you're evaluating your marketing function — or your fractional CMO — the question is no longer just "can they build the brand and run the channels?"
It's also: "do they know how to earn the brand's place in AI outputs?"
Those are two different skill sets. The job now requires both.
— Susan Pieper, Founder, SHIFT CEO. Helping Founder-Led Businesses Get Found, Chosen & Trusted in the Age of AI.
Originally published in The Selection Economy™ newsletter.