For a growing number of chief marketing officers, AI search has become a boardroom question they cannot yet answer clearly. Buyers increasingly put their questions to assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, which means a CMO is now expected to know how the brand shows up in those answers and to keep improving it, usually without a bigger team. Pepper, the organic growth engine used by more than 250 enterprises, is now helping marketing leaders take on both sides of that problem inside its GEO platform.
The hard part, most CMOs will say, is not knowing what good marketing looks like. It is two things they have not had to manage before. The first is proof. A brand can see that it gets mentioned in AI answers, but a leader has no simple way to tell whether that is a strong position or a weak one against the competitors chasing the same answers. The second is throughput. Even when a team knows exactly which pages to fix, the volume of that work across a whole content library means it rarely gets finished before the next quarter's priorities take over.
