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How to win the AEO/GEO game on a startup budget. About Kevin Airbnb, Shopify, Reddit, and G2 have billions riding on SEO & AI search… and they all use the same advisor – Kevin Indig. He publishes original research through his newsletter, Growth Memo, and advises companies whose entire business model depends on getting discovered. Watch the full interview on YouTube Can a small company outrank the big guys? Q: Does AI search give startups an opportunity to leapfrog incumbents?

Since I started this newsletter, people have now read my emails 3 million times. That’s about 11 years of reading! What do my best emails have in-common? I uploaded my best and worst performers to Claude, and discovered my best emails do five things: Grab my reader’s attention early with curiosity and a promise of value Hold attention through the email by telling a story Respect my reader’s time and intelligence Leave them with a simple action they can use right away That’s f

I love working with former scientists, but I also kind of hate it. I was reviewing an experiment recently. The new page was performing better, so I suggested we end the A/B test. "Shouldn't we wait until it's statistically significant?" she asked. “We’re not trying to publish a paper,” I replied. “We’re looking for things that are big. If an experiment takes weeks to reach significance, it’s not big. Don’t waste time chasing unnecessary precision – go look for something bigge

My best SEO post died last month. Sigh. For years, it ranked for “Growth mindset interview questions” and brought a steady stream of subscribers. Now, it’s a trickle. I had a theory… I typed that query into ChatGPT, and it spat out a brilliant answer – much better than my blog post – in three seconds. No wonder everyone's using AI to automate the hard graft of SEO. But does that actually work? tl;dr – it doesn't. To test this, Lily Ray tracked 220+ websites who use AI conten

Early in my career, we used this horrible thing called WebTrends that measured nonsense like "hits" and "time spent on page." Eventually, I realized those reports were a Rorschach test – I could see anything I wanted in them. So I ditched them and started with business outcomes, working backwards. Why am I telling you this? Because marketing analytics feel the same way today. AI overviews reduce search clicks. Social platforms suppress links. Apple, GDPR and LLMs all block tr

Are your smartest people working on your hardest problem? The best marketer I ever hired had zero marketing experience. He studied physics at Cambridge and cracked a $100M churn problem that had stumped us for 17 years. We kept trying the usual stuff – retention campaigns, win-back offers, incentives – all to no avail. Instead of reaching for another tactic, he reached for a pen and paper and studied the problem. Who exactly was churning? When? Why? He excluded tiny merchants

My friend Erin used to run experiments at Booking.com. She said they tested 1,000 ideas per week, and 91% failed. My first reaction: "Wow, if you test aggressively, you'll be wrong a lot." I completely missed her point. On a bike ride last week, it hit me: Testing didn't cause them to be wrong, it caused them to discover they were wrong. Those ideas would’ve been bad whether they’d tested them or not. But Booking.com isn't uniquely stupid. So if 91% of their ideas are wrong,

Their whole business was: Customers install the app, go to a pub, show a QR code, get free beer. (Their revenue came from pubs paying for new customers.) The only problem – people wouldn’t take the free beer. Crazy, right? We suggested their Head of Marketing, Hannah Parvaz , talk to some customers:​​​​​ “Free beer? What’s the catch?” “Is it some weird new microbrew?” “When someone offers to buy me a drink… he expects something in return.” Once she understood the problem, the

How to tell if your ads are actually working so you can find and cut your least efficient spend A quick primer on incrementality testing “Should we just turn off all our ads and see what happens?” Every founder and CFO wonders "Does our ad spend actually bring new customers? Or are we paying to acquire customers who would have purchased anyway?" Good news… this has been tested. In a recent study , Dropbox cut all mobile and paid search (SEM) ads in the USA, and compared the r

My co-founder Nopadon has mentored hundreds of teams who have hit plateaus – and he’s spotted a handful of root causes behind myriad symptoms. He fed transcripts of these sessions into Claude, and found 8 root-cause blockers – different ones depending on your stage and business model. Scroll to the section that's relevant for you👇 1. Early-stage B2B Vague Target Customer: You have an idea of who’d buy your product, but can't narrow it down to a particular job title, type,

AppSumo just released their most popular AI marketing tools, based on 63,410 searches: Do you see what's wrong with this list? Most teams are using AI to automate the exact tactics that AI is making obsolete: SEO: AI makes content creation easy while AI answers are killing organic traffic. LinkedIn: DMs are so full of AI-personalized garbage, nobody reads them anymore. Email: AI spam filters are as good at blocking outreach as AI is at writing it. Video: We scroll past an

An 8-figure CEO asked me, “Should I fire my copywriter? Claude can do a pretty good job for $30/month.” “It depends…” I responded. (Of course it does. 😏) I told him the real problem isn’t “AI vs. copywriters” – it’s that most writers crank out mediocre work: SEO pages that never rank Social posts nobody reads Emails nobody opens “If that’s what you’re paying for, then for sure, switch to AI. Or better yet, just stop. Stop pumping out crap!” Good writing is one of the most l