We talk with Tim Soulo, CMO at Ahrefs and author of Discoverable, about scaling a SaaS brand without outbound sales and why discoverability beats chasing leads. We also get practical about AI, where it truly boosts marketers, and how to measure AI-driven discovery without getting lost in vanity metrics.
• Growing a company by doing marketing that scales rather than outbound
• Three discovery paths: search, noticing, recommendations
• Why teams drift into tactics as marketing roles specialise
• “Vibe coding” as a new marketer advantage for building tools fast
• Why effort is what people notice and respect, even with AI
• A holistic way to judge AI search performance using traffic, bots, attribution, and trends
• Whether AI changes buyer evaluation or just speeds low-stakes choices
• The BREW framework for prioritising marketing work with limited resources
How to Become Discoverable in the AI Era
From Scrappy Startup to Discoverable Brand
Tim Soulo has a rare vantage point on modern SaaS growth: he joined Ahrefs when the team was tiny, marketing was scrappy, and scale had to come from systems rather than headcount. That constraint shaped a set of marketing fundamentals that still hold up in 2026 even as AI search, social search, and creator platforms keep shifting attention. The core idea is “discoverability”: instead of chasing prospects one by one with outbound sales, you build demand generation and brand building so the right people can find you when they feel the problem. For any startup, Web3 company, or product-led growth team, the takeaway is practical: growth compounds when your marketing is designed to scale, not just to impress.
The Three Paths to Discoverability
Discoverability can be mapped with a simple framework: people find products through search, through noticing, or through recommendations. Search now includes classic SEO for Google, but also ChatGPT, Claude, TikTok, YouTube, and other “social search” surfaces, which means content marketing must be built for multiple discovery engines. Noticing happens via advertising or content that earns organic distribution because it’s genuinely worth watching, reading, or sharing. Recommendations are word of mouth, and Tim highlights two human drivers: people share to brag (signalling competence or results) and to be useful (helping a friend solve a problem). If you want more recommendations, you don’t just ask for them, you give people a story worth repeating.
Tim Soulo
Why AI Makes Marketing Fundamentals More Important
A major tension in marketing teams is why tactics often crowd out fundamentals. As organisations grow, specialisation becomes necessary: someone owns paid ads, someone owns SEO, someone owns lifecycle, and each role naturally zooms in on tools and execution details. The risk is mistaking the tactic for the strategy. AI makes that risk bigger because content generation is suddenly cheap. Tim’s rule is blunt: AI multiplied by zero effort equals slop, while AI multiplied by maximum effort can become gold. AI is incredible for “vibe coding” and rapid prototyping, letting marketers build landing pages, micro tools, and internal dashboards without waiting in an engineering queue. But for brand trust, differentiation, and resonance, the edge is still taste, personality, and human effort.
Measuring AI Visibility and Prioritising What Matters
AI-driven discovery also needs better measurement than prompt screenshots and vanity “citation” counts. Tim recommends tracking performance holistically: referral traffic from AI chatbots, visits from AI bots that fetch your pages, self attribution (“I found you in ChatGPT”), and feedback from sales calls. AI visibility scores can help, but trends and competitor comparisons matter more than a single percentage. Underneath it all, AI outputs mirror what reputable sources on the web say about you, which makes digital PR, accurate third-party mentions, and fast corrections (even on pricing details) part of modern SEO. To choose what to do first with limited resources, Tim uses the BREW framework: Business potential, Reach, Effort, and Who will do it. It’s a simple way to prioritise marketing strategy that actually ships.
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