Generative AI went mainstream in marketing this year. ChatGPT's late-2022 launch had already upended content workflows by January, and Google announced its Search Generative Experience at I/O in May 2023 — the first public preview of AI-generated answers sitting above the traditional blue-link results page.
10 Professionals
Worth Knowing This Year
- 01
Founder, Women in Tech SEO
Launched her freelance SEO practice Crawlina in January 2023, building on the Women in Tech SEO community she founded back in 2019.
Running both a community and a consultancy gave her a rare dual vantage point on how AI-driven search was changing the day-to-day work of SEOs across the industry.
- 02
Content marketing consultant
Advised startups and enterprise brands on content marketing strategy.
Working across that range of company sizes right as generative AI hit content workflows meant helping clients figure out what to automate and what still needed a human hand.
- 03
CMO, Ahrefs
Shared SEO and organic-growth research as CMO of Ahrefs.
A decade of publishing Ahrefs' own data openly gave the brand credibility to weigh in on how AI Overviews and generative search were starting to reshape organic traffic.
- 04
Founder, Niche Pursuits
Kept documenting SEO and niche-site strategy through Niche Pursuits.
His transparent, numbers-first approach gave readers a real-world look at how AI content tools were actually performing in search, not just how they were marketed.
- 05
Founder, Exit Five
Founded Exit Five, a community for B2B marketers, after stints as CMO at Privy and VP of Marketing at Drift.
Building a paid community, rather than another free newsletter, bet on B2B marketers wanting real peer conversation over more one-way content.
- 06
Video marketing & personal branding consultant
Kept building her audience around video marketing and productivity.
Her focus on productivity alongside video marketing resonated with creators trying to figure out how AI tools fit into an already demanding content workflow.
- 07
Creator, chiefmartec.com
Tracked the ever-expanding martech landscape through chiefmartec.com.
His annual landscape graphic, already sprawling with thousands of vendors, was about to get another wave of entrants as AI-focused martech startups multiplied.
- 08
Founder, WordStream
Was still a leading voice in PPC through WordStream.
As Google pushed automated bidding and AI-driven campaign types further into PPC, his research kept giving advertisers a way to sanity-check what the automation was actually doing.
- 09
Founder, Content Marketing Institute
Kept shaping content marketing thinking through the Content Marketing Institute's legacy.
The discipline he helped name was now facing its biggest test yet, as AI tools made low-effort content cheaper to produce than ever.
- 10
Founder, iPullRank
Grew iPullRank's reputation for technical SEO right as AI-driven search started to matter.
His technical background positioned iPullRank well to explain how large language models were actually retrieving and citing web content, a topic most SEOs were only starting to grapple with.
This page is an independent editorial mention published by Digital Business Marketing. The numbering above is a browsing order, not a formal award, contest, vote, or ranking, and inclusion does not imply any named person endorses Digital Business Marketing.