Who this is for
Search marketers who already know their craft and now need the AI half of it. ▪ In-house SEO leads watching AI Overviews eat their organic numbers. ▪ PPC managers who need to scale account analysis, ad copy, and reporting without scaling headcount. ▪ Agency owners and directors building out AI-enabled service lines and pricing them properly. ▪ Content strategists, GEO specialists, and analytics leads who own the funnel from search to AI citation. ▪ Marketing leaders who need to brief the team on what "AI in search" actually means in 2026. This is a practitioner book. We assume you understand SEO and PPC. We do not assume you understand how a language model decides which token to emit next, what an embedding is, or why your prompt produced something that sounds confident and is also wrong. We fix that.
If your impressions are climbing while your clicks fall, you are looking at the alligator.
Two years ago, Gartner predicted brand organic search traffic would drop 50% by 2028 as consumers embraced generative AI search. We hit that number last year. Google still holds roughly 93% of search activity, and "Google is doing the Googling for you" is no longer a slogan — it is the experience. Generative AI For SEO and PPC Marketers is the complete content from a Trust Insights workshop, restructured as a standalone reference. It is written for the practitioner — the SEO lead, the PPC manager, the in-house team, the agency owner — who needs to translate "AI is changing search" into specific things to do this quarter.
Seven chapters and two dozen prompts you will actually use.
Chapter 1 — Introduction. What this book is, who it is for, and the case study (the Savory Oatmeal Company) you will use to practice every technique without exposing client data. Chapter 2 — AI Foundations. The alligator pattern, what AI capability benchmarks actually mean for your work, the three classes of AI, and how language models really process your prompts. Chapter 3 — The Five Levels of AI Enablement. From copy-paste prompting to anticipatory AI. Where you stand, what is one level up, and how to climb without breaking your team. Chapter 4 — Prompt Engineering. The CASINO framework, Knowledge Blocks, the Ask-Me-Questions-First technique, deep research, and meta-prompting — built specifically for search marketing problems. Chapter 5 — Seven Use Case Categories for Search Marketers. Extraction, classification, summarization, rewriting, synthesis, question answering, and generation — with worked SEO and PPC examples for each. Chapter 6 — Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). The three phases — Presence, Appearance, Relevance — the three-layer measurement funnel, and how to make AI find, retrieve, and cite your brand. Chapter 7 — Advanced Agentic AI (Level 3+). The PRD-to-Spec-to-Work-Plan workflow, getting started with Claude Code, and using NotebookLM as an agentic output layer. Appendix A — Prompt Library. Every prompt from the workshop, organized by chapter. Copy, paste, plug in your data, ship the work.
Walk away with skills you can use the next time you open your AI tool.
Diagnose the alligator in your own Search Console data and tell the story to leadership without panic. Write prompts that produce specific, citable, on-brand output — not generic AI slop. Build a Generative Engine Optimization plan that targets Presence, Appearance, and Relevance, with a measurement funnel that ladders up to revenue. Decide which of seven AI use case categories fits each task — and stop using a chatbot to do work that needs a different shape of model. Move up from Level 1 prompting toward agentic and autonomous workflows without breaking your stack or your team. Defend your craft when the keyword-list crowd panics, and pitch new agentic services to clients who need them.
PDF + ePub editions. Read on your laptop, Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, or any e-reader. Print the prompt appendix and mark it up.
Audio edition. Listen on the commute, the dog walk, or the flight to the next conference. Same content, hands-free.
Lifetime access. Buy once, download all three formats, keep them forever. One purchase. No upsells.
Christopher S. Penn Co-Founder & Chief Data Scientist
Christopher S. Penn is one of the most-cited voices in marketing technology, generative AI, and analytics. He is the co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast, a frequent keynote speaker at SMX, MarketingProfs B2B Forum, Content Marketing World, INBOUND, and Social Media Marketing World, and the author of multiple books on AI and marketing. The material in this book comes from his April 2026 SMX Spring AI Masterclass — a full-day workshop he restructured chapter by chapter so the value didn't stay locked inside a single live session. Trust Insights is a strategic planning and AI consulting firm helping companies turn data and AI into measurable revenue. We train, advise, and build for some of the most recognizable brands in the world — and we run the Analytics for Marketers Slack community, free to join, where this book's readers compare notes and trade prompts.
Trusted by marketing teams that take search seriously
From the firm trusted by Fortune 500 marketing teams. Author of multiple AI marketing books. Featured at SMX, MarketingProfs B2B Forum, Content Marketing World, and INBOUND. The Trust Insights Live Stream and the Marketing Over Coffee podcast are listened to by thousands of practitioners every week.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to be technical to use this book? No. The book assumes you understand search marketing, not machine learning. Where the technology gets technical, we explain it in plain language and give you the prompts to use. Do I need a paid AI subscription? Yes — at minimum, a paid version of one frontier model (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot). Free tiers harvest your inputs and gate you out of the most capable models. Chapter 2 explains exactly what to look for. Is this only about Google? Google still holds roughly 93% of search activity, so most examples reference it. The frameworks — especially the GEO three-phase model in Chapter 6 — apply to any AI search surface, including ChatGPT search, Perplexity, and Gemini. Will this be out of date in six months? Specific tool names will move. The way to think about prompts, the seven use case categories, the GEO phases, and the five levels of AI enablement are designed to be evergreen. We focus on mental models that survive model upgrades. What format is the download? After purchase you receive a resource sheet with links to PDF, ePub, and audio versions. Download whichever you want, as many times as you want. Is there a refund policy? Digital downloads are non-refundable once the resource sheet has been delivered. If you have a problem with your purchase, email [email protected] and we will make it right. Can my whole team use this? The license is per buyer. For team licensing or to bring this content to your organization as a workshop, email [email protected].
Stop optimizing for the search engine you used to know.
The practitioners who thrive in 2026 are not the ones with the longest keyword lists. They are the ones who understand how AI intermediaries decide what to recommend — and who use AI to do the work that used to take a team. This book gives you the foundation, the frameworks, the prompts, and the playbook.
$19.99