Marketing has always had a tendency to chase the newest acronym.

SEO. GEO. AEO. AI search. Zero-click search. Every few months, there seems to be a fresh existential panic about how people discover brands online – usually accompanied by a flood of hot takes explaining why everything is about to change forever.

Spend enough time in the industry and you begin to recognise the pattern.

What stood out to me during my recent conversation with Amir Shahzeidi on the Flipping the Playbook podcast was that he didn’t seem especially interested in the noise. Which feels unusual, given his background.

Amir started his career in SEO before growing into broader demand generation and growth leadership roles at Uscreen, where he helped scale the business from a small bootstrap startup into a company generating more than $25 million in annual recurring revenue before securing private equity backing. Today, he’s leading growth at Playbook, still operating in the creator economy space.

You might expect someone with that kind of background to spend most of the conversation talking about algorithms, rankings, or whichever new search trend is currently dominating LinkedIn.

Instead, he kept returning to something much simpler: understanding people.

That sounds obvious. But in practice, it’s surprisingly easy to lose sight of.

The problem with becoming obsessed by visibility

One of the more interesting parts of our conversation came when Amir reflected on his earlier years in SEO. Like many specialists, he admitted he once viewed the world through a fairly narrow lens. Keywords. Rankings. Authority. Traffic. The mechanics of search itself became the goal.

And to be fair, it’s easy to understand why. Those metrics are visible. Measurable. Rewarded.

The problem is that visibility can create a comforting illusion of progress. You can be ranking brilliantly. Traffic can be climbing. Dashboards can look healthy. Yet somewhere underneath all of that, commercial performance remains stubbornly flat. It happens more often than people admit.

“The bigger shift,” Amir told me, “was to work backwards, not forward.”

In other words: stop starting with traffic and start with business outcomes.

Where does the company need to grow? What pipeline needs to be generated? What customers actually matter? And only then – once those questions are clear – does it make sense to think about channels, content, or search strategy.

It sounds simple. But it represents a fairly fundamental mindset shift. Because once revenue becomes the thing you optimise for, vanity metrics start to lose some of their shine.

Why understanding intent suddenly matters more

There is a slightly uncomfortable truth sitting underneath a lot of current conversations around AI search: many businesses still don’t properly understand their audience.

Amir kept coming back to the same phrase throughout our discussion – ICP, or ideal customer profile. Not in the vague “we sell to marketing leaders” sense, but in the real-world, messy, specific sense.

Who are these people actually? What problems are they trying to solve? Where do they search? What objections do they have? What language do they use? What persuades them? And perhaps most importantly: what makes them feel, this product is for people like me?

One example he gave stayed with me.

Inside the creator economy, even adjacent audiences behave differently. Someone teaching yoga might respond strongly to seeing examples of other yoga creators succeeding. Show them case studies from Pilates or strength training businesses and, despite the overlap, something subtle changes.

That’s not me, they think.

It’s a small detail. But marketing is often made or broken by details like that. The temptation for growing businesses is usually to broaden the message. Capture more people. Appeal to everyone. Yet, as Amir put it rather bluntly: “If you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one.”

It’s the sort of advice most marketers already know. Yet somehow it still feels oddly easy to ignore when growth targets enter the conversation.

AI isn’t replacing strategy – it’s exposing weak strategy

Naturally, we spent time talking about AI. But Amir’s perspective felt more measured than much of what tends to circulate online. He’s excited by the possibilities – particularly around automation, prototyping, and agentic workflows that allow marketers to move faster than they could even three years ago.

Tasks that once required engineers can now be mocked up quickly. Workflows that used to involve multiple tools and long handovers can increasingly happen in one place. There is something undeniably exciting about that. At the same time, he repeatedly returned to the importance of focus.

Because for every genuinely useful innovation, there are another 20 shiny distractions arriving in your feed before lunch.

“It’s very noisy,” he admitted.

There’s a growing assumption that AI somehow rewrites the fundamentals of marketing. That if search behaviour changes, everything else must change too. But Amir’s view was more grounded than that. The mechanics evolve. Surfaces change. Google Search becomes AI search. Featured snippets become AI overviews. ChatGPT enters the mix. Discovery happens in more places than before. But underneath it all, the fundamentals remain surprisingly stable.

Good marketers still need to understand behaviour. Intent. Positioning. Messaging. Buying journeys. If your audience doesn’t understand who you are or why you matter, search engines probably won’t either. In some ways, AI may simply expose weak strategy faster.

The marketers who adapt best

There was one final thread running through the conversation that stayed with me. Amir spoke openly about how much of growth leadership is really about staying adaptable.

SEO has always demanded that mindset. Algorithms change. Platforms shift. User behaviour evolves so gradually you don’t notice it at first – until suddenly the thing that worked 18 months ago simply doesn’t anymore. That willingness to evolve feels increasingly important now.

Not because marketers suddenly need to abandon everything they know, but because the best growth leaders seem unusually comfortable holding two truths at once:

  • Yes, the landscape is changing quickly.
  • No, the fundamentals haven’t disappeared.

The companies that navigate this period best probably won’t be the ones chasing every new acronym. They’ll be the ones quietly getting closer to their customers while everyone else is debating terminology. Because modern growth leadership, at least from Amir’s perspective, looks less like mastering the latest platform and more like understanding what genuinely moves people to act.

The tools may change. The audience rarely does.

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Watch on YouTube.