Your budget, your funnel, and your paid clicks are all quietly being rerouted by AI, so here's how to get ahead of it.

This week's edition covers:

  • Kevin's Take: why your marketing budget isn't really yours, and who's actually renting it to you
  • The Signal: Signal: AI is rewriting the B2B buyer journey before prospects hit your site, plus ChatGPT is now eating your paid click share
  • Tools & Tactics: how to measure if AI scrapers actually send you traffic, and a Notion system so your team's AI work stops resetting to zero
  • Quick Links: Google Ads' new B2B lead gen features, 6sense piping intent data into Claude and ChatGPT, and Clay's move into GTM orchestration

Kevin's Take

Your marketing budget isn't yours. You're renting it.

Human's of Martech (and my friend), Phil Gamache's piece on the four mindsets of modern marketers is this notion that our budgets aren't owned, they're rented, and every quarter we're basically re-signing the lease with the CFO based on whether we can show the last dollar did what we said it would. I think most of us walk into planning season acting like the number we got last year is a starting position we're defending, when in reality the finance team is watching every line and deciding in real time whether to renew us. It's a very different posture.

If you own something you protect it. If you're renting it you're constantly showing your work, and I think the marketing leaders who are going to do well over the next couple of years are the ones who accept that they're on a month-to-month lease, not a mortgage.

The other piece in there that I think is more urgent than it sounds is the surrogation trap, which is the idea that we pick a metric to stand in for a goal and then over time we forget the goal and just work the metric. MQLs are the classic one, we all know this, but it's happening again right now with AI-era metrics like pipeline sourced by an AI SDR or content produced per week.

We're already surrogating on the new stuff before we've even shown it maps to anything real. One thing I've found helpful is to write down, at the top of every dashboard, the actual business outcome the metric is supposed to be a proxy for, and then quarterly ask ourselves whether the proxy is still honest. Most of the time it's drifted, and nobody noticed because the number kept going up.

If I'm being honest with myself, what this piece really made me do is go look at our own scorecard and ask which numbers we're defending out of habit versus which ones we could actually walk into a CFO's office and defend as rent worth paying. That's an uncomfortable exercise, and I think it's the one worth doing before Q1 planning starts.

If you want to follow Phil's awesome podcast, go here.

That's it for this week. Talk soon.

— Kevin Kerner, CEO, Mighty & True

The Signal

New survey shows AI is rewriting the B2B buyer journey (1 min read)

Clarity and Norstat surveyed 175 B2B decision-makers and found AI is fundamentally reshaping how buyers research and evaluate purchases, changing what marketers must do to influence the journey.

Why it matters: Your buyer journey mapping and content strategy need an update if AI tools are now shaping how your prospects evaluate you before they ever hit your site.

ChatGPT now out-earns other sites for paid clicks from Google (3 min read)

New clickstream research from iPullRank finds ChatGPT captures a higher share of paid clicks from Google than any other top destination, signaling deep overlap between traditional search and AI discovery behavior. The data suggests users are treating ChatGPT as a search endpoint, often arriving via paid Google ads.

Why it matters: If your paid search strategy doesn't account for ChatGPT as a competing destination for your ad clicks, you're losing visibility into where your budget is actually going.

Tools & Tactics

Microsoft Clarity now tracks whether AI scraping delivers real referral traffic (1 min read)

Microsoft Clarity launched a new AI Scrape-to-Referral insights report that measures AI bot scraping activity against actual referral traffic. The metric helps sites determine whether AI crawler activity is translating into real visitor value.

Why it matters: This gives you a concrete way to measure whether AI search engines scraping your content are actually sending you traffic, so you can decide if optimizing for AI visibility is worth the effort.

A practitioner's system for shared AI marketing memory in Notion (1 min read)

Jonathan Martinez outlines a step-by-step system for running marketing teams on Notion as a shared 'multiplayer' hub for Claude skill files, brand guardrails, and campaign history, solving the scattered-knowledge problem he saw at Postmates. The framework moves teams from siloed 'singleplayer' AI use to a shared institutional memory layer.

Why it matters: If your team is onboarding Claude or similar AI tools without a shared system of record, you're already losing campaign history and repeating tests without knowing it.

Resources & Tools

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