the gtm engineer The Rise of Content Engineering with Eoin Clancy, VP of Growth at AirOps
Eoin Clancy is the VP of Growth at AirOps, a company that helps brands get found in LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Before joining AirOps, Eoin ran growth and marketing at Telnyx, where he began as a growth engineer. He spent a year using AirOps at Telnyx to automate inbound SDR work, enabling him to move 8 inbound SDRs to outbound. After that, he was sold on the product, and 18 months ago joined the AirOps team. When Eoin joined, AirOps had fifteen employees and was doing less than $1.5M in revenue. Since then, they've nearly 10x'd headcount and well over 10'x’d revenue.
In this podcast, we discuss:
* The new role of content engineering and why AirOps believes it will thrive in the new world of search
* Why generic AI-generated content doesn’t work anymore, and what actually differentiates content that ranks in LLMs
* How to make AI-generated content look like it was written by your team
* How content teams like Ramp and Carta use high velocity experimentation to separate themselves from competitors
* The case for investing in documentation and support guides
* How AirOps uses their own product to speed up and increase the impact of their webinar content
Episode highlights:
* 18 months ago, AI slop worked, and teams could pump out pages at scale while watching website visits climb. The old SEO playbook was to look at the top three results for a target keyword, see what sections and questions they covered, and release pages that copied or rephrased it. AI slop enabled that playbook at 10x scale. However, Google and LLMs have adapted and now reward unique insights that add to the conversation, rather than rehash what’s already out there, effectively killing the benefits of generating loads of AI slop content pages. Eoin explains that Reddit performs so well in AI search because many comments offer new takeaways.
* The two biggest changes to content in the age of AI are that: (1) it is easier to create more content than ever, and so the bar for speed (of net new and refreshed content) to keep up with the market has significantly increased, and (2) LLMs process content and rank differently than Google, making certain tactics (like offsite content) more important than before.
* In order to make AI content look like the team that wrote it, Eoin suggests feeding the AI internal context before having it write. If the goal is for AI to write like engineers talk, give it access to engineering Slack channels and standups, so the words and phrases in those places make their way into content. He also explains that building effective content workflows requires serious time and investment that is well worthwhile to speed up overall content creation and refresh.
* Eoin points to Ramp and Carta as examples of content teams that succeed by moving fast. Ramp has pushed the boundary of offsite content on Reddit because they ship so fast that they’re able to learn from rapid experimentation. On the other hand, Carta’s content team is now able to ship content three times faster than before, enabling them to go to market to new audiences and industries quickly.
* Eoin advocates for investing in documentation for the sake of AI search distribution. Docs are often the last thing to get updated and the first thing to go stale, but they’re rich with context, well structured, and contain the most nuance about a product. When someone asks ChatGPT for a tool that does X and integrates with HubSpot, docs are what surface. Eoin gives Salesforce as an example of a company that understands this. Most of their sitemap is how-tos and community content, and that’s what ranks first in AI search.
* Because AI search prioritizes fresh, up-to-date insights, AirOps regularly refreshes their existing content in order to keep it up to date. After recording a webinar, they use the transcript to auto-update existing related articles with new takeaways. This enables same-day turnarounds, so after a webinar is recorded in the morning, their content library is refreshed by day’s end.
* Branded search terms are an underrated metric. Even as teams optimize for AI search, people will still Google a company name after discovering it in ChatGPT. If a competitor is running a conquesting campaign on that branded term, they’ll steal the click. Eoin recommends keeping an eye on and tracking branded search terms over time, to ensure all bases are covered.
Where to find Eoin:
* AirOps
Transcript details:
(00:00) Introduction to Eoin and overview of AirOps
(03:34) Eoin’s background as a growth engineer at Telnyx and becoming an AirOps user before joining
(5:03) AirOps’ growth trajectory
(05:34) What VP of Growth means at AirOps, the builder enablement function and content engineering
(8:58) How AirOps is helping their customers adapt to the new reality of content creation
(11:00) How the modern content role differs from historical SEO roles
(16:14) Why Eoin thinks content teams will grow, not shrink
(20:52) How much should AI actually write, why AI slop content doesn’t work anymore, and where humans need to stay in the loop
(26:47) How to measure whether your content is sufficiently human and value-add
(32:06) The importance of content velocity
(34:24) Underrated metrics in content
(37:37) Why documentation is a goldmine for AI search visibility
(41:16) How AirOps uses their own platform for webinar content workflows
(46:34) Agentic browsers and how websites are going to change
(47:29) Where search is headed
(51:11) Why AirOps bet on webinars as a growth channel
(54:03) Favorite underrated tool, growth hack, and conclusion
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