At SMX Advanced in Boston earlier this month, I sat through back-to-back sessions from Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search and SEO Communications at Wix, and Jen Cornwell, Senior Director of AI SEO at Tinuiti. On paper, they covered the same beat: how AI search is reshaping the marketer’s job. In the room, they could not have approached it more differently. That gap turned out to be the most useful thing either talk taught me.
Following the conference, I emailed both Crystal and Jen and received a copy of both presentations to ensure I represented what they said at the event.
Carter’s Talk: A Framework For What To Optimize
Carter’s session rests on one distinction that does most of the conceptual work. Memory is what an AI assistant infers passively from how you talk to it, your tone, your complaints, your patterns. Personalization is what you actively declare, through profile settings, connected apps, and stated preferences, and it carries enough weight to shape what an agent actually does, not just how it sounds. You cannot SEO your way into someone’s inferred memory the way you’d tune a meta description, but you can engineer the signals that shape both halves at once.
The sharpest evidence she brought wasn’t a slide of best practices. It was an iPullRank experiment using three accounts running identical prompts with different levels of connected personal data, which produced visibly different AI Mode answers, including one response that addressed a hypothetical child by name in a streaming recommendation. That’s a controlled comparison, not an anecdote, and it’s the kind of detail that should worry anyone still treating AI search results as a single, generic output everyone receives the same way.
From there, Carter moved into tactics, starting with denominal nouns (“actor” instead of “the person who acted”) because semantic models cluster identity-related queries that way. And the average Google query runs three to four words, while the average ChatGPT opening prompt runs roughly 103 words. That gap is the argument for FAQ-style, narrowly specific content over broad landing pages. Users typing into an AI assistant are already further down the funnel than a search box ever made them.
Cornwell’s Talk: A Framework For Why Nobody Acts On It
Cornwell’s session had almost no new SEO data in it, and that’s the point. She opened by naming a different problem entirely. Most search teams aren’t short on insight; they’re short on an organization willing to act on the insight it already has. That’s not a search problem. It’s a change management problem, and she handed the room two borrowed frameworks to solve it, Kotter’s eight-step change model and Everett Rogers’ diffusion of innovation curve.
The device she used to make it stick was Kotter’s own 2005 fable about a penguin colony on a melting iceberg, re-skinned with AI Overviews as the melting ice and five cast roles (Sponsor, Trust, Catalyst, Analyst,…
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