Stacker CEO Noah Greenberg opened Cited, Stacker's inaugural brand journalism conference, in front of 200 senior content and communications leaders with a clear message: in an AI-driven landscape, narrative is more important than ever. High-quality, educational content is what builds brand affinity, earns authority, and drives visibility in AI search. The day's sessions, featuring leaders from Tripadvisor, Ramp, HubSpot, The Points Guy, and Hone Health, dug into mining company data for newsworthy stories, proving content ROI, collaborating across teams for AI visibility, and applying journalistic standards to brand storytelling.

HubSpot's content operation now reaches 50 million people a month — built not through SEO alone, but through 70 content professionals, 17 YouTube channels, and a roster of creator and media partnerships, Jonathan Hunt told Noah Greenberg. The team maps content against 27 touchpoints across a customer journey that no longer looks like a funnel, and takes a build-versus-buy approach: growing original programming in-house while strategically acquiring media properties, then giving those teams editorial independence alongside HubSpot's resources and distribution.

Former journalists are running some of the most influential editorial operations in the country — just not at newspapers. AJ Smith of The Points Guy, Tracy Middleton of Hone Health, and Sarah Firshein of Tripadvisor sat down with WSJ's Katie Deighton to unpack which skills carried over from the newsroom (operational discipline, curiosity, adaptability), which didn't, and how they're navigating a media landscape being reshaped by AI search. Their playbook: split content into brand-building versus conversion buckets, front-load budget pitches with what stakeholders actually care about, and treat GEO as one more distribution lever rather than a reason to rewrite content strategy from scratch.

When brands discover they are invisible in AI search results, the instinct is to produce more content immediately. But Robert MacCloy, CTO of Scrunch, argues for a more strategic approach: monitor your visibility first, prioritize high-authority earned media over Reddit, and triage existing content before creating anything new. The brands winning in GEO are the ones treating AI visibility like an experiment, not a content calendar.

GEO measurement frameworks are still evolving, and the panelists agreed there's no single source of truth — teams are using multiple tools to triangulate data rather than relying on universal KPIs. Success requires cross-functional collaboration, particularly integrating PR and marketing efforts since earned media drives the majority of citations. Perhaps the biggest mindset shift: brands can't delete inaccurate information from AI models, so the strategy is to consistently flood platforms with accurate content and shift the narrative over time.

Proving content's value to the C-suite is not a one-time pitch, the panelists agreed, it's a running conversation grounded in audience insight. Jeannie Kim, Jon Kowieski, and Erin Bruehl pushed back on vanity metrics like total organic traffic and impressions, pointing instead to blended customer acquisition cost, marketing-qualified leads, and citation tracking as the numbers that actually move leadership. They also drew a hard line between branded and non-branded content, since each serves a different purpose and needs its own reporting, and recommended setting aside 5 to 10 percent of budget for experimentation so teams can move quickly on what the data shows.

Most brand newsletters fail because they read like everyone else's, Daniel Krenitsyn, COO of beehiiv, told the Cited crowd — email has "survived every algorithmic shift, every platform collapse," but only pays off for brands willing to treat it as owned territory rather than another content dumping ground. Krenitsyn pointed to Ramp, Brex, and Kalshi as companies turning newsletters into real business outcomes by leaning on proprietary data to tell stories competitors can't replicate, warning against "undifferentiated, AI slop" in favor of genuine reader value over direct sales pitches. His takeaway: treat the newsletter like a product with its own metrics, not a content afterthought, and the payoff shows up in retention and revenue, not just opens.

Ara Kharazian, lead economist at Ramp, and Kelly Soderlund, head of insights at Samsara, told Ken Romano that turning proprietary data into stories worth spreading takes the same standards as a newsroom: editorial independence, intellectual honesty, and a willingness to publish findings that aren't always flattering to the business. Their playbook includes reacting to breaking news with unique datasets no one else has, using data to challenge prevailing narratives, and filling gaps in publicly available metrics — all with the goal of earning coverage from publishers and, increasingly, citations in AI search results.