Generative AI Revolutionizes Marketing: 37 Real-World Applications Revealed

The past year has witnessed an unprecedented leap in the capabilities of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Letaido. What were once considered complex, non-automatable marketing tasks are now within reach, accessible to marketers without requiring advanced technical expertise. A comprehensive guide, compiled from insights of seasoned marketers, outlines 37 practical applications of AI across various marketing disciplines, from SEO to international marketing, providing actionable workflows that can be replicated.

These AI-powered workflows are largely facilitated by Letaido, an AI marketing agent developed by Ahrefs. Current Ahrefs customers can access Letaido for a complimentary month.

SEO: Streamlining Tedious Tasks and Enhancing Strategy

A significant portion of SEO involves repetitive and intricate tasks such as analyzing crawl exports, processing Search Console data, and managing spreadsheets. Generative AI excels in automating these processes. However, it’s crucial to note that AI is not a substitute for SEO expertise; its effectiveness hinges on the user’s judgment. Claims of fully automated SEO for a nominal monthly fee are often misleading.

• Quality Rater Page Assessment: Dan Hinckley of Go Fish Digital has developed an AI agent that emulates Google’s quality raters. This tool evaluates a webpage against Google’s guidelines, providing detailed feedback on areas of strength and weakness. It analyzes search intent, checks About and footer pages, and even records a video of its assessment, offering a valuable alternative to manually reviewing Google’s extensive rater handbook.
• Accelerated Keyword Research: Sam, VP of Marketing at Ahrefs, spearheaded the creation of an AI-driven keyword research tool. This agent identifies seed keywords, retrieves volume data from Keywords Explorer, and analyzes SERPs to assess intent and difficulty. It also categorizes page types within the top 10 results, enabling marketers to understand SERP composition (e.g., video-heavy, forum-based) before investing in content creation. Keywords are graded as Go, Maybe, or Skip, clustered into topics, and presented with competitor gap analysis and hub-and-spoke maps.
• Developer-Actionable Site Audits: The Ahrefs team has integrated generative AI to connect their Site Audit tool directly with GitHub. This integration automates the creation of pull requests for high-severity technical issues, such as indexability problems and broken links. Developers receive a checklist and audit data, streamlining the process of addressing website health issues.
• Traffic Boost Through AI-Generated FAQs: Steven Macdonald demonstrated a 32% average traffic increase across 21 existing blog posts by using ChatGPT to identify and answer reader questions, appending them as FAQs. This initiative also led to a significant rise in keyword rankings.
• Internal Linking Engine Development: An AI tool has been developed to suggest internal links for blog articles. By converting articles into numerical representations (vector embeddings), the tool identifies semantically similar pages. This process, which traditionally requires holding hundreds of articles in mind, is now automated, significantly improving internal linking strategies. Ahrefs’ Site Audit also offers an "Internal link opportunities" report that suggests links based on keyword rankings and identifies orphan pages or broken internal links.
• Automated Internal Link Insertion: John Iwuozor created a Python script that identifies relevant internal links and automatically inserts them into web pages. This script streamlines the laborious task of editing pages to incorporate new links, addressing a common bottleneck in SEO efforts.
• Prioritized SEO Plans from Search Console Data: Rudiger Dalchow developed a tool that analyzes Search Console exports to generate actionable plans for content creation. By grouping pages by topic, identifying search intent, and highlighting pages competing for the same queries, the tool provides briefs for writers and addresses structural SEO issues that are not apparent in standard reports. Ahrefs’ Site Explorer also offers an "Opportunities" report that identifies potential SEO improvements.

AI Search Optimization: Navigating the LLM Landscape

Ensuring brand visibility in AI-driven search environments, such as ChatGPT, presents a complex challenge. While technical jargon abounds, many effective strategies are rooted in familiar SEO principles. AI is instrumental in speeding up the analysis required for these tasks.

• LLM Page Perspective Analysis: Aimee Jurenka created a tool that assesses how an LLM perceives a webpage. By analyzing raw HTML and rendered screenshots, it scores content clarity, citation potential, and JavaScript-dependent information, highlighting issues that may not be apparent to human users.
• Fan-Out Query Mapping: Chris Long developed a script to identify if a website adequately addresses the nuanced questions AI assistants pose. By breaking down user queries into narrower components, the script scores website pages against these components, revealing content gaps.
• Rewriting Pages for AI Queries: Wil Reynolds utilizes Bing’s webmaster tools to identify the specific questions that lead to his pages being cited in AI answers. He then rewrites pages to directly address these queries, transforming content optimization from guesswork to a data-driven comparison.
• Template Design Based on AI Citations: Adina Timar has redesigned listicle and comparison templates based on AI citation data. By tracking which pages are quoted by different AI models for various prompts, she creates templates that align with how AI assistants actually structure answers, emphasizing pages with genuine insights and comparisons.
• Content Prioritization from AI Citations: Ross Hudgens’ team prioritizes content creation based on prompts that drive sales and the frequency of their pages being cited in AI answers. By cross-referencing this with ordinary Google search demand, they focus on topics that are both commercially valuable and visible to AI.

Content Marketing: Enhancing Efficiency and Depth

While AI-generated blog posts can be generic, treating content marketing as a multi-step process reveals AI’s utility in research, briefing, outlining, editing, fact-checking, and internal linking.

• Reduced Content Creation Time: A personal workflow has been developed that reduces the time to produce a publishable blog post to approximately two hours. This is achieved by breaking down the editorial process into granular steps, each guided by AI with human oversight at every stage.
• Web Page Development with AI Assistance: Kelsey Libert learned to build landing pages using Cursor, a code editor with integrated AI. By describing desired features in plain language, she generated code for 30 landing pages, demonstrating AI’s potential to democratize web development for marketers.
• Data-Driven Research Without Engineering Expertise: Mateusz from Ahrefs’ content team leveraged AI to write code for data analysis, correlating organic traffic with stock prices. This enabled him to conduct a substantial data study, highlighting AI’s role in overcoming technical barriers to original research.
• Eliminating AI’s Generic Voice: Myriam Jessier’s "Absolute Mode" system prompt strips extraneous elements from ChatGPT’s responses, such as filler text and conversational pleasantries, resulting in more direct and useful output.
• Rapid Presentation Creation: Wil Reynolds uses AI to transform spoken ideas into presentation decks. By transcribing his explanations, an LLM structures the content into a narrative arc, which is then used to generate deck variations.
• Managing Content Refresh Backlogs: An "Update Pipeline" tool assists in refreshing outdated content. It identifies stale statistics, outdated product descriptions, and missing information compared to current top-ranking articles. This process, crucial for maintaining relevance in both traditional search and AI overviews, streamlines the updating of a large content library.
• Discovering Unique Statistics: AI tools can unearth statistics from PDFs, Word documents, and PowerPoint decks that are not readily available on web pages, providing unique data points for content that can earn backlinks.
• Efficient Expert Quote Curation: Mateusz Makosiewicz utilizes NotebookLM to query and organize expert quotes from various sources, enabling him to quickly identify relevant insights and their origins.
• Content Repurposing from Webinars and Calls: An AI system transforms webinar recordings into blog outlines, clip guides, and social media briefs. It also analyzes sales and customer calls to create databases of pain points, objections, and customer quotes, providing valuable insights for content planning.

Marketing Analytics: Automating Reporting and Deepening Insights

Reporting is a highly automatable marketing function. AI can handle data extraction, integration, and table generation, reducing manual errors and freeing up marketers for analysis.

• Automated Monthly Reporting: Letaido generates comprehensive monthly blog performance reports, pulling data from Google Search Console and Ahrefs Web Analytics. This automated process includes KPI tiles, trend charts, and drafted analysis bullets, significantly reducing manual reporting time.
• Content Relevance Audits: A semantic audit of the Ahrefs blog used AI to analyze articles based on their core topics. By measuring the distance of each article from the blog’s central themes, the tool identified content that was off-topic, revealing a correlation between topical relevance and organic traffic.
• Integrated Data Audits: Chris Long documented a content audit assistant that integrates crawl, analytics, and Search Console data. By feeding these datasets into Claude via Zapier, the AI can identify pages losing traffic, misaligned search intent, or content that no longer fits the site’s overall strategy. Letaido offers a similar integrated solution with built-in connectors.

Social Media and Community: Enhancing Engagement and Insight

AI can assist in monitoring brand mentions and drafting social media content, but human judgment is essential for nuanced engagement.

• Identifying Relevant Reddit Conversations: The lemlist team used AI to sift through Reddit to find relevant discussions for engagement. This approach, combined with human-crafted responses, led to increased traffic and sign-ups from Reddit, with some threads even ranking in Google and appearing in AI answers.
• Uncovering Customer Language: Britney Muller advocates using AI to extract audience insights from community platforms. By analyzing discussions mentioning a brand or subject, AI can identify recurring complaints, questions, and comparisons, revealing the language customers use organically.
• Personalized Social Media Drafts: A Letaido-powered social post generator creates five distinct drafts for each published article, tailored to the author’s voice. These drafts offer various angles, making the selection and editing process more efficient.

PR and Outreach: Optimizing Timing and Relevance

AI can monitor news for PR opportunities and draft follow-up emails, but human oversight is critical to ensure pitches are relevant and welcome.

• Real-Time PR Opportunity Monitoring: Mark Williams-Cook developed a Python script using a local LLM to scan thousands of daily news stories for PR opportunities based on client interest profiles, routing qualified leads to Slack.
• Rapid Follow-Up Email Generation: Andy Chadwick employs a ChatGPT workflow trained on his tone and product details to draft follow-up emails from sales call transcripts in minutes, leading to a significant increase in closing rates.
• AI-Powered Cold Outreach Campaigns: Sam Oh built an AI-driven outreach campaign managed via Slack. This system identifies prospects, analyzes their traffic growth, and drafts personalized emails, resulting in a high conversion rate for booked meetings. Letaido offers a similar native solution with integrated data.
• Automated Press Release Generation: An AI tool generates formatted press releases from blog post URLs or product feature notes. This automates the initial drafting process for promoting original research, ensuring timely outreach to media outlets.

Product Marketing: Streamlining Launch Packages and Competitive Analysis

AI can generate entire launch packages from a single brief and reverse-engineer competitor campaigns to inform ad copy.

• Comprehensive Launch Package Generation: A "GTM Generator" creates a full suite of launch materials, including a brief, landing page, video script, promotional email, and flyer, from a single product brief. A crucial final step involves AI cross-referencing these documents to identify any inconsistencies.
• Competitor Ad Copy Reverse-Engineering: Ahrefs’ Paid Ads Campaign Builder analyzes competitor keywords and landing pages to generate targeted ad copy for identified gaps in bidding strategies.
• Automated Webinar Setup: A webinar automation app, built by Constance, sets up entire webinars from a title and date. It creates tasks in a project management tool for all necessary steps, from promotion to slide creation and post-webinar reporting.

International Marketing: Localizing Content at Scale

AI can facilitate translation and localization, but careful attention to cultural nuances is essential.

• Link-Preserving Blog Post Translation: An AI translation pipeline handles multiple languages, ensuring internal links are updated to point to localized versions of articles. It also incorporates country-specific keyword research for more effective content.
• Localized Visual Content: An AI translator specializes in localizing charts and diagrams within posts, adapting prices, web addresses, and names to specific regions and languages. Users can correct translations, leading to more accurate localized visuals.
• Cost-Effective Live Subtitling: A "Live Interpreter" uses AI to generate live subtitles in multiple languages from microphone feeds at conferences, offering a significantly more affordable alternative to human interpreters and incorporating product-specific glossaries for accuracy.

Conclusion: AI as a Multiplier of Marketing Expertise

While some claim to have replaced marketing teams with AI, the reality is that AI is a powerful tool that amplifies existing human expertise. The most successful applications of AI in marketing are driven by professionals who deeply understand their workflows and desired outcomes. AI multiplies what marketers bring to the table; without inherent knowledge and judgment, its impact is limited. Marketers are encouraged to remain critical, recognizing AI not as a magic solution but as a means to enhance speed, quality, and even enjoyment in their work. The article concludes by inviting marketers to share their own successful AI workflows.