About Trevor
Trevor Pyle is Head of Marketing at Profound, a Series C company building the visibility and analytics infrastructure for the answer engine era. He joined when the company was around 25 people. It is now around 280, with offices in New York, Buenos Aires, London, and San Francisco. He now sits at the intersection of AEO, brand, and agentic marketing, and hosts Profound's flagship event, Zero Click.
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Most marketing teams are still debating whether AEO will replace SEO. Trevor Pyle thinks that’s the wrong conversation. The real question is what kind of marketer you need to become when answer engines are reshaping discovery, attention is harder to earn than ever, and a new role is quietly emerging at the center of it all: the marketing engineer.
In this episode, we went deep on how Profound thinks about brand, attention, attribution, and what the marketing team of the future actually looks like.
Here’s what I took away:
1) AEO expanded the SEO toolkit. It didn’t kill it.
The old SEO problem was about visibility and ranking. AEO is about influence, guidance, and shaping answers across a corpus that is far larger than anything Google pulled from. The result is that SEOs now have latitude to work across PR, comms, content operations, and technical teams rather than just their own domain.
2) The evergreen pillar page is over.
LLMs pull from content less than 13 weeks old. The page that ranked number one for two years and never needed updating is no longer a viable strategy. Agents cycle content in and out based on recency, relevance, and freshness across the entire web.
3) Attention is the new moat. Quality and velocity together.
Trevor credits this framing to George Warnocki, VP of Growth at Ramp. The argument: traditional performance channels are overcrowded, CPCs keep rising, and AI is flooding the market with new competitors daily. The companies that stay top of mind are treating their marketing team like a production house, creating content that is genuinely beautiful, aesthetically considered, and connected to the value prop. Quality alone is not enough. Pace and launch velocity are equally important.
4) “Aura” is a real marketing metric. It just isn’t easy to quantify.
Trevor’s CEO tracks aura as one of marketing’s most important outputs. The way Trevor measures it: performance lift across direct response channels during brand campaigns, event waitlist demand, and employer brand data. When candidates consistently say they applied because they saw a video on LinkedIn or spotted an out-of-home ad in the Union Square subway, the aura work is landing. It starts with performance data and ends with how confident the internal team feels about what they are building.
5) Zero Click went from 300 to 1,000 attendees in one year, with thousands on the waitlist.
The format is community-first, not pipeline-first. Profound doesn’t tie the event directly to a pipeline number. The goal is to put the right people in a room, create an experience they talk about, and let the content live on social afterward. Every piece of food is tasted in advance. Every pixel is checked before doors open. The book Trevor puts on every new marketing team member’s desk is Unreasonable Hospitality by the owner of Eleven Madison Park.
6) The marketing team has three layers: PMM at the core, marketing engineers, and in-person experience.
Product marketing sits at the foundation and acts across the full funnel. Marketing engineers systematize and optimize the workflows of every other team. The third group owns in-person hospitality and event experience, bridging into ABM and digital. As product becomes easier to build, brand becomes harder to ignore and more necessary to invest in. The marketing engineer is the role that connects those two realities.
7) Attribution is a mixed model problem
Profound uses data science to build telemetry across every deal from start to finish, mapping all touchpoints before creating models around the mix. The philosophical alignment with sales leadership is simple: revenue is what matters, regardless of where it comes from. The question Trevor and his head of sales ask together is what they feel is working, not which team gets credit.
Find Trevor on LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-pyle/
Enjoy,
— Jordan
