The Digital Marketing Podcast · Daniel Rowles and Ciaran Rogers

The Hubspot CMO Interview - Kipp Bodnar on AI, Answer Engine Optimisation and the Future of Marketing

February 17, 2026·21 min

The premise is blunt. Daniel Rowles puts AI, answer engine optimization, and marketing discovery on the 2026 radar, then Bodnar makes the case that the pace is not normal. He says marketing may be heading into its biggest year of change yet, with moves that used to take weeks or months now happening in days. Discovery is the thread running through it all. The conversation keeps circling back to how companies get found when people lean on AI answers, search, social, YouTube, and similar channels instead of the old habits. Bodnar treats answer engine optimization as an early opening because the competition has not fully caught up. The logic is pretty simple. New channels are less picked over, so marketers can learn faster and sometimes turn small numbers into meaningful growth. His example is a company moving from 50 visits from chatgpt.com to 500 visits. That is still small, but it proves the channel can move. Daniel spots the echo of early SEO, when search work mattered but often took ages to pay off. AEO, in Bodnar's view, can show value faster because it does not carry the same page rank and crawlability drag as traditional SEO. The episode stays useful. Daniel asks what marketers should watch, and Bodnar points to content production, AI tools, data for personalization, agents, and new discovery behavior. HubSpot becomes the working example, especially when Daniel connects the company to the loop marketing material. By the end, Daniel is joking about putting videos of himself into Google Gemini, which says a lot about the episode's mood: try things before the playbook hardens.

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