Every content leader eventually has to walk into a room and defend a budget — and the leaders who do it well aren't relying solely on instinct. They're pulling from dashboards, AI citation analysis, and attribution data to make a case the C-suite can get behind.
At Stacker's Cited 2026 summit, three leaders — Fora Travel's VP of Brand & Content, Jeannie Kim; growth marketing consultant Jon Kowieski; and Current's VP of Communications, Erin Bruehl — shared what they've learned translating content's value into terms that finance will trust.
They also shared other tips that will get you thinking about how you approach your content efforts.
Knowing what your audience cares about most is the best way to approach framing the pitch.
The C-suite is usually focused on ROI, "whether [content ROI] is explicitly like a straight line or like a wandering wave line," as Jeannie put it.
The idea of "pitching" content might be misleading, she added, since showcasing its value is never one conversation. She said you will have multiple attempts to make the case in a way the person you're talking to actually cares about.
💡 Hot tip: Advocate for setting aside 5-10% of your budget for experimentation, Jon said. "With how fast things are changing, you might need to do something new that you just didn't budget for."
Great content strategy paired with intentional execution can ensure that your work doesn’t end up on the proverbial shelf. Here are the main ways that leaders are adapting their content strategy now to meet the new demands of GEO.
Be unique and act quickly: Focus on what drives value for your audience, then move fast on production and distribution before competitors targeting the same keywords catch up, Jon said. Lean on brand insights or case studies that competitors can't copy.
Use your data as a guide: Content doesn't need to be laser-focused on initial leads. Break down attribution into stages to see what's working, and let it guide what you create next.
Focus on the right traffic, not more traffic: Search traffic has declined catastrophically, but Jeannie said she has seen at multiple companies that the right strategy generates more revenue from less traffic. Volume matters less than conversion and value.
Structure your site to match: Jon said he supports content hubs instead of one catch-all blog, grouping content by topic for users and crawlers alike. Erin said she does the same; Current's blog serves consumers, while a separate newsroom serves investors and partners.
It's also important to acknowledge the distinction between branded and non-branded content to make sure each is tied to the right metric.
Non-branded search shows what people are searching for as they discover you for the first time — versus branded search, which serves up content geared towards people who already know you, whether through GEO, ads, or other content. Watching branded search grow is one of the clearest signals of how your other initiatives are performing, Jeannie said.
Jon said he reports the two separately because the strategies differ. He says non-branded is where new leads come from, so he works backward from top SEO keywords to find the "money prompts" people use before they know your name. He said he has also seen a podcast lift branded traffic for two straight weeks, which was a clear enough signal to invest further.
The new metrics — and acronyms — used in brand journalism can be a learning curve for folks coming from the traditional journalism world, but in some cases, these new yardsticks can feel more authentic to the content being created.
Virality isn't the main goal: Jeannie's lifestyle-journalism instincts were built for page views and clicks. In brand journalism, she said, chasing virality is like "throwing more trash into the top of the funnel" — meaning it's creating more traffic that was never going to convert.
The directness of content metrics: Ad-supported media, Jeannie said, made her feel like her real job was "selling eyeballs to advertisers." Meanwhile, tying content to conversions and lifetime value feels more honest: it's clear what the company sells, and her content just helps people decide if they need it.
The debate over which metrics to include in a content strategy is ever-changing and dependent on the brand, but a few clear patterns arose from the panel.
Jon framed his content strategy and measurement approach simply: Brand work and GEO authority drive influence, and engagement on top of that should translate into more customers. He said he tracks his content in terms of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs) but warned that not all leads are equal. The wrong audience can inflate both while hurting your numbers, he said.
Blended CAC (customer acquisition cost) is another important metric used across brands, and it's particularly helpful for gauging overall effectiveness, given the blurred lines of attribution inherent with GEO. Blended CAC is found by dividing all acquisition costs by all customers, including "free" organic ones. This is a number that wins over the C-suite since it trends down as organic grows and paid costs keep climbing, Jeannie said.
What to stop obsessing over? Total organic traffic, Jon said, because it doesn't tell you if you're reaching the right people. Jeannie agreed: Some of her best-performing content barely got clicks but earned heavy citations from high-authority press.
Erin's answer was to stop reporting on impressions: "If I never saw that again as a comms person, I'd really be so happy." She said that engagement and citation metrics are closer proxies for someone actually reading your work — but that not every piece of content needs to do the same job.
Beyond the top-line numbers, Erin's citation dashboard has become a way to spot gaps in authority, not just performance. For example, she said an affordability data study was being cited for months because it sat squarely in Current's lane and was aligned with financial products the brand already sells. By contrast, a lifestyle piece on surviving wedding season on a budget barely registered since the platforms simply didn’t see Current as an authority on that topic yet. She said those insights are not failures so much as a map, showing where to double down and where to build credibility before those stories pay off.
Jeannie recalled her value-per-session dashboard at Policygenius, where she tracked revenue through the pipeline page by page, so the team could see insights like how a 10% traffic bump on one page might generate 10 times the revenue of the same bump in traffic elsewhere.
Given the influence of citation-based metrics in GEO right now, Erin reverse-engineered a Claude workflow to understand what prompts in AI searches lead to story citations. She said she keeps that tracking separate from her team's overall brand-visibility tracking so the two don't muddy each other. This means she could tell her CEO specifics like how a single December blog post earned 500 citations in a month.
Jeannie said she does something similar, asking Claude to periodically audit and revise her full prompt list. Jon said he also works backward from his highest-converting pages to find the "money prompts" behind them.
Erin said that working with Stacker enabled her to stand up a consumer comms program as a team of one. Her strategy is to write a story, then distribute it through Stacker's Newswire to gain earned distribution and increase the likelihood of AI mentions and citations.
"I feel like I've been very fortunate in that regard," she said, "And it's kind of interesting how we've gone back to the things we were doing just a few years ago."
The through-line across all three perspectives in this panel was that proving content's ROI isn't about finding one perfect metric; it's about matching the right measure to the right goal and making the case again and again.