About our guest — Kevin White

Kevin White is the head of marketing at Scrunch AI, where he's building visibility infrastructure for the post-LLM web — analytics and optimisation that show brands how they're being represented inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. Before Scrunch, Kevin spent a decade marketing for the companies that defined the modern operator stack — Common Room, Retool, and Segment — and has advised teams at Ashby and Deepnote. He's one of the most pragmatic operators in the AEO space, with a working hypothesis that "there are no experts in this market yet" and a habit of running controlled experiments instead of taking anyone's word for it.

Core takeaways

Bots Are Your New VIP Visitor: Retrieval bots from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini are now hitting sites at meaningful volume — on Scrunch's own site, bot traffic exceeds human visits. Each retrieval call has a real human with commercial intent behind it. The work for marketers and engineers is shifting toward making sites cheap to crawl in tokens (Markdown and JSON over heavy JavaScript), so retrieval bots get more useful information and your brand surfaces in more answers.

Wave 1 GTM-E Was Enrichment. Wave 2 Is Bespoke Trigger Hunting: The first wave of go-to-market engineering consolidated firmographic enrichment for SDRs. That layer is mature. The alpha now lives one step upstream — in identifying the specific sequence of triggers that puts a buyer in commercial-intent mode (a product action, a competitive event, a regulatory shift) and building the workflow to catch it at scale. Tools like Cloud Code have collapsed the build cost from a 6-figure software contract to a $20/month subscription.

Hire The Vibe Coder Over The Content Writer: Vibe-coded interactive tools — site graders, prompt generators, real-time domain audits — are now more compelling outbound offers than gated PDFs. The same build gets reused as outbound asset, programmatic SEO play, sales enablement surface, and self-serve qualification interface. Kevin would hire a vibe coder over a content writer 100 times out of 100. Elena Verna at Lovable just hired one full-time. The move is no longer fringe.

Reddit Citations Are TOFU. Lower-Funnel Intent Lives In The Long Tail: Most "win at AEO" advice fixates on Reddit and Wikipedia. Kevin's data says those surfaces cover top-of-funnel referential prompts — "what is X" — not the comparison and evaluation prompts that drive commercial intent. The prompts you actually want to win for are answered by long-tail niche publications. Optimise where your buyer's lower-funnel question lives, not where the volume looks biggest on a leaderboard.

Top quotes

> "We have more bot traffic now than we have human visits to our site."

> "If I had the choice between hiring a vibe coder to build really cool tools and someone on the content side of things who's going to write a bunch of like white papers, I'm definitely going to hire the vibe coding person 100 times out of 100."

> "There's not really an expert in the space. I would say instead of listening to me or others, go out there, create controlled experiments, see if those experiments yield the right kind of results that you're looking for."

> "As marketers, you would typically dismiss in the past — bot traffic, this is not going to give me any information on the user experience. But now, it's like, I want that bot traffic, because there's a person with intent behind that bot."

Referenced tools and resources

AI assistants & dev: Cloud Code, Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT

GTM & enrichment: Common Room, Clay, Clearbit, Apollo, Outreach, Artisan, 11x

AI search visibility: Scrunch AI, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews

Citation surfaces: Reddit, G2, Trustpilot, Wikipedia

Web infra & CDN: Cloudflare, Akamai, Vercel

Analytics: GA4, PostHog, Similar Web

Timestamps

(00:04) Welcome to S2E3 — Kevin's path from Segment to Retool to Common Room to Scrunch AI

(03:00) What's actually changed in GTM engineering — Wave 1 enrichment vs. Wave 2 trigger reverse-engineering

(04:55) Reverse-engineering signals back from buyer commercial intent

(09:25) The biggest failure mode — list-building beats message-coaching, every time

(12:00) SDRs as multipliers, not dispensable headcount

(14:00) Stack the plays as patterns emerge — and don't stop hiring once it works

(16:25) Where GTM engineering is winning — and the untapped industries with greenfield opportunity

(18:15) Cloud Code as today's tool of choice — and why Kevin won't be loyal next quarter

(20:40) Worked example: paid spend × declining organic = Scrunch ICP

(23:05) Who maintains the sprawl of vibe-coded tools? Enter the AI architect

(24:43) The vibe coder vs. content writer hiring decision — 100 out of 100 times

(27:30) One vibe-coded tool, four surface areas — outbound, SEO, enablement, self-serve

(30:30) AEO, GEO, AI search — and why Kevin stays acronym-agnostic

(33:14) There are no AEO experts yet — run controlled experiments instead

(36:00) Reddit and Wikipedia cover top-of-funnel. Long-tail niche pubs cover lower funnel.

(39:00) Two Scrunch personas — marketing (CMO/SEO) and engineering (CTO/CIO)

(42:30) Bots are now your VIP visitor — Scrunch's own traffic data

(44:00) Three categories of bots: traditional search, training, and retrieval

(44:48) The token economy of crawlability — Markdown and JSON over JavaScript

(48:46) The mental shift from "filter bot traffic" to "want bot traffic"

(53:12) Hire deep IC experts and let them stack AI on top — the new shape of marketing teams

Where to Find Kevin

Scrunch AI

Where to Connect with Jared & Matteo

Jared Waxman, GTM Engineer School Co-founder: LinkedIn

Matteo Tittarelli, GTM Engineer School Co-founder: LinkedIn, X, Website, Newsletter

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