Welcome to the first issue of Outliers.
Every week, we get a pretty unusual view into how cybersecurity companies are trying to reach the market. We talk to marketers deciding where to spend, agencies deciding how to angle, creators figuring out how to turn their expertise into a business, and security practitioners deciding which companies and ideas are actually worth paying attention to.
This newsletter is where I’ll share what we’re learning from those conversations. The goal is not to recap marketing news or tell you which LinkedIn tactic is working this week. It’s to write about the bigger shifts we’re seeing in cybersecurity marketing, creator businesses, content, distribution, and how technical expertise is being valued.
And there’s one shift I keep hearing about right now that feels much bigger than a new marketing tactic: AI search.
The Robots are Watching…Closely 🤖
A security marketer reached out to me this week with a request that would have sounded a little strange a year ago.
They wanted several dedicated YouTube videos from cybersecurity creators. The main goal was not just views, clicks, or leads. They wanted the content to help the company show up inside AI-generated answers.
That line stuck with me because it captures a much bigger change happening in security marketing right now.
Creator content is no longer being treated only as a media buy. It is starting to look like search infrastructure. The format highly formulaic. Mechanic. Is this what’s coming next?
First, what are AEO and GEO?
If you have not been buried in the latest marketing alphabet soup, AEO and GEO refer to optimizing content so a company is more likely to appear in answers generated by tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and other AI search products.
Your Average Security Marketing Convention in 2026
The old playbook was built around ranking a company webpage in Google. The new playbook is about giving answer engines enough credible material to understand who solves a problem, how the product works, and what trusted people in the market think about it.
This is where enlisting creators get interesting.
A strong cybersecurity creator already has three things most vendor content does not: a trusted voice, a real audience, and a history of explaining technical topics in language people actually use.
That combination is valuable to buyers. It may also become valuable to the systems answering their questions.
The obvious trap
Brands are going to hear this and conclude that they need more dedicated product videos. Technically, that may be true. But if the result is a ten-minute brochure read by somebody with a YouTube channel, it will miss the point. Nobody really wants to watch that without some level of prior trust or previous exposure.
Creators are not rented distribution.
In cybersecurity, trust is earned slowly. People follow practitioners because they explain tradeoffs, test claims, show their work, and occasionally say a product is not right for everyone. If a sponsorship removes that judgment, it removes the exact thing the brand wanted to borrow.
We see the same pattern again and again from brands and agencies alike:
A brand starts by asking for a product walkthrough.
The creator starts by asking what problem the audience is actually trying to solve.
The best content comes from letting the creator connect those two things in their own way, sometimes fully disregarding the format ask from the brand.
The creator has to be allowed to teach. The brand has to be comfortable not controlling every sentence. That tension is not a flaw in the model. It is the reason the model works. Audiences thrive on authenticity.
From campaign to content corpus
One sponsored post is a moment. A body of useful content is an asset.
If AI search becomes a serious distribution channel, the winning security brands will stop asking, “Which creator can post about us next month?” and start asking, “Which trusted experts should be part of the body of knowledge around our category?”
That leads to a different kind of creator program:
One piece explains the problem without pitching a product. Thought leadership/market setting/category definition.
Another shows the technical workflow in practice. Practitioner led/driven content.
A third compares approaches and explains the tradeoffs.
Interviews, newsletters, and short posts reinforce the same category story over time through social surround. This can last months.
That is more work than buying an integration. But it is also much harder for a competitor to copy.
In an AI Search world, niche audiences are going to matter more
The security market still overuses follower count as a shortcut for value.
But a creator with a modest audience of senior GRC leaders, cloud security architects, or offensive security practitioners may be far more useful than a general technology account with ten times the reach. The audience is smaller, but the people are closer to the problem and more likely to trust the person explaining it.
On a spreadsheet, the cost per thousand impressions can look worse. That is because impressions are often the wrong denominator.
The better question is how many credible interactions a brand is creating with the exact people who influence a security decision. What’s your impact within your ICP? AI search adds another layer because the useful life of a technical explanation can extend well beyond the first week of distribution.
Licensing is becoming its own product
Another trend is showing up alongside this shift. More brands want to take creator content and run it through paid social, programmatic video, thought leader ads, and their own channels.
That can be a great deal for both sides, but it should not be treated as a free bonus. There are really three separate things being purchased:
The work required to create the content.
Distribution to the creator’s audience.
The right to reuse that creator’s identity and content in paid media.
Those are different assets and they should be priced that way. In a market where nobody has perfect benchmarks yet, short licensing trials tied to actual performance make a lot of sense. Start with 30 days, learn what the asset does, then decide what longer-term usage is worth.
The bigger opportunity for creators
The creator economy in cybersecurity is also getting wider than sponsored posts.
Creators are being asked to host events, speak to customers, run webinars, produce research, interview executives, build dedicated newsletters, and help companies shape the category itself.
LinkedIn helps somebody find another job. Upwork helps them sell their time. Substack helps them publish. None of those platforms are really built around turning professional expertise into a full business. That gap is becoming obvious, and in a weird way we are already filling it manually every day.
We find people with real credibility, package what they can offer, connect them with companies that need that expertise, work out pricing, negotiate the rights, and handle the operational mess behind the scenes. The post is just one possible output.
What I would do today if I were a security marketer to influence AEO/GEO
Choose creators based on audience fit and authority, not follower count alone.
Start with the buyer’s problem, not the product brief.
Give the creator enough freedom to have an actual opinion and demonstrate confident authority.
Build a connected series of useful assets instead of isolated posts. Repetition to feed the machine.
Separate creation, distribution, and licensing in the budget. Need licensing to build a dominant, saturated distribution model & cadence.
Measure the first week, but also watch what keeps working three, six, and twelve months later. Build a cadence on what works.
The brands that get this right will not simply have more influencer content, or better AEO/GEO. They will have a durable layer of trusted, third-party education surrounding their category.
That is a much bigger prize.
