Vivek Shankar
About
Vivek Shankar is a B2B content, SEO, and answer engine optimisation (AEO) consultant based in Lisbon. He works with B2B SaaS and fintech clients on content strategy, SEO audits, and AI search visibility. He also holds a senior leadership role at Krossings, a go-to-market (GTM) engineering startup, where he leads AEO workstreams and client delivery.
Before moving into content and SEO, Vivek spent several years in institutional finance and foreign exchange (FX) journalism, working with J.P. Morgan, RBS, and Freddie Mac. This background shapes his emphasis on evidence, sourcing, and precision in how brands build authority with both search engines and AI systems.
His work centers on helping in-house marketing teams understand why strong content and SEO programmes often fail to translate into AI visibility and which specific, practical changes can close that gap.
Vivek Shankar | Why Customer Journey Mapping Is the Overlooked Foundation of AI-Era Content Strategy
Most organic content strategies still start with keywords or, more recently, with a list of prompts pulled from a tool. Both approaches skip the step that actually determines whether any of it works: knowing what buyers need to know at each stage of their decision-making process and in what order.
This talk makes the case that customer journey mapping is not a nice-to-have for content teams - it is the missing input that determines everything downstream. Without it, teams guess which prompts matter, chase ideal customer profile (ICP) questions with no sense of priority, and end up with content coverage that is heavy at the top and bottom of the funnel but empty in the middle - exactly where buyers are doing the most active comparison, whether that comparison happens in a search engine or an AI-generated answer.
Vivek Shankar will show how journey mapping reframes three things content teams currently do blindly: which prompts and queries are actually worth tracking for AI visibility, which ICP questions deserve dedicated content rather than a passing mention, and where the real coverage gaps lie across the buyer’s journey - not just in traffic terms, but in whether the right content exists for the right buyer at the right moment in their decision-making process.
Attendees will leave with a simple way to map their own buyer journeys and use that map to prioritise content and prompt-tracking decisions rather than working backwards from whatever a keyword or prompt tool happens to surface.