New Builders: AI Marketing Automation, GEO and the Future of Originality

Thought Bubble: Miracly Wants to Put Marketing on Autopilot. But What Happens to Originality?

I know how nerdy this sounds, but there’s something genuinely exciting about watching entrepreneurs see a problem, decide the existing solutions aren’t good enough, and build something entirely new.  That’s what we did at PRToolFinder and we’re still figuring things out!

Since there appears to be a whole lot of building going on, that’s exactly the kind of story I want to celebrate in this new PRToolFinder series, New Builders.

Our first spotlight is on Swedish startup Miracly, which recently launched with a $2 million pre-seed investment to build an AI-powered alternative to traditional marketing agencies.

And it’s an ambitious one.

Building a Different Kind of Marketing Engine

Miracly began with a familiar frustration: businesses paying thousands of dollars for SEO and generative engine optimization (GEO) audits, receiving recommendations, and then being left to figure out how to implement them.  OR even worse, paying for implementation and seeing no results even after almost a year (we know SEO takes time but …)

The company set out to build the platform its founders wished they’d had themselves.

Today, Miracly combines AI visibility analytics with content creation, PR, social media and performance marketing capabilities. Its AI agents can generate recommendations, automate workflows, track business objectives and even identify potential revenue opportunities hiding in customer interactions.  Yes, the premise is compelling: move beyond telling businesses what they should do and actually help them do it.

And the timing is good too.

As traditional search traffic becomes less predictable (I know, understatement of the year), paid acquisition gets more expensive, and AI answer engines increasingly influence how buyers discover companies and products, businesses are understandably looking for new ways to remain visible.

Miracly is building for that reality.

The Productivity Opportunity—and the Question Behind It

Here’s where I find myself both enthusiastic and a little conflicted.

AI-powered marketing tools are opening doors that were previously available only to organizations with substantial budgets and specialized teams. A small business can now undertake activities that once required an agency, a collection of software subscriptions, or considerably more people.

That’s a meaningful democratization of marketing capability.

But we’re also entering an era in which the same technologies that help us become more productive are encouraging us to produce more of the same.

Consider the growing pressure to optimize content not just for Google, but for generative AI systems and the agents increasingly involved in researching, comparing and recommending products.

Generative engine optimization is becoming an important consideration. Understanding how AI answer engines represent a company, whether they cite its content, and what information they use to form recommendations is increasingly relevant to marketing strategy.

Yet there’s a distinction worth preserving:

Being discoverable by AI is not the same thing as being distinctive, memorable or worth discovering.

If every company uses similar tools, similar prompts, similar recommendations and similar optimization strategies, what happens to the original thinking that once differentiated one brand from another?

If we all optimize our content to answer the questions machines are likely to ask, are we still writing for the people who actually have those questions?

And if the answer is increasingly no, what are we gaining, and what might we be losing?

Are We Trading Originality for Productivity?

I don’t think this is an argument against AI-generated content, I leverage AI assistance all the time. Nor do I believe we should ignore SEO or GEO in the name of creative purity.

Visibility matters. Discoverability matters. And frankly, creating great content that nobody finds isn’t much of a marketing strategy.

But originality matters, too.  I’ll admit, I’m struggling with this (anybody else?)

The ideas that differentiate companies, the perspectives that make a story interesting, the experiences that give a writer something meaningful to say—these aren’t necessarily the things that emerge from optimizing a workflow.

There’s a potential long-term cost to an ecosystem increasingly filled with content engineered to satisfy algorithms rather than engage people.

We could end up with more content, more efficiently produced, and less genuinely useful information.

More answers, fewer original questions.

More visibility, less distinction.

And perhaps an internet that becomes increasingly efficient at delivering information while becoming less interesting to explore.

That’s not inevitable. AI can also help people research more deeply, challenge assumptions, find unexpected connections and devote more time to the creative work that matters.

The difference, I suspect, lies in how we choose to use it.

What I’m Watching as a PR Professional

For PR practitioners, this is especially interesting.

Our work has always involved helping organizations articulate what makes them different—and communicating that distinction in ways that matter to audiences.

AI can help us research, develop content, identify opportunities and execute campaigns. It can also help us understand how our clients appear in AI-generated answers and where their visibility might be lacking.

But it can’t substitute for the strategic judgment that determines whether a company has something meaningful to say in the first place.  Which, I suspect, is the reason Gartner has elevated PR as now being more important and necessary than ever before.

My fear is that if we’re not careful, we may find ourselves spending more time optimizing messages for machines than developing the stories, insights and relationships that make communications effective.

Miracly represents an exciting example of entrepreneurs building solutions for a rapidly changing marketing landscape. We’ll put this tool in the content marketing category for now.  I’m genuinely interested in seeing how the company evolves—and how platforms like it change the economics and practice of marketing.  Read their full press release here.

I’m equally interested in the bigger question its emergence raises.

Where is the balance?

Are we sacrificing originality for productivity gains, SEO performance and the promise of being discovered by AI agents? If so, what is the long-term cost to our brands, our communications and the information ecosystem itself?

Or can we use these tools to become more productive and more original?

I’d love to hear what other PR and marketing professionals think. Are we building a better marketing future, or simply getting more efficient at making everything look alike?  How can we have both; be “found” and also be worth finding?

Have a new company, product or technology you’d like to see featured in New Builders? Let us know. We’re here to celebrate the builders—and ask a few questions along the way.