Here I am uploading all my writing work to LinkedIn, Google Drive, and this site in the form of documents, screenshots, links, and case studies. The plants are real. The smile is fake.
At some point in every marketer’s career, there comes a moment when you have to rebuild your portfolio.
Usually it’s because you’ve done a lot of interesting work and want a fresh place to show it.
Sometimes it’s because the internet has scattered your writing across six company websites, LinkedIn posts, Google Docs, and a folder called "final_final_REALLY_final."
And sometimes — as it turns out — it’s because you’ve been unexpectedly laid off and now have the unique opportunity to revisit your entire portfolio strategy while deliriously sipping your second oat milk chai and muttering about answer engine optimization versus traditional SEO.
This week I’ve been rebuilding my marketing portfolio across my website, LinkedIn, and a Google Drive folder that now functions as a kind of living archive.
But doing that made something very clear: portfolios don’t really work the way they used to.
Because the way people discover work has changed.
Why Portfolios Work Differently in the Age of AI Search
Five or ten years ago, a marketing portfolio was fairly straightforward. You built a website, added a few writing samples, maybe a case study or two, and called it done.
Today the reality is messier — and honestly a lot more interesting.
Your work lives everywhere.
Some of it lives on brand websites.
Some of it lives inside campaigns and product launches.
Some of it lives on LinkedIn.
Some of it lives in marketing portfolio examples scattered across the internet.
And increasingly, some of it is discovered through AI search systems that surface expertise in completely different ways than traditional search engines.
This shift is why marketers are paying more attention to answer engine optimization and AI SEO strategy. Instead of optimizing content purely for keywords, the goal is to structure information so that AI systems — and the humans using them — can quickly understand what you do, how you think, and what kind of problems you solve.
Rebuilding my portfolio forced me to think about my own work the same way.
Instead of trying to cram everything onto one website page, I started thinking about my portfolio like a content marketing strategy: a connected ecosystem of work that lives across platforms, with clear links between it all.
What I actually realized is that if I were optimizing purely for AI search, the ideal setup would be to turn every major portfolio piece into its own pillar page on my website. Each project would live as a structured case study — essentially a mini content hub designed to surface in AI search and support answer engine optimization.
That is, frankly, the correct long‑term portfolio strategy.
But rebuilding a portfolio after a layoff is also a race against the clock. So for now, I’m doing the practical version: assembling everything in a Google Drive portfolio while I gradually build those pillar pages on my website. Think of it as the working archive — the place where all the pieces live while the more polished, AI‑search‑friendly version of the portfolio gets built out.
What Actually Belongs in a Marketing Portfolio
If you google marketing portfolio examples, you’ll mostly see very tidy websites.
A few landing pages.
A neat case study.
A couple screenshots.
Maybe a clean grid of brand logos.
It all looks extremely organized, like the marketing equivalent of a perfectly styled bookshelf.
In reality, most marketing work doesn’t look like that at all.
It lives everywhere.
Some of it lives on brand websites.
Some of it lives in product launches and campaigns.
Some of it lives inside email sequences or social posts.
Some of it lives in strategy decks that never see the light of day.
And increasingly, some of it lives in things like AI SEO strategy, content structures designed for answer engine optimization, and the messy behind-the-scenes thinking that helps companies show up in AI search.
So a real marketing portfolio usually ends up including a mix of things like:
website and landing page copy
product messaging and positioning
email campaigns
brand storytelling and social content
AI SEO strategy and pillar page content
long-form blog or educational content
In my case, the work spans a few different industries and brands — including L’Oréal, Royal Caribbean, HexClad, and HungerRush — which means the samples themselves are scattered across the internet.
And right now, if I’m being honest, my Google Drive portfolio looks like it was organized by someone who had three browser tabs open, five client projects, and a mild food coma from putting a little too much granola on my lunchtime Cocojune yogurt.
For reasons that remain unclear even to me, I originally grouped things by company instead of asset type.
So the current archive looks something like this:
L’Oréal how-to blogs in one place
Royal Caribbean email campaigns somewhere else
HexClad product messaging in another folder
AI SEO strategy work for HungerRush living in its own little ecosystem
In other words: it’s a hot mess.
But rebuilding a portfolio in the middle of a marketing career transition has a funny way of forcing you to confront how your work is actually structured.
And once you step back and look at it, a pattern starts to emerge.
Most marketing work — at least the interesting kind — isn’t one thing. It’s a system of assets working together.
Which is exactly why portfolios are starting to look a lot more like ecosystems than galleries.
Especially in the age of AI search.
How AI Search Changes Marketing Portfolios
Another thing that’s changed recently is how people actually discover marketing work.
For a long time, portfolios were designed for two audiences: hiring managers and potential clients. You’d send someone a link, they’d click through a few samples, maybe skim a landing page or two, and decide whether you seemed competent enough to talk to.
Maybe they noticed a brand name they recognized. Maybe they liked a headline. Maybe they just thought, "Sure, this person seems normal enough."
But AI search is quietly changing how that discovery process works.
Instead of manually clicking through websites, people increasingly ask AI systems questions like:
Who has experience with AI SEO strategy?
Who understands answer engine optimization?
What marketers are talking about AI search visibility?
And when AI systems look for answers, they’re not just scanning for pretty screenshots or clever taglines.
They’re trying to understand expertise.
Which is a very different game.
Traditional search engines mostly looked for things like keywords and backlinks. AI search systems look for patterns across content that suggest someone actually knows what they’re talking about.
They look for things like:
clear explanations
connected ideas
real examples of work
evidence that someone has solved actual problems before
In other words, they’re trying to answer the same question every hiring manager secretly asks when they open a portfolio:
Does this person actually know what they’re doing?
This is where ideas like AI SEO strategy and answer engine optimization start to matter.
Instead of writing content that simply ranks for keywords, the goal becomes structuring information in a way that makes sense to both humans and AI systems.
Which is where pillar pages come in.
A pillar page is essentially a structured hub of information around a topic. Instead of writing ten unrelated blog posts, you create a central page that explains the big picture and then connect it to supporting pieces that go deeper on specific ideas.
It’s a way of saying:
Here’s the topic. Here’s how it works. Here’s the evidence.
I used this approach when working on AI SEO strategy projects for restaurant technology companies like HungerRush.
The goal wasn’t just to publish blog posts. It was to build structured content that could surface when restaurant operators asked AI tools questions about restaurant POS systems, delivery management software, or digital ordering platforms.
Instead of a single article trying to answer everything, we built pillar pages supported by additional content explaining different parts of the system.
That structure makes it easier for humans to navigate the information.
And it makes it much easier for AI systems to understand what the content is actually about.
Which brings us back to marketing portfolios.
If I were optimizing my portfolio purely for AI search, every major project would eventually become its own pillar page on my website.
Each project would include things like:
the problem the company was trying to solve the strategy behind the content the messaging decisions that shaped the work and the final asset itself
That kind of structure helps AI systems — and the humans using them — understand the thinking behind the work, not just the finished headline.
And yes, that is absolutely the long-term plan.
Right now, however, the reality looks a little more like a Google Drive folder full of marketing portfolio examples while I rebuild the ecosystem.
Because rebuilding a portfolio after a layoff is part strategy exercise, part archaeology project.
You open old campaign docs. You rediscover headlines you forgot you wrote. You suddenly remember things like, "Oh yeah… I wrote that aerospace tagline: the sky is never the limit."
Which, in retrospect, is a pretty excellent tagline for a company that built a groundbreaking — er, I mean sky-breaking — NASA telescope.
And somewhere in the middle of all that digging, you start to see the bigger pattern.
The work was never just the individual assets.
The landing pages connect to the email campaigns. The product messaging connects to the pillar page content. The brand storytelling connects to the strategy that made the work possible in the first place.
Which, conveniently enough, is exactly the kind of structure AI search systems are starting to recognize.
Not just the finished headline.
But the thinking behind it.
And that’s why while I suspect we’ll all be unemployed in the near future, at least for right now, answering questions for the robots is a lot like answering questions for humans. And that will make for a better read.
Examples of Work in My Marketing Portfolio
At some point, of course, philosophy about portfolios has to give way to actual work.
Because a marketing portfolio isn’t really a collection of opinions about strategy. It’s a collection of things that were built, launched, published, and sometimes argued about in Slack threads at 11:30 p.m.
So while the long-term plan is to turn many of these projects into structured pillar pages on this site, the easiest way to explore the work right now is through the portfolio archive I’ve been rebuilding in Google Drive.
Inside that slightly chaotic but increasingly organized library, you’ll find examples of work across a few different categories.
Website and landing page copy
including projects for brands like L’Oréal and Royal Caribbean
Product messaging and positioning
including naming and go-to-market work for HexClad
AI SEO strategy and pillar page content
developed for restaurant technology platforms like HungerRush
And brand storytelling and social content
including the occasional LinkedIn post about regional food rivalries and clam chowder debates.
Each piece represents a different kind of marketing problem:
how to explain a product
how to structure information for search
how to turn complicated systems into clear messaging
and occasionally how to convince people that tomatoes do not belong in clam chowder.
You can browse the full collection here.
Over time, many of these projects will turn into deeper case studies and pillar pages that explain the strategy behind the work — not just the finished asset.
Because the interesting part of marketing usually isn’t the headline.
It’s the thinking that got you there.
Wondering what the thinking behind your marketing should look like?
Let’s talk.
Frequently Asked Questions About Marketing Portfolios in the Age of AI Search
What should a marketing portfolio include?
A good marketing portfolio usually includes a mix of real work that shows how you think and what you can execute.
That might include:
website and landing page copy
email campaigns
product messaging and positioning
brand storytelling and social content
AI SEO strategy and pillar page content
The goal isn’t just to show finished assets. It’s to show the thinking behind the work.
Because the interesting part of marketing is rarely the headline itself — it’s the strategy that made the headline possible.
What are examples of a strong marketing portfolio?
Strong marketing portfolio examples usually combine several different kinds of work rather than focusing on one format.
For example, my own portfolio includes work across:
website and landing page copy for brands like L’Oréal and Royal Caribbean
product messaging and go-to-market work for HexClad
AI SEO strategy and pillar page content developed for restaurant technology companies like HungerRush
brand storytelling and social content
In other words, it’s less like a single project and more like a collection of marketing systems that work together.
How is AI search changing marketing portfolios?
AI search systems don’t evaluate portfolios the same way traditional search engines do.
Instead of ranking pages purely on keywords, they look for structured explanations and patterns that show expertise.
That’s why ideas like AI SEO strategy and answer engine optimization are becoming more important.
Content that clearly explains problems, strategy, and outcomes is much easier for AI systems — and humans — to interpret.
Which is one reason marketing portfolios are starting to evolve from simple galleries of work into more structured case studies and pillar pages.
What is answer engine optimization?
Answer engine optimization is the practice of structuring content so AI systems can easily extract meaning from it.
Instead of optimizing a page just to rank for a keyword, you structure the content so it can answer real questions people ask.
That might mean:
clearer headings
structured explanations
connecting related ideas across multiple pages
It’s a slightly different approach to SEO, and it’s one of the reasons many modern content strategies rely on pillar pages and topic clusters.
Why is my portfolio currently in Google Drive?
Because rebuilding a portfolio after a layoff is part strategy exercise and part archaeological dig through years of marketing work.
The long-term plan is to turn many of those projects into pillar pages on this site so they can function as structured case studies for AI search.
In the meantime, the Google Drive version acts as the working archive while that ecosystem gets built out.
Think of it as the “under construction” version of the portfolio — minus the blinking GIF from 1998.