Look, the phrase “AI-powered digital marketing” is getting slapped onto everything these days, from $7 e-books to canned Twitter threads. We did something simpler: we picked one narrow use-case—AI-driven email subject-line testing—and built our entire off-page play around it. First, we scraped every podcast, newsletter, and SaaS blog that had ever mentioned “email marketing + AI” in the last 12 months. Not a heroic task; a single Ahrefs content-explorer export plus a Screaming Frog crawl got us 1,847 URLs. That list was way too fat, so we ran it through a dead-basic prompt in ChatGPT: “Keep only the pages that have a contact name, an email address, and a Domain Rating above 45.” That left us 212 targets. From there we wrote what we call “coffee-break emails”—three short sentences, zero buzzwords, one clear ask: “Would a 15-minute chat about how AI is changing subject-line CTRs be useful for your audience?” Hit send, follow up once, and move on. No fancy templates. Just humans talking to humans about a topic we actually knew. By the end of the quarter we had 127 do-follow links, zero paid placements, and a client who finally stopped asking if we were “doing SEO or just playing with ChatGPT.”