A fractional CMO who owns AI visibility, SEO, AEO, and GEO strategy end to end — run personally by the partner who built the methodology, not handed off to an account manager. For privately held businesses doing $5M to $50M who need a real growth function, not another retainer.
A Carbacio Group fractional CMO engagement is not a scope of one-off deliverables. It is a standing marketing function, run monthly, with a fixed measurement cycle so you can see exactly what moved and what did not.
A documented baseline across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude on the exact questions your buyers ask, then a monthly re-test on the same questions so movement is measured, not claimed.
Schema markup, entity structure, crawler permissions, and the on-page fixes that determine whether AI systems can read and cite your site at all.
Long-form and answer-format content written to be picked up by both traditional search and AI-generated answers — not blog posts written for keyword volume alone.
Founder-led content and outbound built and run, not just recommended, aimed at real conversations with buyers and referral partners.
Go-to-market decisions — what you say, to whom, and where — owned as part of the function, not delivered as a slide deck someone else has to execute.
A performance report every month: traffic, citations, ranking movement, and what's next — written for an owner-operator, not a marketing department.
For two decades, being found online meant ranking on Google. That equation has changed. A growing share of buyer journeys now touch an AI-generated answer before a traditional search result — and most businesses in the $5M–$50M range haven't adapted their marketing function to compete for that visibility at all. The businesses that move now have a real window to own their category before their competitors catch up.
A fractional CMO closes that gap without the cost, timeline, or risk of a full-time hire. You get the same caliber of strategic ownership — someone accountable for the outcome, not just the activity — at a fraction of the commitment, run by the person who built the methodology rather than a junior account team executing someone else's playbook.
Best fit: Businesses with a real product or service that AI search and modern buyers simply can't find yet.
A Carbacio fractional CMO owns the growth function directly: monthly AI visibility testing across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude against a fixed set of buyer questions, technical SEO/AEO/GEO fixes on your website, content and schema work, LinkedIn outbound systems, and a monthly report showing exactly what moved. It is delivered personally by Jeff Hatfield, not handed off to an account manager or a rotating team.
An agency typically executes a scope of deliverables and reports activity. A fractional CMO sits inside your business as embedded leadership, owns the growth strategy end to end, and is accountable for the outcome, not just the output. At Carbacio Group, the same partner who develops the AI visibility methodology is the one running it inside your business every month.
Privately held, owner-operated businesses doing $5M to $50M in annual revenue. Large enough to need a real marketing function and to compete for AI-era visibility, small enough that a full-time CMO hire is slow, expensive, and hard to reverse if it does not work out.
Under this operating model, Jeff Hatfield delivered a 3x increase in website traffic in six weeks for The Box Automotive Finance Academy, alongside 131 Bing Copilot citations and ChatGPT citation in 8 of 18 tested buyer questions for a separate client, workforce housing provider BPK Housing. Every engagement is baselined before work begins and re-tested on the same questions afterward, so results are documented, not claimed.
Jeff Hatfield, co-founder and Managing Partner of Carbacio Group. He developed the Carbacio Stack, the firm's SEO plus AEO plus GEO methodology, and personally runs every fractional CMO engagement. There is no account manager layer and no rotating consultant roster.
Tell us about the business. We'll test how you show up when buyers ask AI who to call, then walk you through the findings on a short call. No sales pitch, no agency-style sequence.