This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Stacker and Airops.
(sponsored) Your buyers are asking AI what to consider. Visibility+ from dofollow.com helps B2B SaaS brands build the authority necessary to improve visibility across AI answers and traditional search. See where you’re missing.
(Sponsored)SEO IRL, Canada’s largest SEO conference, returns October 6-7 at MaRS in Toronto with Lily Ray, Joy Hawkins, Nathan Gotch, Lidia Infante and more on what’s actually working in SEO/AEO right now. Tickets here
See the Stacker offer at the end of the email for a free PR story just for booking a meeting
Paid subscribers can use this brand traffic and Google Trends dashboard
Venture investors and senior leadership keep asking me the same question on calls: How do you measure this new AI search channel? This question is misguided. AI search is not a new channel; it is an extension of SEO, much as mobile was an extension of desktop SEO. The UI has changed, but the user’s jobs to be done have not.
[Sponsored by Airops]
Marketing budgets aren’t keeping pace with marketing targets, and now there’s data on exactly how badly.
AirOps surveyed 300+ marketing leaders on what’s actually happening inside their teams: budgets, headcount, AI adoption, channel performance. Not the polished version, the real one.
75.4% got higher pipeline or revenue targets this year. Only 43.0% got a bigger budget to hit them. Just 23% feel confident they can measure what’s working. And 86.6% are prioritizing AI search anyway.
The finding that stood out to me: budget size isn’t what separates the teams growing from the ones stalling. It’s the teams changing their KPIs, shifting channel mix, and building AI capacity that are pulling ahead.
This issue’s worth flagging if you’re heading into planning season with a bigger number and the same budget.
The simple answer to measurement is: revenue. Every time I am asked this, it surprises me that using revenue to measure AEO was not the first instinct; instead, they explored ways to shoehorn in the old, ineffective ways of measuring SEO.
Every team that tries to do this ends up with a vanity number because, for too long, SEO itself has been built on vanity rankings. Everything in SEO was driven by that one vanity goal rather than revenue, leading to too much busywork instead of revenue-driving initiatives.'
Traffic is not the goal
Traffic fell? Do a technical audit. Rankings fell? Acquire links. Neither of these is a bad exercise in its own right, but they aren’t necessarily tied to the outcomes that triggered the effort. Even worse, the trigger might not have even been that bad. Rankings and traffic drops on their own might not be a big deal if there is no business impact. I once had a client who lost traffic with every Google algorithm update but also saw their revenue increase.
They lost traffic because they had spammy parts of their site that needed to be demoted, but the revenue-generating parts of their site benefited as their and other spammy pages disappeared from the results.
For years, SEO was sidetracked on a complicated journey of rankings disconnected from revenue, and rankings as a success metric alone were declining amid new scrutiny of this channel. This is not the time to make the same mistake with AEO. As a basic premise, AEO should only be deemed successful if it adds business value in terms of revenue or a direct proxy.
AI answers are here to stay and will eventually become dominant when AI mode becomes the default experience; we, marketers, and especially search marketers, need to find a way to measure this channel before it is defined for us by others.
Having a clear revenue goal will keep everyone happy.
AEO doesn’t drive revenue… directly
Transparently, revenue from AEO will be impossible to attribute, despite what all the new AI visibility tools say in their marketing pitches. Historically, attributing SEO to revenue has been challenging because it requires the last click before a conversion to come from an organic search result, unless a company is really good at multi-touch attribution, which is rare.
AEO is even worse because the very nature of the AI result might mean that a user doesn’t need to click anything, so there’s no trackable event. Therefore, building a measurement system that relies on a click will inevitably result in only slight accuracy.
What we need instead is to fully cement the shift in mindset from attribution to influence that was already happening with SEO pre-AEO. In that respect, AEO is closer to brand marketing than to SEO from a conversion standpoint, too. The byproduct of AEO is the squishy, trust me type that will never show up in an analytics dashboard. To measure AEO in revenue, we need to find some proxies.
Brand traffic
An ideal proxy that actually works in analytics is branded search and direct traffic. When a model cites a company by name, this will likely lead to a follow-up click on a search result after a brand search or a direct visit to the website. Obviously, all direct traffic isn't due to the SEO team's efforts, but if there’s a bump above the baseline, it would be fair to give some credit. This is true, especially when there’s no seasonal pattern or viral news item driving the jump.
You can find this in Search Console by looking at queries for the brand terms, and Google Trends should show something similar.
Track this as its own line, separate from organic and paid, and start correlating it with your citation tracking cadence. This isn’t a hard perfect number, but it can be a reasonable signal in an untrackable world.
Paid users can download this template
Ask the users
My favorite proxy, and the one most marketing teams skip, is to ask. You can do this by adding a field to a demand gen form or by simply conditioning sales teams to ask directly. Not everyone will answer, of course, but if your AEO efforts are effective, you can expect this source to appear in your reports.
This sounds unsophisticated compared to a dashboard, and it is, but it beats having no data at all.
Account-based matching
Take your list of target accounts, run your citation tracking against the queries those specific buyers would plausibly ask, and check whether the accounts that later entered the pipeline or closed were ones you were being cited for in the months before they showed up. The correlation won’t hold up as proof on a board or in a deck, but it is still a pattern worth watching.
Surveys
My final proxy and the most expensive is share-of-voice surveys. This isn’t the manufactured share of voice that the AEO tools are selling, because those tools invent a denominator that doesn't exist and then report your slice of it with false confidence. Instead, you need to run surveys using a bias-free set of questions that measure brand recognition across a broader set of competitors. This can be run using a basic homegrown panel or outsourced to a market research agency.
Even though these proxies lack accuracy and are difficult to chart, they are far better than building success metrics based on vanity alone.
AEO can be a substantial investment, and no company should be investing in it if it can’t even get to the back-of-the-envelope ROI calculation. Like SEO, if you can’t substantiate why a $10,000 monthly investment would ever break even, take a pause before writing the check.
[Sponsored by Stacker]
Earned Media Is How Brands Get Cited in AI Search
See why 84% of AI citations come from earned media coverage.
Learn how brands earn placement across 3,000+ vetted news publishers.
For twenty years, SEO budgets centered on content visibility and backlinks. AI search reshaped both within months.
Large language models gravitate toward brands that are already established and widely cited. That recognition comes from earned media. Muck Rack’s analysis of 25 million+ AI citations found earned media drove 84% of results, with paid content responsible for a mere 0.3%.
Stacker turns brand-funded stories into editorially reviewed content, placed natively across 3,000+ vetted news publishers, with publisher-verified reporting your team can audit. One well-built story on a trusted, high-authority publisher builds more model-visible brand authority than most backlink campaigns combined.