Name: Investing in AI Discoverability: Measuring Impact
Uploaded: 2026-10-20T18:51:06.186Z
Duration: 33 min
Description: Investing in AI Discoverability: Measuring Impact

Transcript for "Investing in AI Discoverability: Measuring Impact": Hello, everyone, and welcome to investing in AI discoverability, measuring impact. I'm Jodi Cerretani. I'm the CMO of WordPress VIP, and this is the third and final session of our enterprise AI discoverability series. So if you've been with us along this journey from August, September through today, thank you. We're excited to have you back. And if you're new, welcome. I'm joined again today by my friend and partner, Paxton Gray, who is the CEO of 97th Floor. Paxton and his team spend their days working inside the actual data of AI discoverability and with tons of customers just like you. So they know a little bit about the topic, and I'm very happy that he's here. Paxton, welcome back. Thank you. Glad to be here. And just a couple of quick housekeeping items before we get into the content. As usual, we are recording today. You will get the recording afterwards, so don't feel too rushed to take too many notes. You'll also have the session on demand to share with your colleagues or your friends if you'd like. Recordings of session one and two are available on demand today, and this third one will be on demand just shortly after we we wrap. And then second, drop questions into the chat anytime. We have saved... Or we aim to save time at the end for questions, and we always welcome that discussion. Just a quick recap of the journey we've been on together in August in session one. We talked about where you stand, a bit of a a mirror on what AI actually says about your brand today and how to tell. And then in September, we talked about how to improve. So what's your strategy that makes it easier for AI to find, understand what you're all about, why you're valuable, and then ultimately recommend you, where relevant. And then today is really about success, how to measure success, and then importantly, how to prove it to your core stakeholders so that you can either continue to invest or even increase investments. So, with that, what is it that people are typically asking marketing and digital leaders about these investments? Well, CFOs often are asking, what is AI visibility worth? What's the ROI? And since folks are gonna be asked that or are being asked that, we wanted to give you a concrete answer, and that's probably why you're here today. So that leads us to our agenda for the day. We'll be talking through why you should be chasing buyers instead of chasing attribution in the, age of I... AI, what to invest in when there's so many things that support AI visibility, what specifically should you be investing in and how much? Then we'll talk through how to measure success and then wrap finally with how to make the business case to some difficult stakeholders like your finance lead, your boss, or the CEO, and then also your your board. And with that, I'll hand things over to Paxton who's gonna get us started with our content. Great. Excited to dive into this. So the thing every CFO has... Asking right now is, like, what is AI visibility actually worth? And, like, what do we say to that? How do we invest in the channel that is often kind of murky when it comes to attribution even though we know it's important? Well, for many, organic traffic has been falling within their analytics. And this has been true as AI overviews start to take over more and more of the Google organic search. Today, 68% of all Google searches result in no click at all. And when an AI overview or I should say full AI mode is present, it actually goes up to 92% of all of those searches have no click. So that means that buyers are increasingly doing their research within AI, but then they show up later by either typing your URL in directly or searching your name. All of this represents... It's like a new era for AI search, which will require a new way of approaching attribution and a new way of approaching how we get funding for these initiatives. So the old era is, you know, what we call like the keyword era. This is, SEO is easy to track and it was easy to attribute. The customer journey was transparent. Users often did research on your site so you could kind of feed them content and see what did and did not resonate. Well, now we're in a new era, which we're calling the specificity era. In this era, users are doing their research within AI. They create a list of favorites, when they're selecting vendors. And in many cases, they actually make purchase decisions before they actually ever fill out a lead form or even hit on... Hit your site. And so this this, is a complete shift in how buyers are behaving. 94% of buyers, b to b buyers, they actually rank vendors before they talk to them. And four out of five of the favorite, quote unquote, vendors, they end up winning the deal. So in many ways, the the sale is already made before they hop in and call with your sales team. Now the kicker here is that 90% of b to b buyers are now using LLMs to identify who their favorite is. Again, before they've ever visited your site, before they've ever talked to your sales team. And so this this... I think we all know the importance of AI search and, why we should get investment there. However, marketing is kind of in a place right now where making that investment is becoming difficult, and here's why. First, less money is being spent on marketing than years... In years past. According to Gartner's, CMO survey, only 77.7%. I think this year rose to 7.8%, but still very low, of total revenue was actually being invested in marketing. So that's, you know, near all time low. And as dollars tend to get scarce, I mean, this is true in personal finances just as is in business. As dollars get scarce, the pressure to show ROI for how those dollars are spent goes up. So you take that... The the pressure on attribution increases. You add on second marketing leaders, they're under more pressure now than ever to defend their strategy and prove ROI. CMO tenure is falling to all time lows. And what's interesting, from, this CMO survey is 71% of CMOs say that they respond to that pressure by, quote, focusing on short term impact over long term gains. So again, there is this pressure cooker where you have to show ROI quickly. So how do we respond to that? Well, we tend to then invest in channels that are more easy to, show attribution, which ends up often being paid, especially digital paid channels like Google or Meta. So this really is is us chasing an illusion of transparency and attributable to ROI, and we're kind of at risk of chasing attribution more than actually chasing the audience was... And going where they are. So how do we justify this investment in AI visibility, which is the fastest growing channel on the web, when you're dealing with this massive pressure to show ROI? The way you do that is you invest in the right places that will have an impact and you work to develop a better ROI framework that's unique to AI search. So things have really, really changed. Right? And I'm sure everybody could relate to this. I know I can and a lot of the folks I talk to every day can. We just walked through how the buyer audiences, are shifting their journey to really start with AI, and we know that. And and many of you are aware of that. In fact, when we did a survey earlier this year in June, for CMOs and digital leaders, a little under half of you said that you're really worried about the loss of control. You're worried about the loss, that you're seeing of site traffic and subsequent leads and demand as more and more people are starting their journey within AI. And what's interesting is even though you know that that is not... They're not always starting with AI and ending with AI, there are some AI referrals. People are clicking through to some degree, and you're seeing that that growth in AI referral traffic up 60% from last year to this year. It still feels like it's not enough. And what folks aren't really realizing is that you're somewhat in control, not completely, but somewhat in control. And why is that? It's because AI has to reference context out in the Internet in order to understand what's what. And the number one source of authoritative content about your brand and your business is your own website. Unfortunately, this isn't really a match. That importance isn't really a match on how, our survey has has shared that people are spending their their efforts. Only 17% are ranking website as a priority, as a top investment priority, over the next twelve months. So there's really a disconnect here, and it really needs to change. We need to focus on the website as a top way to influence, if not control, what AI says about our brand because that's where buyers are getting their information. So the the section one is really about the fact that this isn't a loss to manage or defend. It's really about how to shift investments and be more precise about how you're making investments so that you can, regain control of the top of funnel, albeit different than than in the past. So with that, let's switch gears into what investments, you wanna make precisely. It's not just your website. There's other things that contribute to AI discoverability. So, Paxton, why don't you take us through budgeting? Yeah. Happy to. So the big question is, how much should we actually invest and where does it go first? So this new AI, you know, it's like a new channel. It's a big shift in how buyers are behaving. So, clearly, people wanna say, like, well, I wanna invest in this channel, and, we often look at it as, like, equivalent to a paid channel, but it's very different. So first thing to understand is your SEO foundation, what you've been investing in for SEO, that is the foundation of a solid AI discoverability strategy. Some data from Ahrefs, shows that seven out of 10 of the pages that are actually cited in AI overviews are pages that already rank in the top 100, of Google search. And four out of 10 of the cited brands are pages that rank in the top 10. So there's big correlation between successful SEO and whether or not your brand is actually visible, recommended, and cited in AI search. The other thing that's important to understand is that, Google has confirmed, that they use this fan out... Query fan out, methodology, which we covered in the previous session. And that's, in a nutshell running multiple related searches across subtopics to build out one answer. So a user has their query, Google will go and actually do multiple queries and return results and site results based off of those secondary queries. So ranking for those original, and, rank rank for those organically is actually paramount to showing up in AI overview. So I would say you have to continue investing in SEO. And in fact, turning up the heat here is only gonna do positive things for your AI search, optimization. Now I wouldn't think about AI search as a line item within your budget the way you might your media spend. There are multiple things that actually impact and influence the success in AI search, and these are some of the most common, line items. So, again, like we talked about, there's SEO, continue to invest there. But brand and PR, those have a massive impact. How your brand is mentioned and in what context has a very big correlation with AI visibility. There was a massive study of... Again, from Ahrefs that they studied 75,000 brands, and they saw that not only are backlinks important, but the overall PR and brand building becomes even more significant than backlinks when it comes to whether or not your brand is cited and mentioned with an AI search. And then investing in development and technical, you know, that that is even more important in s... In AI search than it was even in SEO. It was always important in SEO, but it's even more important. Why? Well, in SEO, you dealt with just one bot. It was the Google bot and kind of the the places it gets... Would get stuck are known. It wouldn't change that often compared to where we are now. Now we're dealing with a whole host of bots that all prefer and interact with your site in different ways. And so having a solid platform that is designed to succeed in AI search is paramount. And that's why, you know, I would plug, WordPress VIP, like, as the, platform for AI. It's how AI learned, how to crawl the web is is on a WordPress platform. So, there there may not be, you know, again, like a single line item for AI discoverability, but, there should be a coordinated investment in each of these existing line items, content, brand, development, and SEO, to see success in AI search. So I'm gonna pass it over to Jodi to cover what is the next step to get investment, which is about getting on the same page with leadership about what success actually looks like. All about reporting. Thanks, Paxton, and thanks for the plug. So, yeah, as I mentioned earlier, I talked to a lot of of CMOs and digital leaders at my job at WordPress VIP. So this would be customers and prospective customers. And I am a CMO myself, so my peers and I talk about this. And something that constantly comes up is, you know, how do you know that AI discoverability is working when last click or last touch attribution can't always tell you? It isn't that direct. Well, it's a great question, and I will answer it. But first, I'll I'll I'll make a confession on behalf of our entire function, and that is, we're pretty good at measuring things. I think that that DNA from DemandGen and we kinda drank the Kool Aid around measuring things long ago, we're we're good at that. What we're less good at, it turns out, is really figuring out and deciding what we're measuring for. So we did some research, a few months back, and then we found that 74% of leaders call AI discoverability and attribution a a significant priority or a main or a significant priority. And yet these same teams admit that they haven't fully defined what they're measuring for. So they they haven't defined whether or not they're, they're making a business decision such as, like, should we keep funding this, or should we shift resources to... For one type of investment to another, or we we just need to know which topics we should go deep on. So this is just a public service announcement, that kinda trumps everything that says, if you haven't figured out and really defined what you need, these success measures to tell you about your business, start there before you onboard any tool or put together any template. But if you... You know, without kind of knowing exactly which questions you're trying to answer, because it can vary business to business, when in doubt, here's kind of a screenshotable scorecard that we use with our customers, and I think that 97th Floor and us agree, are a good starting point. We've got leading indicators on the left. We've got lagging indicators on the right. And we'll start with the right because that's really the north star metrics that we point people to, kinda two stats to rule them all. The first is unpaid traffic. So unpaid traffic is a... Is the accumulation of AI referral traffic, organic search, and direct traffic. And that might strike you as a little strange because, obviously, AI referral traffic has a direct correlation between investment and outcomes, but organic search and direct, little bit less direct. No pun intended. And that's really because, you know, a lot of times folks are starting in AI, and they're getting some information or maybe it even, as as Paxton mentioned, picking their favorites, but they may not click through right away. They may get their shortlist and then come back later and type your name into the search bar or even type a URL in directly. So you wanna kinda measure these three things in totality so that you have a comprehensive view of success. And then the second North Star metric are what are the conversions? We know that this site traffic, when it, you know, when it comes to your site, it's likely going to convert and and result in pipeline and revenue. So we wanna be able to track the conversions from these specific sources as either, sourced or influenced leads, pipeline, and revenue. And we'll talk through that in a little bit of a formula a little later on the presentation. On the left hand side, these are these are leading indicators. So these are the things that say, you know, when you're starting to see results here, it's a good indication that the right hand side or those ultimate success criteria are around the corner. So things like AI crawler activity, AI citations, brand mentions, share of voice compared to your competitors, how accurate, the AI, is representing your brand, or what's the sentiment. Is it positive, neutral, or negative? And then, of course, branded search. So these, three things are are... These are two sides are... Is sort of our ultimate recommendation of a scorecard barring any other nuanced, understanding of your business and what you might wanna measure and why. But you can use the right hand side to really tell a story to all of your stakeholders, and the left hand side can really be the way that you measure your own progress and to help you direct, redirect, or refine your strategy. So obviously, we mentioned this is a recorded webinar. You can get this later, but also feel free to to grab this slide or take a screenshot and use it in your own organization. And just a a a warning, when we're talking about AI traffic specifically, while we're seeing kind of across the market AI traffic growing tremendously from a from a year over year growth rate perspective, Many of our customers are reporting that this is still a pretty small slice of the pie. Right? So as a percentage of the total, it's pretty minor. The good news is is that there is evidence that this traffic is much more valuable. In fact, this this Microsoft survey or or study looked across 2,000 sites and 30,000,000,000 sessions and found that AI referred visitors are staying longer than organic search visitors, and they're three times more likely to convert. So just set expectations with your stakeholders. If you're reporting out on different traffic and starting to report on these sort of North Star metrics, you're gonna wanna make sure that they know that these are small but mighty numbers, and that this is absolutely, the future and where you need to invest. And then in terms of just kind of the the pacing of how you report on these different success criteria and signals, We broke it out into three sort of cadences, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. The weekly and monthly would be for your own internal use in your department, your marketing department, to refine, your strategy and make sure that you're on the right track. And then the quarterly would be what you start to share out across your stakeholders to substantiate the investment and maybe to unlock more investment. So on a weekly basis, you really wanna keep an eye on your AI access, making sure that, AI crawlers are reaching the the content that you want it, them to reach. Then on a monthly basis, you'll wanna measure all of your traffic sources and how that is performing relative to your targets. And then finally, on a quarterly basis, that's when you can start talking about or measuring brand mentions and how you're progressing there, what kind of citation volume you're getting, and then, talk about conversion rate, and conversions and subsequent, pipeline and revenue. So this this takeaway for this section is really you wanna define success, meaning why are you measuring what you're measuring, what are you trying to understand about your business. Then you wanna make sure you're setting up both leading and lagging indicators of of success and performance and focus those lagging indicators on, on your north star metrics. Then you wanna also set fair expectations with your stakeholders about the nature of AI referral traffic, that it's a small but mighty source of of traffic, leads, pipeline, and revenue. And then you wanna measure thoughtfully across these different intervals. So, Paxton, you're up next. Favorite section, making the business case. Great. Happy to dive in and and tell a story. I'm gonna use a a client case study to kind of demonstrate this point. So, this client is a... In the event and venue management software, company. They're a b to b company, and they were, you know, the big player, in this space. However, they started to see their pipeline get thinner and thinner, and their close rate kinda started to go down. So they were looking to try to figure out what was going on. And what they saw when they pulled these leading indicators, as we talked about before, is that they were at the bottom of the list when it came to citations and brand mentions. Their authority was not high. They were not being recommended as a good solution by AI. Clearly a big mismatch between their true market share and whether or not they were actually showing up. So, they use these metrics to get buy in from their leadership, and get full rein, free rein to invest in the areas that they needed to move, in order to have an impact. So, these were those areas. So they invested in brands. They invested in their architecture, their technical crawlability. They invested in their content, making sure that it's AI friendly and AI readable, and then validation, third party validation, backlinks, mentions, PR, all that good stuff. The beautiful thing about AI search right now is that the impact can be very quick, especially compared to traditional SEO. So what happened within three months of them making these big concerted coordinated, investments? Well, first, in terms of citations, they nearly... They own... They've over doubled the number of citations. The brand was mentioned twice as much, and they had a 36% increase in AI impressions. So almost doubling kind of their presence within AI search. Now, what's... Is this the North Star? No. These are again kind of the leading indicators. Well, lagging indicators, the impact on, traffic and on pipeline. And so, this is kind of the big upshot of this investment. They had almost three x increase in MQLs and a 143% increase in SQLs from, traffic that came from AI search, from organic, indirect. So you can see, yes, it was a doubling in their presence, but almost a tripling in the impact. So this just highlights again the importance of measuring the correct things, getting that buy in, and then, the quality of the traffic that AI can send, is just, like, out of this world. So huge huge impact here. Now, there's some additional benefits to investing in AI beyond just this connection to the bottom line, which ultimately is the most important. But as some kind of like icing on the cake to help you get further buy in, we've laid out some additional benefits. So number one, content that is built for AI, search and to influence AI search should be the same kind of content that serves your sales team. So this is sales enablement content. It's comparison pages, FAQs, research, case studies. If you think about AI as a salesperson, which in many ways it kind of is, then you're feeling it with the same kind of content that you would feel your sales team. So you kinda get double impact on that content. Number two, when you build strong AI visibility, you have to be building a strong brand, making sure that your brand's more consistent. So you have to fix inaccuracies across the web, better define what problems you solve and for who, and you need to get better at answering the many, many questions that your audience has and you need to answer them quickly within your content. All of these are great things to be doing for your brand even if it wasn't about showing up better in AI. So, this is gonna tighten things up across the board, not just on your site but across the web for how your brand is represented which is definitely a good thing. And the last thing is any work you do today is gonna have big impact not just today but in the future especially as we move towards a more agentic web. Making your AI... I'm sorry, your website more AI friendly, AI accessible, that's just going to be the thing that flips the switch when, people start using agents to actually make purchases and make decisions. So, any movement you can make here right now, just gonna future proof you when we get ready to move to that, agentic web. In fact, Gartner actually predicts that 90% of b to b buying is actually gonna be run through AI agents by 2028. So all that's very important. However... And and, again, this is icing on the cake. It all comes down to ROI. So how do you present that to your CFO? Jodi got something great that she's put together for this. Yeah. I imagine a lot of you came for this particular part because it can be a difficult conversation. And you you wanna have something really solid that you can say to your CFO that it'll pass their sniff test and likely pass the sniff test of a CEO or board member that have kind of the same orientation and way of thinking. And that really comes down to ROI, like Paxton said. There are two ways to kinda calculate ROI, for investments that are hard to attribute. So I'll I'll... I've illustrated it here kind of with dummy data, and, hopefully, this is is helpful for you to use as a template. The first on the left side is sourced. So we're looking at the ROI from, AI referral traffic, so the traffic that turns into leads and then subsequent pipeline and revenue relative to the investment in AI discoverability. With this example, we're saying that we invested $250,000 in AI discoverability in the period, whether that be a week or a month or what what have you, and we got 400,000 worth of attributed revenue from that investment. So that's basically saying that for every dollar we invested in AI discoverability, we were able to track with precision that we were returning a dollar 60. Now this is intentionally conservative. Right? We know it's conservative because there's a lot of, impact of AI discoverability that will show up outside of AI referral traffic alone. That's where piece number two comes in or sort of the the the second way to look at ROI, and that's influenced. So in this case, we wanna take revenue from AI referral, organic, or direct traffic that then resulted in last touch leads pipeline and revenue relative to the AI investment. In this case, it's it's definitely much more generous of an understanding of impact. But when you go to your CFO and you have sort of this floor and ceiling approach, you can make the case that if I'm at least returning my investment or getting one x ROI on the sourced, we can probably agree that that's too conservative and the truth or true ROI lives somewhere in the middle. So this is something that I've used in my past. I know that this is something that our customers are starting to use, and it goes over really well because, otherwise, you start to get into this funny conversation around looking at leading indicators, which we know are important for the marketing side, but it doesn't speak in the in the dollars and 10... And cents terms that someone in a CFO seat is gonna be demanding. So take this. We'd love to hear feedback if it works. But this is something that it seems to be coming more and more the the trend, across organizations. Alright. Cool. I think we might have one question or one minute for questions, Paxton. So, we'll we'll, wait for those to come in. I am seeing one question, in the chat, and it's asking about brand mentions and citations. Is there any tool that can reliably measure this? I've got a perspective I can share, Paxton, if you wanna add. You know, there are tools like Profound or Searchable or Ahrefs Brand Radar that track it. They are using sample prompts. So, you know, you kinda have to measure it as a trend line over time. It's not an exact count. I don't know if there's any other tools that you know of Paxton, that that could work. Yeah. Ahrefs, BrightEdge has has a version of this. Semrush has a version of this. Even Moz, through GetStat, they have a version of this too. But as you said, like, it is... All all of them are samples. And so, like, I just back up what you said. What... Like, I don't think it's reliable data that you can take to the bank in terms of looking at share volume and and trusting that number, but it is more reliable when it comes to movement. So if you see, the interest doubling for a certain set of prompts, you can reliably assume that interest is going up, but you just can't necessarily bank on the actual volume being accurate in my opinion. Cool. Thank you for the question. And, anything else coming through? Let's see. Let's see. If you could only fund one thing this quarter, where would you start? Oh, boy. One thing. What do you think Paxton? Yeah. I think I would, first work on brand representation across the web and ensuring that it's consistent, my messaging is consistent, and it's compelling with what I know my audience wants. I think that's in many ways kind of the first step to solid AI work and, again, would have far reaching impacts even beyond AI search. So that's probably what I... Where I'd invest first. I like that. I would add that, like, just to make sure that your infrastructure is set up, you can have all the best content in the world on your website. But if, you know, your AI crawlers are being blocked for some reason or or it's invisible to them because it's being written for a human and not an, you know, a crawler, an AI crawler, then you're you're kind of in a... It's like that old tree falls in the forest, doesn't make a sound analogy. So I would I would definitely do an audit there. And that is actually a a a pretty good segue. I think some of you know this. Some of you have signed up. We've had a a few dozen folks go through this, but we're offering something as, like, as a collection, between 97th Floor and WordPress VIP. There's There's a lot of AI discoverability assessments out there, but I think ours is pretty unique in the sense that we've got both, you know, two sides of OneCoin, the infrastructure and the content optimization, brand optimization side of things. So we'll do an assessment for you, and show you a baseline of how AI represents your brand today, highlight your biggest gaps, and then give you a very, custom practical recommendation from both of our teams so that you can know where to invest, where to invest first. So I think my my colleague, Mike, is putting the URL just to, make the request in chat. And if you're watching this on demand, you could, of course, scan the QR code. And with? that, I think we're out of time. It's been such a lovely, three series, effort with you. Paxton, thank you so much, and thank you all for joining us, spending part of your Tuesday. And if you joined our our our prior sessions, thank you for that as well. We look forward to seeing you next time. Take care. Thank you so much.