How to measure revenue impact of AI Search as a marketing channel

Let’s start here: AIs are designed to use the internet like humans (specifically with the precision of an engineer), just much faster and at a far higher volume. 

Today, people use AI to use the internet of their behalf, for a few (over simplified) reasons:

1. To retrieve information faster

2. Because a personalized answer is (or seems) better

3. Most will be lazy if they can

This has made traffic from google search to some very popular websites decline and cause panic within the marketing world.

AEO is SEO. And it's not dead.

If you look at the aggregate traffic from organic search (Traditional search and AI search) is growing faster than ever. It’s because AI search not only eats some of searches, but opens up new use-cases for search, and as mentioned earlier, searches at a much higher volume than humans used to manually.

More importantly new customers from organic search are growing even faster, and that's because conversion rates from AI search are far higher. It makes sense, the consideration phase is being done by the persons AI and presented to them in the chat. They are ready to convert when and if they get there.

Back to the starting point: just like people search for things in traditional search, AIs search for things in traditional search. Just like people made content for other people to fulfill those searches, people will make content to fulfill searches for AI. That is search engine optimization. And it's growing faster than it has since the early 2000s. 

Tracking is important today, but will be even more important in the future.

Mentions matter, just like keywords matter for traditional search, but you need to measure actual revenue impact from these channel if you ever want to move the needle in a meaningful way.

Today we can track referrals from these channels to understand if those people become user and customers, that way you can understand how you are being mentioned to inform the content you create but build the strategy based on what’s driving actual revenue impact.

In the not so distant future, we’ll be able to track the visits AIs make on behalf of the person prompting them. As they start to take action on people’s behalf, and are built into the browsers—they’ll share tracking with them—painting a clear picture of all the touchpoints leading to actual customers and revenue.

The good news is, if you set up tracking correctly for people using your website and apps, you'll be set up for measuring impact of AI search today and in the future.

The main things you need to cover:

• Make sure you have attribution on your revenue metrics
• Break our AI Search as a traffic source in your attribution model
• Map the AI Search channels to the AI search platforms
• Map the AI search campaigns to the landing page of your site
• Build a dashboard with key metrics filtered from AI search grouped by campaign

‍
Remember that the core principles aren't changing—the tactics are. We now have more search and ad platforms with more use-cases. Growth marketing is about to explode, make sure you're set up to understand it and make it work for you.

And don’t forget: when these platforms roll out paid placements, that will translate into some of the most effective ad targeting you’ve ever seen.