ADWEEK Tech Advantage: Brands Are Showing Up in ChatGPT. Proving It Pays Is Harder.

Getting recommended by an AI chatbot has its own burgeoning cottage industry. In a survey of 75 small and medium business search marketers by Emarketer and Semify, 76% said appearing in AI search is extremely or very important. To help answer that need, agencies like Jellyfish have built proprietary tools to chart brand appearances in answer engines like ChatGPT. A wave of startups is selling software to understand and improve visibility. Investors are also taking notice. Profound, among the best-funded of the 11 startups ADWEEK profiled, raised $180 million in Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation in September, less than seven months after its Series C. Some of these startups are getting acquired, too: Scrunch was snapped up by content platform Sitecore in a deal worth a rumored $225 million. Brands are building teams and strategies to shape how they show up on AI search. Period-tracking app Flo Health has a manager dedicated to LLM discoverability, who works with every channel owner when media plans and messaging are being built, said Georgia Jones, Flo’s head of brand marketing. At car-selling platform Motorway, leadership now tracks LLM outputs in real time, Cassie Hall, Motorway’s marketing and brand director, said at the Semrush Spotlight event in London in October. Some of those efforts are starting to pay off, with more citations and new traffic from AI search. In the short term: marketers improve their AI visibility Some brands are seeing results as quickly as within a day. “We can publish new content and see it being cited within 24 hours,” Hall said. Motorway is also testing ChatGPT ads, which launched in the U.K. in May. Beyond citation, some brands are seeing tangible benefits. Emarketer found that 38.7% of SMBs are already reporting meaningful new traffic from AI tools in the last 12 months. 29.3% have had customers tell them they found the business through AI search. Business advisory firm Business Intelligence Group used OptimizeGEO’s analytics, recommendations, and execution agents to make technical site changes so its content was readable by LLMs. It also optimized or created new content based on what users were asking. This helped grow its AI visibility threefold, AI traffic by 151%, and double revenue from AI-generated leads. Russ Fordyce, CEO, told ADWEEK in a statement that “58% of AI-referred customers were completely new—unlocking growth at scale.” AI shopping platform Glance added YouTube to its media plan, cleaned up inconsistent brand descriptions across the web, and rebuilt its site to be bot-readable. It reported a 4.7x increase in citations and a 6.6x increase in share of voice in the shopping category in three months. “We were able to see early results in a few weeks to a month,” Aashish Benjamin, the company’s vp, global head of brand & consumer marketing, told ADWEEK. In the long term: standardization is a stumbling block Consumer journeys have gotten messier. A shopper can find a brand in Google’s AI Mode, build a shortlist in ChatGPT, and buy it on Amazon without visiting the brand site. The brand can’t tell which answer engine drove the sale. “There’s no industry-wide standard for measuring AI visibility yet, unlike the established metrics used in traditional search, such as CTRs and keyword rankings, ...or how that visibility contributes to business results," said Emarketer analyst Kelsey Voss. When Glance's Benjamin and I first spoke in early October, he said: “It’s still unclear whether that visibility translates to any downstream impact like website traffic or sales.” In a follow-up last week, he said the picture is starting to change. “We’re already seeing early signs of this translating into higher website traffic, with some of the cited pages experiencing a noticeable boost in visits,” he said. Emarketer’s survey found that measuring ROI from AI visibility is the top challenge SMBs face (56%), and confidence in measuring ROI across search channels scored lowest of any task tested, below paid search, review management, and organic SEO. “AI platforms will need to report more of their value as their ad businesses mature,” said Alex Sherman, CEO, Bluefish. “More purchases will happen inside agents and retailer platforms, and those transactions carry their own sales data. And brands are opening direct data pathways through programs like OpenAI’s Product Feed.” When a brand supplies its own product data, it can check whether agent answers reflect it, which gives measurement a verified reference point, Sherman said. Bluefish is piloting this by sending verified product data to AI platforms and measuring whether agents recommend those products. OptimizeGEO’s CEO Kirthiga Reddy also said clients are able to connect their server logs and Google Analytics to see human and agent traffic by platform and how it converts. But even at the earlier visibility stage, currently there's no standardization among vendors. “Right now two vendors can report very different numbers for the same brand, because they ask different questions, query different model versions, and count mentions differently," said Justin Inman, CEO at AI visibility startup Emberos. "AI answers also vary from run to run, so a lot of the small day-to-day moves people report are noise. A credible standard has to cover what gets asked, how answers are captured, how often, and how much a number has to move before it counts.”

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ADWEEK Tech Advantage: Brands Are Showing Up in ChatGPT. Proving It Pays Is Harder.

An Emarketer survey found that 38.7% of SMBs are reporting meaningful new traffic from AI tools

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