Wil's Key Takeaways
1. Traffic Is No Longer the Leading Indicator
Wil's perspective: Seer saw its traffic steadily decline over the past two years, but pipeline continued to rise. Wil dug in and found social, direct, and branded search were all up, with social traffic converting at about 5x the rate of organic. The leading indicator that brands have trusted for decades is no longer useful, and AI plays a big role (the shift happened once ChatGPT started gaining traction).
What your brand can do: Overlay traffic against pipeline and look for the spot where the two diverge to reveal the shift in how people are discovering your brand. Moving forward, tie your metrics to revenue and pipeline, and stop using organic traffic as your top-line value.
2. AI Visibility On Its Own Is a Vanity Metric
Wil's perspective: Being visible is necessary, but not sufficient to drive pipeline or revenue. The AI platforms are constantly changing, and your visibility can rise (or fall) because of model changes. Measuring performance solely based on AI visibility is like the old days of obsessing over rankings.
What your brand can do: Don't just track AI visibility. Instead, track it against something else - like MQLs, SQLs, and conversions - that shows the metric in relation to your pipeline. It can also be helpful to measure the words and brands that appear in AI answers, so you get a fuller picture of the narrative around your brand and those of your competitors. AI training data can lag by 16 months or more, so don't expect to see immediate changes from your recent efforts.
3. Pay Attention to How Users Search
Wil's perspective: Seer's research for one client showed nearly half of participants included brand names in their AI prompts. That means visibility matters most if your brand is absent from the conversation.
What your brand can do: Our research showed that instead of asking "what's the best project management software," users were more likely to ask thing like "how does Asana compare to Monday." Identify direct competitors and other brands that get grouped with yours, then track head-to-head comparisons. Use it to see what narrative AI is sharing about your brand (you can work to change it if it's inaccurate) and how other brands are being positioned.
4. Trust Is the Real Moat
Wil's perspective: In a world of AI-generated slop, it's easy to erode brand trust by choosing short-term gains over long-term trust-building. Wil cautions brands against taking this easy way out, comparing Michelin's brand trust to the 52 AI-generated pages that RAMP published in one day: one is like a rotisserie chicken made by a chef, the other chicken nuggets.
What your brand can do: The Seer team uses a playbook that focuses on being seen, being believed, and being chosen. Make sure you're showing up in the right conversations, then give your audience the answers or information they're looking for. Hack-y tactics might work for a short time, but they can damage your reputation and will linger in AI training data.
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Re-imagining AI Visibility KPIs in a Query Fan Out world
Wil, take me right to the KPI for long term sustainable GEO visibility!!
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