Picture this. You are sitting post Thanksgiving surrounded by friends and family. The conversation drifts towards AI, because at some point it will. When it does, try a quick exercise: ask everyone at the table to choose a side.
On one side, you are the consumer. You use ChatGPT to plan holiday shopping. You ask Perplexity for new recipes. You rely on Google’s AI Overviews before you buy anything. AI has already changed how you discover information, whether you notice it or not.
On the other side, you are the brand marketer. Your responsibility is to make sure your brand shows up when consumers ask AI tools questions in your category. You need to know…Is your brand visible? Is it trusted? Is it chosen when decisions are made?
Here is the reality. Most marketers have no way to answer those questions. Traditional search KPIs like impressions, rankings, and click-through rates cannot measure what happens when AI answers questions directly. The clickstream breaks. The funnel breaks. Attribution breaks.
So we built a new approach.
At Seer Interactive, we’ve spent months researching how to measure brand performance in AI search environments. Heck, I wrote The *NEW* Big Book of KPIs to help Marketer’s measure humans in our digital world. Yes, I probably think about KPIs too much. It’s as unhealthy as going in for that second piece of pumpkin pie, but I’m still gonna do it. At work, I’m constantly challenging my colleagues to think about their measures of success and to ask themselves…What will you do if that KPI changes…? Wil Reynolds has told us why 2020’s SEO KPIs won’t work anymore.
So recently I’ve turned my attention to analyzing AI search KPIs that are emerging in the SEO industry, or call it the rapidly evolving GEO-AIO industry. We’ve tested them across real client datasets, and we’ve developed a framework that gives marketers a clear, practical way forward.
These KPIs are already being used across our client base, supported by an agent-assisted system that evaluates hundreds or thousands of AI answers at scale. We may not have it perfected, but we're not letting that stop us.
But before we dive into the framework, let's understand the shift that's happening...
The AI Search Landscape
AI search is not a single tool. It is an ecosystem, and it is expanding fast.
- Google AI Overviews
- ChatGPT Search
- Perplexity
- Microsoft Copilot
- Claude, Gemini, and other LLMs working through retrieval
Users are shifting from keyword-driven discovery to conversation-driven discovery. That shift demands a fundamental reset of measurement. If search behavior changes, marketing measurement must follow.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) attempts to describe the tactics. But without measurement, GEO is guesswork. You need KPIs that reveal visibility, credibility, and outcomes in AI driven environments.
Seer’s Framework: Be Seen, Be Believed, Be Chosen
AI search changes how users discover brands, evaluate credibility, and make decisions. To measure this new journey, we use a simple but powerful framework.
1. Be Seen
Are you visible when AI tools answer questions in your category?
2. Be Believed
Does the AI represent your brand accurately and credibly?
3. Be Chosen
Are AI influenced interactions driving business impact?
Old KPIs cannot answer these questions. They assume a click, a session, and a linear path. AI search removes all three.
The Research: 17 KPIs, One Problem
Across the emerging AI Search industry tools and research, we hand-picked 17 KPIs that can be used to measure AI search visibility, credibility, and influence. If these resonate with you or you want to use them to measure your brand, we encourage you to do so. Here's a CustomGPT I built to help you form proper KPIs. Just don't use them all!
Visibility
- AI Citation Rate
- Primary Source Rate
- AI Share of Voice
- Topic Coverage
- Entity Presence
- AI Snippet Visibility
- Zero Click Visibility
Credibility
- Answer Accuracy Rate
- Content Depth
- Semantic Relevance
- Trust Signal Strength
- Source Context Integrity
Outcomes
- Zero Click Impact Score
- Branded Query Retention
- Cross Channel Lift
- AI Influenced Conversion Rate
- Revenue per AI Visit
They all have value. But if you hand these 17 KPIs to a marketing team, they will spend the next six months debating methodology instead of improving performance.
So we simplified. If we could only measure one KPI for each phase of the journey, which three matter most?
These.
The 3 Core KPIs Every Brand Should Track
Before we get into it, I do want to call out that these KPIs are meant to be considered, debated, and determined only if they're meaningful to your brand. If these don't work for you, then ditch them and develop something that does work.
That said, here's where we see things going:
Be Seen: AI Signal Rate
The Seer Signals score goes back to our roots of measuring AI mentions. We ask questions and we measure how many times a brand shows up in the answers. It’s a signal of your presence. We can compare this against a competitive set or benchmark performance over time. As content is AI-optimized and you’re testing what makes your brand show up, your “signal” should get stronger. We don’t just talk about this, we test it and we prove it.
Definition
How often your brand is mentioned in AI generated answers for queries in your category.
Formula:
AI Mention Rate = (Number of AI answers that mention your brand) / (Total AI questions asked)
Why it matters
Visibility is the starting point. If AI tools are not mentioning your brand, you are invisible where discovery is now happening.
Example
If someone asks Perplexity, “best place to buy kids gifts on Black Friday” does your brand appear? How often?
What good looks like
Leaders in a category might achieve 60 to 80 percent citation rates. Challenger brands might start at 5 to 10 percent. Track direction, not perfection.
Be Believed: Answer Accuracy Rate
There are many ways to be believed. We see this in our data when humans visit our site from social channels. This means they found you based on what another human said…that’s believing! So perhaps it could be argued that this is more about trust. Can your customers trust you (and AI) to have accurate answers about your brand? This is why we focused on Answer Accuracy.
We measure against a Brand Canon that we work with our clients to define to ensure that we’re capturing who they are and what they stand for as a brand. We capture mission statements, core values, and any information that a brand wants to put out there. And then we see what the AI’s bring back. It is the new age of reputation management and brands that measure it can manage it.
Definition
How accurately AI systems represent your brand, measured through a structured rubric.
Formula:
Answer Accuracy Rate = (Total rubric points earned) / (Total possible rubric points)
Why it matters
Visibility without accuracy is a risk. If people get incorrect information about your brand, credibility erodes.
How we measure it
Each answer is scored on traits, each worth 0 to 2 points.
- Factual Correctness
- Alignment with Canon
- Hallucination Presence
Max score is 6 points per answer.
Example
If ChatGPT claims your product does something it cannot, that is a credibility failure.
What good looks like
Brands with strong content foundations can achieve accuracy rates above 85 percent. Scores below 70 percent indicate real risk.
Be Chosen: AI Influenced Conversion Rate
The way we see it, being chosen is all about having consumers choose your brand. Whether you sell widgets or professional services, it’s that conversion event that we’re looking for here. We measure this by connecting to your analytics platforms to identify AI-referral traffic to your websites and then understanding engagement and conversion rates. This tells us how frequently we’re chosen by humans that found us through AI.
Definition
The conversion rate among users or sessions influenced by AI surfaced content.
Formula:
AI-Influenced Conversion Rate = (Conversions from AI-influenced sessions) / (Total AI-influenced sessions)
Why it matters
This is the KPI your CFO cares about. It connects AI visibility to actual business impact.
Three ways to measure it
- Direct tracking
UTMs or referrers identified using Custom Channel Groupings from AI platforms. - Behavioral inference
Patterns like branded search occurrences or deep page entry. - Post conversion surveys
“What led you here today?”
What good looks like
AI influenced sessions often convert somewhere between 3-16 percent, which is often higher than average traffic. We're seeing this in our data and we're tracking it closely.
Measuring at Scale: Seer’s Agent Assisted System
Manually evaluating AI answers works for spot checks. It does not work for measurement at scale.
So we built a hybrid system that combines automation with human oversight.
How it works
- Our LLM monitoring tool Scrunch generates and executes branded and unbranded prompts across AI tools.
- We feed this to our NinjaCat agent, that evaluates each AI answer using the rubrics.
- The agent assigns a confidence score (0 to 100).
- The agent asks the evaluator to choose a confidence threshold (we start at 75% but usually go lower to train the model and assure answer accuracy).
- Any answer below the threshold is escalated to a human.
- Human reviews feed back into the agent’s training.
This ensures measurement that is:
- scalable
- consistent
- explainable
- high quality
- cost efficient
And most importantly, it allows your team to track performance trends over time.
How You Can Get Started
Step 1: Build your query set
Aim for 100 prompts (use 80 unbranded and 20 branded) across category, comparison, education, and problem solving intents.
Step 2: Establish your baseline
Run your query set across AI tools and document:
- Brand appearance
- Accuracy
- Misattributions
- Competitor presence
Step 3: Audit your content foundation
Evaluate your site for completeness, clarity, entity accuracy, and trust signals.
Step 4: Implement AI influenced tracking
This is how you connect visibility to outcomes.
Step 5: Measure consistently
We recommend bi weekly for most brands.
Step 6: Optimize iteratively
Draft. Measure. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
The Bottom Line
AI search is not emerging. It is here.
Consumers are already discovering brands, comparing options, and making decisions through AI.
If you want to win in AI search, you need 3 KPIs:
- AI Signal Rate
- Answer Accuracy Rate
- AI Influenced Conversion Rate
Everything else is detail.
Start with your baseline. Measure consistently. Improve your content. Track your impact.
This is the new analytics discipline. Brands who embrace it early will win. What do you think? Do these KPIs resonate with you and your Brand? If not, we want to hear from you and learn what you’re focused on.
If you want support implementing AI search measurement or want to see how your brand performs today, get in touch with us.
