As AI adoption has grown over the last few years, so has uncertainty among marketers. The rules for generating traffic to a website have been turned upside down and many brands are seeing a dip in traffic given the fact that asking AI a question is more like having a conversation than it is surfing the web.

When websites become a citation instead of traffic from search, marketers and small business owners start to ask: how do you measure AI search visibility?

Traditional SEO reporting focused on keyword rankings, organic impressions, clicks, click-through rates, and organic traffic. While those metrics are all still valuable and important, they only tell part of the story.

AI platforms answer a user’s question without requiring that they go to a website, which requires a different way of thinking about what metrics to pay attention to. While there are plenty of software options to help you uncover when you’re mentioned in AI answers, what content gets cited, and the pages AI references, rethinking website metrics as a whole can help you better review and understand how you’re performing online.

Let’s walk through a variety of indicators of AI visibility that you should be tracking and measuring.

What Is AI Search Visibility

AI search visibility offers insights into whether answer engines are talking about your business, referencing your products and linking to your website.

The marketing industry is yet to land on one term for AI search, so you might see it called generative engine optimization (GEO), answer engine optimization (AIO) or AI search optimization.

Regardless of the term you choose to use, the goal remains the same. You want to appear in AI-powered search experiences to gain visibility with your target audience.

Companies that have solid SEO foundations will win the most with AI because Google states that it uses the same fundamentals to decide what to feature in AI overviews and AI mode. That means you still need to ensure your content is indexable, helpful, reliable, people-first and accurate.

Getting Started with Measuring AI Visibility

Some data offers directional context for your success in getting cited or mentioned in AI. Other datapoints are more clear and factual, giving you confidence that you’re succeeding.

If you want the super clear metrics that tell you how often you’re mentioned and what queries are driving that interest, you’ll need to pay for a tool. Many tools, like SEMRush, offer insights into your AI visibility. Some statistics you might get with an AI visibility tool include:

• Where your brand is mentioned.
• Position within AI results 
• Brand sentiment
• Inquiries that lead to brand mentions
• Competitor benchmarking
• AI prompt research to explore content ideas

Now, what if you can’t or don’t want to pay for yet another platform and spend precious staff hours monitoring and reviewing those platforms? 

You can use other signals to indicate your AI visibility and success. Just know that these signals are more directional, telling you that you’re likely succeeding, but not necessarily what types of queries you’re getting the most citations and interest from.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console offers insights into your website’s inclusion in generative AI results. This free tool provides the following data points:

• Impressions
• Which URLs are appearing in AI features
• Countries where searchers are viewing your brand in AI results
• The type of device searchers are using when seeing your website in generative AI results

You can sort your data based on hourly, daily, weekly or monthly results. One caveat to this data is that it only covers Google’s generative AI tools and not tools from other companies, such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. Just the same, you’ll get a feel for your AI performance.

Referral Traffic

The clearest indicator that you’re getting cited on AI is referral traffic. Depending on the analytics platform you use, you might see it lumped together simply as AI or you might see it broken down by platform, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.

Review the data week over week to watch for changes. Both increases and decreases are relevant as you optimize your content for both SEO and AIO to stay relevant.

While referrals from AI make up a very small portion of overall site traffic, these visitors tend to convert at high rates.

Ahrefs reports that just 0.5% of its visitors are from AI. But that traffic drove 12.1% of signups. That’s a 23 times higher rate than organic search visitors for the company. So while you might not see much referral traffic from AI, you should consider these visitors to be deep in the funnel and ready to convert because they’ve learned a great deal about your company from the conversation with AI.

Branded Search Volume

If you’ve engaged in conversations with AI, you’ve probably noticed that these conversations do not favor directing people to a website to learn more. As such, you might see an increase in branded search volume – or customers searching for your company name to find your website after interacting with AI to learn about you.

Spend time in Google Search Console or an SEO tool like SEMRush or Moz reviewing traditional branded search. Watch for an increase in volume, which can indicate that you’re succeeding in getting cited in AI.

Overall Website Traffic

Much like branded search volume, you should monitor your overall website traffic. This will tell you if more people are coming directly to your site from learning about your products and services from AI or other sources (such as word of mouth).

Many sites have seen a decrease in overall traffic as AI adoption has increased. You’ll likely never see the website volume you did in the search engine era, but as you optimize your site for AI visibility, you might see a small rebound in website traffic.

It can be hard to attribute direct traffic to AI, but it’s one more metric that gives you a directional concept of how you’re doing in AI optimization.

Add AI as a Lead Source

You should have a process for collecting leads from your website. Generally, this is a form that visitors can fill out to get in touch or schedule a call with your team.

If you aren’t already tracking lead source, you should add this as a field asking “how did you hear about us.” If you want this data to be really granular, you can list some of the top AI sources, or your can lump them all together.

Now you can track lead attribution and follow it through to get a sense of the ROI you experience from AI interactions.

If your leads come through calls, train your sales team to ask how they heard about you during the sales call. Try to avoid accepting the answer “online” and get your sales team to dig a little deeper to find out the exact online platform.

While this is a manual process, it can pay off immensely in gaining deeper ROI insights so you know where to put your time and money.

Track AI ROI

Now that you’re tracking AI as a lead source, you can track its ROI. The data from Ahrefs on its conversion rates shows that while website traffic might be decreasing, the quality of the traffic is quite good.

Instead of focusing only on website traffic or leads, make sure you’re measure the return on that traffic to better understand its value.

Start Tracking Your AI Visibility

Whether you pay for a platform to track your AI visibility or use directional metrics you already have access to, it’s time to start tracking the success of your online presence in the AI era.

If you’re unsure where to start or want expert advice and insights, contact Two Wheels Marketing. We can help you measure and understand how AI is generating leads and website traffic.