The scramble to measure a brand's AI visibility

Marketers are realizing that AI does not rank a brand, it decides whether the brand gets brought up at all, and no one can agree on how to measure that. The IAB has been assembling a framework to standardize AI visibility measurement, led by a four-month effort from Caroline Giegerich, the IAB's vice president of AI. "The market is messy. It's hard to do measurement because you could run 'what's the best sneakers for under $200?' and get different results 100 times," Giegerich told Digiday. The volatility is real: Amazon accounted for 4% of Microsoft Copilot citations in July, 0.1% on ChatGPT and zero on Gemini, per Tinuiti. ChatGPT leans on Reddit (28.9% of citations) while Google turns to YouTube (21.1%) and Facebook (17%), per Semrush and Adobe data. "There is no silver bullet in any of this. It's YouTube, its schema on your website, its PR, its creators, its publishers, all working together," said Gabe Feldman, co-founder of The Now Agency. Adobe's survey found 95% of people who use AI find its answers at least as trustworthy as traditional search.

The crux

With no deterministic measure of where a brand or publisher appears in AI answers, the value of being cited is invisible, and the industry is building a measurement standard for a surface that resets every time a model updates.

Sell-side read

Publishers that get cited in AI answers are sitting on inventory no one can yet price. Building a first-party "AI citation share" metric, and proving your content drives those citations, is a negotiating asset buyers are only beginning to ask for.

Watch

The IAB's framework release and whether a trusted third-party standard for AI citation share emerges before the Q4 budget season.