On "How To Measure AI Search Visibility"

Citation counting is a fundamentally broken proxy for AI search value because it conflates mere presence with actual traffic impact. What matters is whether AI answers drive users back to your content, not whether Claude or ChatGPT mention you in passing—and those are measuring two different things entirely. Most brands are optimizing for vanity metrics while their actual discovery pathways shift underneath them. The real metric is whether AI integration is cannibalizing direct traffic or opening new entry points, and that requires tracking downstream behavior, not upstream citations.