u/nick-profound

Yext Research found that 86% of AI citations come from brand managed sources - local pages, listings, owned content. Which means measurement and action are more connected than most teams realise. You just have to know where to look...

Organic traffic and keyword rankings made sense when search was a ranked list of links. But since AI is answering the question before anyone clicks through then traffic is a lagging indicator of something you can't see yet.

Here's what to track instead:

• Citation frequency: is your content the actual source powering the AI answer or is someone else's content carrying you? You can show up in 80%+ of AI responses about your category and still have almost no citation share.
• Share of voice across models: which percentage of AI responses about your category include your brand and how does that compare to competitors? ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini all behave completely differently. Break it down by platform.
• Branded search lift: if AI is recommending you in answers and people aren't clicking through, they'll often search your brand name directly later. Branded search trending up while overall organic is flat or declining is usually a signal that AI is working for you even when you can't see it in referral traffic.

Who's tracking these at the moment? If you're not - why not, and what are you doing instead?

Organic traffic from Google is declining by about 30-40%. In real time, we're watching as SEO becomes a brand and awareness channel instead of a performance channel...

My question - are you still reporting mainly on clicks + rankings? Or are you starting to track things like AI mentions, citations, branded search lift, "how did you hear about us?" data etc?

Google organic traffic is down 30-40% across almost every category I'm seeing right now. Google's AI overviews are giving everyone more impressions, but click-through rates are dropping.

We're seeing SEO change from a performance channel to brand/awareness channel very, very fast. No one really know what's around the corner (including me) and there's no clean "strategy playbook" to follow...

So, my question is where is everyone at with this?

Specifically, I'd love to know what channels you're betting on. Have you already allocated more budget to Reddit presence, comparison content and/or third-party coverage? How are you explaining declining traffic to stakeholders?

I think ranking as a concept is becoming meaningless.

From our internal data we know that being number one on Google gives you roughly a 19% chance of showing up in a ChatGPT response for the same query. 19%. That's it...

We also know that AI models rebuild their answer from scratch every single time. Only 30% of brands stay visible from one AI answer to the next. AI synthesizes an answer and presents it directly to the user based on a judgement call it makes about which brands belong in the answer.

I don't think the industry has come to grips with this change yet - at least not fully?

There's still a fixation on getting into SERP 1, 2 or 3 and thinking that translates into AI visibility. I don't believe that's the case, which is why I don't look at keyword volume data - at all. I look at our customer's data. I look at our call recordings. I've taken probably 50 demos of Profound and led them all. I pull all of that data into what I want to write about and then I combine that with LinkedIn social data.

I want to see where my brand actually stands in AI answers. That's my priority.

For me that comes down to citation share. I want to understand how much control I have over visibility across different platforms/prompts. I want to know who's powering the answers in my category and if it's me or someone else providing the source that gets cited.

Prompt coverage for understanding which questions you're winning/losing + visibility rank of your brand v competitors.

Is everyone else thinking along these lines as well, or do you stand by the idea that ranking in Google will boost your AI visibility. If so, why?

I do want to acknowledge/be upfront that I come from paid media, not SEO. I don’t have the baggage of riding Google algorithm updates for a decade. I do believe that’s been an asset to me so far because I can be positioned to be “eyes wide open” about what's happening.

But I know it also means I approach things from a different perspective.

So, if you've been in the SEO game for a while and think I'm looking at this wrong, I genuinely want to hear it!

AI characterises your brand. If you aren't already, you need to find out how you're being framed in responses. Is the sentiment positive, neutral, or actively working against you?

The signals worth tracking: which themes come up most often, whether they skew positive or negative, which third-party sources AI is pulling from, and whether your owned content is actually being cited.

When AI gets your brand wrong or represents it badly, it usually comes down to stale third-party content. For instance, a comparison article calling out a missing feature that you've since built or included, a review that no longer reflects your product etc. LLMs don't know it's outdated - they just cite it.

I wrote a longer guide on specifically what to look out for and how to start tracking/improving your brand sentiment in AI answers. If you're not sure where to begin, start there.

https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/how-to-track-brand-sentiment-in-answer-engines

Has anyone audited how their brand is being described in ChatGPT or Perplexity? What did you find?

I want to talk about the difference between being cited v being recommended because a lot of the brands I've been talking to are optimizing for the wrong one.

Citation = when AI pulls your content as a source to construct an answer
Recommendation = when AI actively suggests your brand to a user

You can't get recommended without being cited consistently. There's no point in trying to get AI to recommend you if you haven't done the foundational work of becoming citable.

Think of it this way: citation is the input --> recommendation is the output.

You can't skip the first step.

When you take a look at the data in Similarweb's 2026 AI Brand Visibility Index you can see what I'm saying. Look at what's happening across sectors:

• Consumer electronics: Apple scores 100 on AI visibility but the brands with the fatest growing momentum are B&H, Adorama and iFixit aka specialist retailers with deeply structure/problem-solving content.
• Beauty: Education-led brands that explain formulations and routines in clear structured ways like eCosmetics, Dermstore and drmtlgy.com are getting cited more. That's not what you'd expect if you look at their branded search demand compared to big players like Glossier or Maybelline.
• Fashion: Nike scores 100 but is flat in momentum. The brands accelerating are WhoWhatWear, Grailed and ASOS - editorial and resale platform built around curation and contextual guidance rather than transactional presence.
• News: Niche, reference-led publications that answer specific queries with depth are killing it here, especially Science Direct, PC Gamer and Taste of Home. Not the brands with the biggest readership.

Across every sector it's the brands that create specific and structured content that pull ahead. The lesson here is that brand scale doesn't buy you citations - topical depth does. Focus on niching down. Build real topic authority. Make your content the clearest answer to a specific question that exists on the internet. That's what gets you cited consistently over time, which will then lead you to get recommended.

Report’s here if you want to dig in!  https://www.similarweb.com/corp/2026-genai-brand-visibility-index/