Let me start by stating the obvious. AI visibility is a real thing. The question is what it is worth, and to whom.
Three facts are worth agreeing on before we perhaps disagree on everything else.
First, some partners are losing traffic. For some partners, almost 50% of the clicks are gone.
Second, brands are getting almost nothing back. Whatever is happening inside the AI tools, it is not sending people to the brand. I think that is deliberate. Unlike Google, the AI tools earn nothing when you click out. They earn on usage, so they keep you inside.
Third, what happens in the AI tools still matters. When an AI assistant recommended a brand, users are more likely to turn up on that brand's site within the following week, through direct visits and branded search rather than a click through an AI tool.
So, some partners lose traffic, brands gain no traffic, purchase decisions are influenced anyway, and the AI platforms share no data or almost no data.
We’ve been here before
The partner marketing industry has a tendency to think that everything that happens online happens in the partner marketing universe. The recurring assumption is that this can only be solved by us. So the industry has responded with a set of tools. Mainly third-party tools, but also some in-house tools here and there. Several networks now sell AI visibility products, and some claim they can potentially reverse engineer which purchases were made as a result of an AI mention.
This reminds me of the industry's longest running conversation, multi touch attribution. Does anyone remember that discussion? I suspect that it has generated more conference hours than commission.
Follow the logic, please. The last click partner earns less when an earlier touchpoint sits inside the network's own partner base, and more when that earlier touchpoint sits outside it. So the commission depends on what the network happens to see, not on what actually influenced the sale. GDPR and cookie blocking did not help the multi touch attribution model, but in my opinion the model was flawed long before the far reaching privacy rules. Why? Because the internet is a great deal bigger than partner marketing.
So, ten years ago the industry couldn't attribute a sale across three websites. Multi touch attribution did not increase budgets. Now some want to attribute sales from conversations inside ChatGPT that nobody can see.
Combining a small part of the internet with a claim that you can reverse engineer sales made inside AI tools is where this gets dangerous. Introducing a pile of probabilistic transactions into a channel that brands chose precisely because it is deterministic is the wrong move. If brands move budget into AI visibility and the sales do not follow, the budget leaves. Budgets will not only leave the new product but perhaps also the deterministic business.
A billion-dollar opportunity?
Part of it is right, though. Paying partners for content that AI tools consume makes sense, and it is already happening. In September, Google started rolling out an "AI contribution" pilot in Search Console, paying sites when their content feeds an AI answer in a meaningful way. Networks are in a good position to do something similar. We already have relationships with thousands of partners who, in many cases, sit in nobody else's ecosystem.
So, a billion-dollar opportunity? For our industry, no. That value will be split across the whole chain. Google will take a large piece, and so will Cloudflare. It sits in front of a fifth of the web, now blocks AI crawlers by default and makes AI companies pay to use partners' content. The biggest partners will do direct deals. Networks, at best, get a share of what is left.
Am I worried? Not really. AI usage is growing and so are we. Adtraction is seeing more conversions in a market where people use AI tools every day. So far, the two things look complementary rather than competitive.
Will we do something in AI visibility? Yes, I think so. Not because it is a billion dollar market for networks, but because partners deserve to get paid for content that other people monetise and because there may be a way to increase brand visibility.
