When an AI assistant persuades a shopper and the sale happens through a search ad or a voucher site, the credit historically goes to whichever channel recorded the last visible step. The IAB's AI-Era Attribution Blueprint, published in New York on 12 November, is an attempt to stop that happening by default.
The framework asks three questions of each conversion. Who or what created the intent, who made the decision, and who completed the purchase. The answers place it in one of three pathways, Human-Owned, AI-Assisted or AI-Executed, and the pathway decides which parties may make a "decision claim" or a "contributory claim", and what evidence each must bring. The IAB is careful to say a claim is not credit, only "the right to be evaluated for credit".
"AI-influenced sales are sometimes reported as search or direct traffic," said Caroline Giegerich, the IAB's vice president of AI. The result, she said, is that the next marketing investment can go to the wrong channel.
The IAB's own outlook research in September found 45% of ad buyers rank comparing AI-driven and traditional customer journeys as their top measurement challenge. Another 44% use branded search and direct traffic as standins for AI influence they cannot track.
The last click is in the firing line
The IAB's announcement does not mention affiliates, commission or last click. But in most affiliate programmes the last tracked click before purchase is what gets paid. A framework that separates where intent came from and where the purchase was completed cuts both ways for the channel. Content affiliates whose reviews feed AI answers could gain a basis for a contributory claim. Voucher and cashback sites, which often capture the final click, could find more of that click attributed to an assistant upstream.
The document also asks AI platforms to disclose whether recommendations are paid or organic, to name their sources and to label AI-originated traffic consistently, the same disclosure the EU's Digital Fairness Act would write into law for shopping agents. Publishers are asked to identify the contributory claims their content creates. Hello Partner has looked at whether AI visibility can be measured at all and at OpenAI's new traffic data for brands, which stops short of sales.
It is a US framework. Whether IAB UK, the APMA, UK networks or advertisers adopt it is not yet known.
For brands, the IAB's first suggestion is a practical one, to estimate what share of conversions sits in each pathway. A useful companion question for any network or agency is how AI-referred traffic is labelled in the reporting they already send.
Nothing about how commission is paid changes until brands and networks choose to use a framework like this. When they do, the part of the journey that commission has always ignored will start to be measured.
