How to Track Success with AI Visibility and Search
As generative AI continues to reshape how people search, such as through Google’s AI Overviews, businesses must rethink how they track success in organic visibility. Traditional SEO metrics like rankings and traffic are still important, but they no longer paint the full picture. The shift to using AI-driven tools (like ChatGPT) that serve content in response to queries without the need for a click calls for new ways of measuring visibility, influence, and engagement.
In this post, we’ll explore how you can track AI visibility, what metrics matter most, and how to align your digital strategy with the evolving nature of search. It’s clear that AI is here to stay, so your business should be prepared to adjust its strategies and future-proof its marketing.
Understand the New Landscape of AI Search
AI-driven search is fundamentally different from traditional search engine results pages (SERPs). Instead of displaying a list of links to top-ranking content, generative AI platforms often summarize content, pulling in information from multiple sources to provide an immediate answer to user queries.
Because of this, the way search is conducted has changed as well. With the rise of new AI search tools, including Google AI Mode, users are more likely to frame their queries as full questions or natural conversations rather than keyword strings. In turn, they expect personalized results. Searchers may even engage with AI suggestions or follow-up questions within the same session.
How AI Impacts Traditional Search Metrics
AI integration into search experiences is reshaping how users interact with results, which in turn affects the metrics previously used to track organic search success. Here are a few metrics that are impacted:
- Organic traffic: Especially for top-of-funnel (TOFU) queries, many searchers will get the answers to their questions directly from AI Overviews. This means that organic traffic to your website may decrease.
- Clickthrough rates: Similarly to organic traffic, clickthrough rates to certain pieces of content may drop, as users find their answers directly within AI responses.
- Bounce rates: Web visitors may still visit your website even if their query delivers an AI Overview or response. For instance, they might be looking to get more details or context, verify the AI response’s accuracy, or take an action. Depending on the reason for their visit, they may fulfill their needs quickly, which can result in unpredictable fluctuations in bounce rate.
- Average session duration: As users shift to consume content differently, your average session duration metrics can fluctuate as well. For instance, queries that can’t be easily or completely answered by AI responses may pique web visitors’ curiosity. This can lead to increases in average session duration, as the visitor wants to learn more about the topic.
- Keyword rankings: Traditional keyword rankings may become less important, as visibility in AI-generated content may not correlate with rankings. AI responses may serve content taken from articles that rank much lower on the SERP for that keyword. However, according to a Botify study, 75% of AI Overview links come from the top 12 organic rankings for the keyword. This means that, as of this study, having high-ranking pieces of content for your main keywords is still an essential way to gain visibility.
Understanding these changes is key to interpreting SEO performance accurately and setting realistic expectations for organic success. However, fluctuations in these numbers don’t mean that these metrics aren’t worth tracking anymore or that you need to panic if you see any downward movement. The goal is to stay educated on how AI impacts your metrics and adjust your expectations accordingly.
Update Your Metrics to Reflect AI Engagement
On top of understanding how AI impacts existing SEO metrics, you should also begin tracking new metrics that reflect your brand’s visibility and influence in AI-powered search. Marketers need to consider new indicators, such as:
- Mentions or citations in AI summaries, which indicate that AI tools recognize your content and see it as authoritative.
- Presence in answer boxes or AI-generated snippets, where your content is directly cited as a recommended resource, improving non-click visibility.
- Branded search volume, especially following AI exposure, as this suggests users remember your organization and actively seek it out after engaging with AI-generated content.
- Referral traffic from AI tools or aggregators, which confirms that users are navigating to your website after seeing it referenced by AI tools.
Google is also beginning to support the shift toward AI-driven metrics. In June 2025, it began including sites appearing in AI features (such as AI Overviews and AI Mode) in overall search traffic in Google Search Console. Although still in its early stages, this feature signals that Google recognizes the need for greater transparency in how AI tools shape traffic.
Over time, emerging tools will offer solutions to track AI-centric metrics more effectively, helping marketers stay ahead of the curve. For instance, Semrush now offers an AI toolkit that analyzes how LLMs feature your brand and compares how different AI platforms present your products.
For now, simply stay aware of these metrics to better understand how your content is performing.
Optimize Content for AI Tools, Not Just Search Engines
To increase the likelihood of your content getting cited by AI, it’s crucial to structure and present information in a way these tools can easily understand and reference. AI systems don’t evaluate and learn from content the way humans do. Instead, they rely on structure, clarity, and semantic cues to determine which sources to use and deliver to their users.
Here are three key considerations for optimizing your content for AI:
- Clarity: Make sure that your content is clear and concise. Use clear, factual language that’s easy to parse, and break paragraphs into easily digestible chunks. You can also use bullet lists to break text up even further.
- Structure: Structure your content so it flows logically. In particular, implement proper header tags in descending order. This creates a content flow that AI can easily understand. Additionally, you can implement structured data and schema markup to help AI tools understand your content even more easily.
- Relevance: Create content that’s highly relevant to your audience’s search intent. In particular, focus on topics, not just keywords. What do people want to know when they search this keyword? Address their concerns and main questions. Additionally, don’t hesitate to include authoritative citations and relevant images, videos, and infographics to deliver an even better experience for AI and web users.
If your content is ambiguous, lacks context, or isn’t properly formatted, AI tools may have a difficult time understanding it, which results in your content being overlooked.
Keep in mind that all of these best practices align with well-known SEO best practices as well. Emphasizing clarity and relevance isn’t just a best practice for AI; it also allows web visitors to more easily understand and find value in your content. Incorporating a clear structure makes it easy for search engine crawlers to crawl and index your content. This means that following these best practices won’t jeopardize your SEO strategy—they’re actually likely to improve your SEO performance!
Next Steps: Adjust as the Landscape Evolves
AI visibility is already redefining success in organic search. While the metrics are changing, the core strategy remains the same: create high-quality, useful, and trustworthy content.
However, AI and search technology are evolving rapidly. To stay competitive, adopt a mindset of continuous improvement and adjustment. Conduct regular audits to understand how your content appears in AI tools, test different content formats, and subscribe to newsletters (like ours!) that feature industry updates on AI.
Here at Nexus Marketing, we’re constantly evolving our offerings to address new trends in the SEO marketing landscape. If you want to boost AI visibility and get your content featured by AI tools, we provide the following services:
- AI Audits: Using generative engine optimization (GEO) scorecards, we evaluate your brand’s readiness for AI-driven visibility. Our team will also identify actionable steps you can take to improve how AI tools see your brand.
- AI Content Optimization: We support your brand’s GEO efforts by optimizing your website content for AI visibility, including implementing schema, consistent blog authorship, clear brand language, and more.
- Ongoing AI Support: After we’ve conducted an AI audit, we’ll finalize an action plan to get your brand in the right place to be seen by AI. We’ll also monitor your AI visibility by conducting regular audits and implementing new activities as necessary.
If you want to learn about how to increase brand visibility within new AI tools and SERP features and discuss how to leverage them to your advantage, work with Nexus Marketing. Contact us to learn more about our full range of AI visibility, digital marketing, SEO, GEO, and lead generation services.
And if you’re a Nexus client or partner, please contact your Nexus points of contact—we’d love to chat about how we can take your AI strategy to the next level.
