Nobody can prove AI visibility sells anything
Rippling built its own media mix model. Roast went Bayesian. That is the state of the art.
Somebody in your company bought an AI visibility tool this year. Ask
them what it changed.
Digiday put that to the people running these programs, and nobody
can connect the two. Scrunch, Profound, and Semrush will estimate how a model presents you and which sources it read. None of them link that to a sale.
So the teams that care build the bridge by hand. Rippling triangulates visibility scores from Profound and AirOps, conversion data from its paid ChatGPT ads, branded versus unbranded search traffic, and a media mix model it built on Google's open-source Meridian. Roast uses Google's Causal Impact, a Bayesian tool, to infer lift.
A payroll company and a media agency, doing statistics, because the dashboard cannot answer the question it was sold on.
Others skipped the modeling. Dating app Seeking.com hired an agency to get into high-traffic Reddit threads before they get scraped.
Your version is whether you fund a data scientist or a comment section. One of those survives being said out loud in a board meeting.
TALK ON THE MARKET
John Barham, managing partner at performance media agency Roast, on
the last eighteen months:
"Every CMO we know has been under excruciating pressure over the last
18 months from their boards and C-suites or investors." On the
tooling: "There is no one tool out there that can paint you a picture
of the universe."
Eighteen months of that pressure, and the honest answer from the agency doing the work is still: go and build the model yourself.
NUMBERS MATTER
5%. Share of all citations going to G2, Capterra and TrustRadius combined, across 9,978 ChatGPT and Gemini answers in GetIntel's AI Software Index, collected 6 August. TechRadar led on 1,114 citations, Reddit came second on 807, and Gartner managed 238, fewer than Zapier.
A decade of category budget has gone to a reference layer the assistants are routing around.
DAILY PROMPT
You are a marketing analytics lead. I have AI visibility scores from [TOOL] and cannot connect them to revenue. Here is what I can see: [PASTE visibility scores, branded and unbranded search volume, referral traffic by source, pipeline by source, sales cycle length]. Design the cheapest defensible test that moves me from correlation to something a CFO accepts: what to hold out, for how long, which confound would kill the read, and what result would make me stop funding this. Then write the one slide I show the board when the honest answer is still “we do not know yet”.
Use it before the next budget conversation. That last instruction earns its keep, because the honest slide is the one you are going to need.
You think at 150 words a minute and type at 60, which is why your best ideas arrive already flattened by the keyboard.
Wispr Flow sits behind a hotkey in every app you use — Gmail, Slack, Notion, Claude — and turns rambling speech into clean, formatted text without the filler words, false starts, or self-corrections you'd normally clean up by hand.
Dictate the strategy memo on the walk back from the meeting, and it's ready before you sit down.
CMO CORNER
Leaders who rely on visibility often lack alignment.
The pun is free, so take it. Every team in this story measures how visible it is, because visibility is the thing that can be measured. The duller question is what you would do differently on Monday if the score rose ten points. If nobody in the room can answer that, the subscription is a comfort purchase and the renewal is in ninety days.
We provide CMOs with AI strategy consulting for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.
We run an interview series with marketing leaders about how AI actually changes their work. Real use cases, not predictions.
If you’re doing something worth talking about, the opportunity is free and available for anyone. Simply reply to this email with your pitch.
TOOL UPGRADE
You cannot connect visibility to sales yet. You can stop guessing at the visibility half:
Peec AI — best for seeing how often you appear in AI answers, where
you rank, and how you get described. Try Peec AI here →
Semrush — best for holding the AI picture next to the search data
you already report, in a tab your team opens anyway. Try Semrush here →
Surfer SEO — best for the unglamorous half, turning what you find
into briefs and pages that get cited. Try Surfer SEO here →
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LEARN THIS
Roast and Rippling are building this from scratch. You do not have to: the AI-Powered Attribution Modeling Framework.
Step by step on multi-touch attribution that survives a CFO's questions, including which model fits which sales cycle and how to treat the touchpoints you genuinely cannot see. For the marketer whose board asked for the AI number in July and will ask again in October.
We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more about AI marketing for free. Browse our learning resources for free.
BRAND SLOP
D'Addario makes guitar strings. Its promo for the new NYXL HD set included music that keen ears thought was generated, and the company flatly denied it, saying it desperately wants to preserve human expression through music. It deleted the comments.
Then on 11 August it edited that denial and admitted it. Suno Studio used it to regenerate the original recorded track. "We got this wrong," the new statement reads. "We shared inaccurate information, and we're truly sorry." Nobody gets named, which is its own tell about how the track got there.
The remedy is the part to steal. Employees and creative partners must now disclose any use of generative AI. That policy costs an email to write. D'Addario paid for it with a retraction.
Telling guitarists you hate AI music while shipping AI music is the specific failure. The bigger one is that you don't know what your agency put in the last thing you signed off on.
That’s it for today!
See you next time,
— Peter & Torsten
