By If my brand shows up in AI answers, does that have real impact on my marketing? Do people search more for my brand? Do I get more traffic? Do I make more sales? Great news; Similarweb has a new study out: The Downstream Impact of AI Visibility to help answer these questions.
The study looks at three consumer industries: finance, travel, beauty, and analyzes AI prompts that showed particular brands in these spaces and what happened on devices that saw those recommendations. The short version: direct visits and branded search volume for the recommended companies rose more than the visits/searches for non-mentioned brands, suggesting that AI answers have a real impact on consumer preferences (at least in these spaces). The study still leaves lots of open questions:
- Would these users have found these brands anyway?
- Would the results hold if we looked at smaller, unknown brands?
- Does AI answer presence have a greater or lesser influence than other channels, e.g. would ranking #1 in Google (with or without a click) or showing up in Instagram videos the user watched have more or less impact?
In spite of these open questions, the research is an excellent first look at a red hot topic, and worthy of your time.
Want more depth on this? My co-author Amanda Natividad will also give her take on this week’s episode of her Zero Click Marketing podcast. 😎
Transcript
Last week I contributed to a study released by Similarweb looking at the downstream impact of AI visibility, which is a topic lots of people have been asking about. I think the big question for many folks in marketing and outside is if I show up in AI answers, if my brand is present when people ask AI questions, does that actually help my business? Does it have a real impact or is this just a vanity metric?
And I’m real concerned about this too. I think that in many cases there’s some conflation of these two things, this study is one of the first to put data behind that question. So, they say here that AI owns the start of the consumer journey. I think that’s a mildly misleading headline here.
What they’re saying from a survey data is essentially that people say AI is more useful at the start of their journey, right? Discovering and getting initial ideas than it is at finding where to buy. So this is not quite AI is more prominent when people start a consumer journey. In fact, the data suggests traditional search engines are still about a hundred times more popular and more used for that.
But when people are asked to compare the two, that’s what you get. However, however, this is the part that I think is absolutely critical. And you can see some of my comments in the report here, and I’ll give you a link download too. But look at this part here.
I’m going to zoom in just for a second. It’ll be a little awkward, but stick with me.
Side scroll. Never. Great. Okay. So this is essentially saying when the AI recommends American Express in answers about which credit card company should I choose, visitors are seven point two percent more likely to visit American Express’s website.
When AI recommends Capital One, they’re fourteen point two percent more likely to visit that spot. So essentially the AI recommendations seem to have a real impact on whether someone later visits the brand’s website. Similarweb can see this because they have click stream panel data, right? Which looks, similar to what’s part of our users, right?
They can see sort of, visit by visit where people go on the web even after weeks and months. And so they know that within a time period, I believe they used, I want to say it was a month, but it might’ve been two. That essentially, yeah, follow Oh, sorry. This is following seven days.
So we’re really talking about very immediate, right? Like a quick purchase thing. Now, this is true for consumer and B2B, we’re not entirely sure. But like I said here, this is a really similar approach to how advertisers did outdoor in the twentieth century.
And traditional advertising, which is presence equals later consumption and later brand preference.
This data is looking at the channel mix of visits, and you can see that, like, there you go. So when people are influenced by AI, the search is slightly lower, like fifteen percent lower and direct is higher. Direct is how people do it. So essentially if Capital One gets recommended as a credit card company or your brand gets recommended, for whatever you do by an AI tool, it is quite likely that someone will directly go to their browser and type in your domain name.
Now, there’s, there’s a bunch more detail and data in here. I encourage you to check it out. I’ve left some other comments in here. It was great working on this with the similar web folks.
I really appreciate them, putting this together. I will say that my last bit of advice if you’re looking at this is once again, this is aggregate data. They are looking at some specific brands, big brands that you’ve probably heard of, Sephora, American Express, Capital One, right in spaces you’re probably familiar with. My recommendation is if you know your audience and your audience is not necessarily big consumer brand, I would suggest you could do this in SparkToro, could do it other ways too.
Basically I asked, hey, if I’m in interior design, lighting design, I wanna see what high income homeowners seeking to upgrade their home lighting design are looking for. And you can see that their use of search and AI, like they’re a little lower on search and they are a little higher on AI, which matches what we know about higher income and higher education folks, matches folks who are making big considered purchase decisions.
And then you can see all sorts of data about what they do, but we can go into specifically AI prompt topics and you can see like what these people are looking for. My suggestion would be to take a look at what your audience is prompting and searching for in addition to making this sort of assumption that if you show up in AI tools that your direct traffic will rise. You can measure that too by the way. You can measure in your analytics, you can say, hey, our visibility grew. If you’re using, I think Similarweb has a product for this. I know SEMrush has a product for this gum shoe is the one that we use.
You can see whether you’re mentioned, you can see whether your mentions are rising. Right? It’s more likely that you’re showing up in AI responses. And then you can check your traffic and you can use these sort of exact prompts to do it.
This is quite a nice match. So look, I think AI probably is influencing visits to almost everyone.
It’s small right now. It’s probably growing. It’s probably big in some sectors and quite tiny in others. And it’s your job to figure out where you can do this and how and what it means to your business.