Right now, most publishers block AI bots. According to Vince Nero’s excellent research, 79% of top news sites block AI training bots via robots.txt. Only 18% block no AI crawlers at all.
Not a perfect science, as the robots.txt is so easily circumvented, but still.
No one is playing nice anymore.
Multiple publisher x AI company lawsuits and threats to block Google from very serious publishers. USA Today, Reuters, and Politico. Even Reddit is considering walking away from the Google AI deal. A marketplace or micro-conversion model where publishers are paid when their content is used cannot come soon enough.
All of this after Google just posted its most valuable quarter ever. The almost non-existent value exchange doesn’t look like changing anytime soon.
TL;DR
- Visibility has measurable downstream impact. Users visit a brand’s website at 2.5 times the normal rate post AI visibility.
- A brand’s inclusion in the training data is central to inclusion in the future selection process. Publishers have real value here.
- But with probabilistic tracking and with many bad actors in play, marketing yourself as a brand of influence requires true expertise.
- As with any type of commercial proposition of this nature, there are risks to be aware of.
Visibility Has Measurable Influence
Thanks to Similarweb’s fantastic study on The Impact of Downstream Visibility, we know that:
- Users that see a brand in an LLM are 2.5x more likely to visit that brand’s website in the following seven days.
- These users are twice as engaged as traditional users.
- AI dominates the early stage of the journey, but search and AI come close to parity as the user nears the point of conversion.
- That 55.9% of AI-influenced traffic arrives via search.
LLMs have restructured the web in a manner more convenient for users. Because we are so explicably lazy, we almost always take the easy route. This reorganization of the web reduces the cognitive load of finding the answer yourself.
The majority won’t click unless forced into it.
But while AI sends very little traffic, the traffic it does send is twice as engaged. Users find out about a brand, person or product via social, audio, video and now, AI. Once the user knows about an entity, they search for it. This is how search has functioned – as a navigational channel – for some time. We Google things we have found out from other channels.
This is why search has always done so well when it comes to last click attribution.
Being visible really matters to brands who sell products. It is not a soft brand metric. It is a performance channel too.
AI will never send traffic directly to websites. But it is a crucial discovery channel for brands. People discover the brand via AI visibility and search for said brand further down the funnel. Via search.
There’s almost certainly a strong correlation between increasing gen-AI traffic, branded search, direct traffic,…
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