What’s strange is that we’re moving into a world where recommendations matter more than a click, but attribution still assumes a traditional search funnel. By the time someone lands on your site, the most important decision may have already happened upstream and you have no idea.
The UTM case you mentioned is a good example: it only captures direct "AI to site" clicks, but misses scenarios where AI influences the decision indirectly (brand mention to later search to visit). From the site’s perspective tho... yeah it looks indistinguishable from organic search. It makes me wonder whether we’ll need a completely new mental model for attribution here. Perhaps less about “what query drove this visit” and more about “where did trust originate.”
Not sure what the right solution is yet, but it feels like we’re flying blind during a pretty major shift in how people discover things.
Disclaimer: I've built a tool in this space (Cartesiano.ai), and this view mostly comes from seeing how noisy product mentions are in practice. Even for market-leading brands, a single prompt can produce different recommendations day to day, which makes me suspect LLMs are also introducing some amount of entropy into product recommendations (?)
The one concrete thing I've noticed are some companies changing their SEO blog strategies. Where previously they tried to position themselves as thought-leaders, I've seen an increase if blog posts where they add transparency to what they offer (very clear product descriptions, pricing, use cases, etc.). I believe the general idea is that this type of summarized content is more likely to be picked up by LLMs.
Disclaimer: I've built one of these AI visibility tools (Cartesiano.ai), so I've seen just how much noise & uncertainty is around this space.