One of 97th Floor’s clients, a B2B company that sells event and venue management software, was the biggest name in its category when its pipeline started thinning out and its close rate began to slip. When the team looked at what AI tools said about the category, the company sat near the bottom for citations and brand mentions, even though buyers in its market knew it well.
Within three months of fixing that gap, the company had nearly tripled the leads coming from AI, organic, and direct traffic.
That story anchored the last session of our three-part AI discoverability series with WordPress VIP and 97th Floor. After covering what AI says about a brand in session one and how to improve it in session two, Jodi Cerretani, CMO of WordPress VIP, and Paxton Gray, CEO of 97th Floor, took on the question every CFO asks next: what is this worth?
For agencies, the answer often decides whether a client keeps paying for AI discoverability after the first audit.
Buyers pick a favorite before they ever click
Gray opened with the numbers behind the shift. Most Google searches (68%) now end without a click, rising to 92% when Google’s AI Mode answers the query. Buyers are still doing research, but inside AI tools, and many show up later by typing the brand name or URL straight into the browser.
He called this a move from the keyword era, when buyers researched on your client’s site, to the specificity era, when they build a shortlist inside an AI tool and often decide before filling out a form. Gray shared that 94% of B2B buyers rank vendors before talking to them, the favorite wins four times out of five, and 90% now use AI tools to pick that favorite.
68%
of Google searches end without a click
94%
of B2B buyers rank vendors before talking to them
90%
of B2B buyers use AI tools to pick a favorite
Funding that shift is hard when budgets are tight. Gartner’s CMO survey puts marketing spend at under 8% of revenue, and 71% of CMOs say they respond to ROI pressure by focusing on short-term results. That often means moving money into paid channels because they’re easy to attribute, which Gray said leaves teams chasing attribution instead of buyers.
Cerretani added findings from WordPress VIP’s research. Sixty percent of enterprises saw AI referral traffic grow last year, yet only 17% of leaders rank the website as a top investment priority for the next 12 months, even though a brand’s own site is the most authoritative source AI learns from.
Many clients are underfunding the part of AI discoverability they control most, their own website, and that’s work agencies already do.
Fund the work clients already pay for
When a client asks how much to spend, it’s tempting to treat AI search like a new paid channel with its own budget, but Gray recommended against it. Because AI discoverability depends on work clients already pay for, he suggested funding those existing line items together, so clients don’t need to approve a new budget.
SEO is the foundation. Gray cited Ahrefs data showing that seven in 10 pages cited in Google’s AI Overviews already rank in the top 100 organic results. Google also uses query fan-out, which we covered in session two, so ranking for related searches is how a page ends up in the answer. Gray’s advice was to keep investing in SEO and even to increase it.
Brand and PR carry more weight than they used to. In an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, how often and in what context a brand was mentioned around the web mattered more than backlinks for whether AI cited it.
Development and technical work matter more than ever. SEO meant pleasing Googlebot. Now a whole range of AI crawlers read a site, each in its own way.
Decide what you’re measuring for, then build the scorecard
Cerretani admitted, on behalf of marketers, that we’re good at measuring things and less good at deciding why. In WordPress VIP’s research, 74% of leaders called AI discoverability a main or significant priority, yet many hadn’t defined what they’re measuring for.
Deciding whether to keep funding the work, where to shift budget, or which topics to go deeper on each calls for different numbers. “If you haven’t figured out and really defined what you need these success measures to tell you about your business, start there before you onboard any tool or put together any template,” Cerretani said.
When you’re not sure where to start, Cerretani shared the scorecard WordPress VIP and 97th Floor use with their own customers:
Leading indicators
For the marketing team
- AI crawler activity
- AI citations
- Brand mentions and share of voice against competitors
- Accuracy and sentiment of AI answers
- Branded search
Lagging indicators
For stakeholders
- Unpaid traffic: AI referral, organic search, and direct traffic
- Conversions from those sources: sourced and influenced leads, pipeline, and revenue
Cerretani called the two lagging indicators the north star metrics, and they’re the ones to share with stakeholders. Unpaid traffic bundles AI referrals with organic and direct because a buyer might build a shortlist in ChatGPT and come back days later by searching the brand. The leading indicators help the team adjust course, and when they move, the lagging results usually follow.
Set expectations about AI traffic. For most brands, AI referrals are still a small share of total traffic. But Microsoft Clarity data shows AI-referred visitors stay longer than organic search visitors, and in an earlier study, AI traffic converted at about three times the rate of other channels. Tell clients up front that these numbers are small but valuable.
Report on a regular schedule. Cerretani broke reporting into three intervals:
- Weekly (internal): Check AI access. Make sure AI crawlers can reach the content that matters.
- Monthly (internal): Review how the leading indicators are tracking against targets, and adjust the plan.
- Quarterly (stakeholders): Report brand mentions, citation volume, conversion rate, conversions, pipeline, and revenue to make the case for continued or bigger investment.
Make the business case in dollars
The event software company from the start of this post used its leading indicators to win leadership buy-in, then invested in brand, site architecture and crawlability, AI-readable content, and third-party validation like PR and backlinks.
Gray noted that AI search can respond much faster than traditional SEO. Within three months:
- Citations more than doubled
- Brand mentions doubled
- AI impressions rose 36%
- Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) from AI, organic, and direct traffic grew nearly three times
- Sales-qualified leads (SQLs) from those same sources rose 143%
Pipeline grew even faster than visibility, which Gray credited to the quality of the traffic AI sends.
Gray also listed benefits beyond pipeline. Content built for AI is the same content sales teams need, like comparison pages and case studies. And an AI-ready site prepares a brand for agents that do the buying, which Gartner predicts will handle 90% of B2B buying by 2028.
A floor-and-ceiling ROI model for the CFO
CFOs still want an ROI figure, so Cerretani shared a model that gives finance a low and a high estimate.
The floor: sourced ROI
Compare revenue from AI referral traffic alone to the AI discoverability investment. This view is conservative on purpose.
$1.60
per dollar in Cerretani’s example: $250,000 invested produced $400,000 in attributed revenue.
The ceiling: influenced ROI
Count revenue where AI referral, organic, or direct traffic was the last touch and compare it to the same investment.
This gives a more generous figure.
If the sourced number alone shows at least a 1x return, Cerretani said, “we can probably agree that that’s too conservative and the true ROI lives somewhere in the middle.” Leading indicators matter to the marketing team, but they don’t speak in “the dollars and cents terms that someone in a CFO seat is going to be demanding.”
Two questions from the audience
Can any tool reliably measure brand mentions and citations? Profound, Searchable, Ahrefs Brand Radar, Semrush, and Moz through STAT all track them, but they work from sample prompts. Treat the results as a trend line rather than an exact count, and explain that to clients before the first report.
If you could fund only one thing this quarter, what would it be? Gray would start with consistent brand messaging across the web. Cerretani would start with infrastructure, since even strong content won’t help if AI crawlers can’t reach it.
Five questions for your next client review
- What business decision should our AI discoverability reporting help you make?
- Which numbers does your CFO or board expect to see, and how often?
- Are AI referral, organic, and direct traffic tracked together, and tied to leads, pipeline, and revenue?
- Can AI crawlers reach the pages that matter most, and who checks that each week?
- Is your current SEO, content, PR, and development budget working toward the same AI visibility goals?
Why WordPress agencies start ahead
WordPress agencies already build on the platform AI learned to crawl, and for enterprise clients, WordPress VIP adds infrastructure built for the growing mix of AI crawlers. That puts you in a good position to run the audit, the fixes, and the quarterly reporting that shows the work paid off.
Watch Investing in AI Discoverability: Measuring Impact on demand, along with sessions one and two.
Not an Automattic for Agencies partner yet? Join the program.
