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The ROI question is the right one to be asking, and most CMOs are stuck on it because the measurement stack doesn’t exist yet in most orgs.
Traffic drop from AI overviews is real and accelerating, especially for informational queries. Proving ROI on AI visibility investment requires tracking something different than what GA4 shows you.
The teams I’ve seen handle this well are doing a few things: (1) tracking brand mention rate in AI responses as a leading indicator, separate from traffic – so running 30-40 relevant queries in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude weekly and logging where they appear, (2) correlating those mention rates with direct traffic and branded search volume, since AI visibility tends to drive brand recall rather than immediate clicks, (3) treating AI citations as a conversion signal in their attribution model – when someone finds you via AI and visits directly, GA4 records it as direct traffic, not AI referral, so you need a separate tracking layer.
The Conductor stat sounds right directionally. The question is whether that investment is going toward AI content generation (most of it) or AI visibility measurement (almost nobody yet). The former doesn’t move the needle much if you’re already producing content. The latter is where the actual gap is.
SEOforGPT sits on the measurement side – tracks visibility across AI engines so you can show before/after numbers when you make content or distribution changes. Still an emerging space but the CMO ROI pressure is exactly what’s pushing adoption.
