Back when AI search first became a thing, nobody knew how to measure any of it. I started my agency right at that moment (one of the first built specifically for this, mind you). The tooling didn’t exist yet, and when clients asked “is it working?” nobody in the industry could honestly answer them.
Then I started seeing bs on LinkedIn from funfluencers and “experts” about citations and how they’re what matters.
My guess is citations won because they were the first thing anyone could count: you could track them and put them in a deck, so overnight they became the North Star.
This has irked me the entire time.
Nobody clicks a citation and buys…
No one is reading an AI answer, recognizing your domain in the little source carousel, and converting.
People click through when the AI recommends your brand by name, and maybe when it mentions you.
This is why branded traffic goes up when AI visibility goes up for high traffic queries. People see the recommendation and go run a secondary search for your name instead of clicking anything in the answer.
Somehow the industry decided to call this “zero click,” like the click disappeared, when it just moved to a branded follow up search.
Only three things matter: does the AI recommend you, what words does it use to describe you, and does it match the customer intent.
Where it found those words is invisible to the customer. It matters to me when I’m optimizing, sure. It does not matter to the person with the website who actually has to service those leads.
Citations are diagnostics
Tracking them tells me where I have leverage to change what the AI says about a brand, and they’re a decent leading indicator. Useful the same way a crawl log is useful. But you’d never put “crawl requests up 40%” in a case study unless you are desperate, because your client would ask what that has to do with their pipeline.
So when a case study says “we increased citations by X%,” I don’t care. It’s the AI-era version of reporting rankings on zero-volume keywords, and here’s the uncomfortable part: most of the agencies reporting it know it’s meaningless.
Think about why anyone hires a marketing agency in the first place. They want leads and they want people to know them by their name.
Crazy that people are writing checks to appear in footnote 3 of a low traffic AI Overview rn.
It’s not (just) about your website anymore.
What does the AI find about your brand across the entire internet for a given intent, and what does it say after reading?
That’s the game these days.
Am I the only one seeing this? I’ve been in this space since the beginning and I feel like I live in crazy town.
And clients need to stop asking about llms.txt and schema.
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