Rebuilding Brand Trust for AI Discovery

We used to measure success by traffic, maybe to owned properties.

What actually happened to traffic? And what did it teach you about the metrics about what we're doing in media that are still going to matter?

Yeah, I mean, great question.

All right.

Let's start with it would be really interesting to have a year where there wasn't a seismic change in the media industry for, you know, B2B.

But would that be

fun then, is it?

No, it is part of the reason we all have our job, isn't it? To do these things.

Yeah, I mean, site traffic is phenomenally important and getting people to your own properties wherever you can so you can control the narrative and what you want to say to somebody is the ideal for sure.

LLMs, as we know, have come in and kicked that a little bit to the curb over the last year and a bit.

I mean, I think it was Gartner was saying 5% of all searches are now through LLMs.

I suspect that's a lot more for B2B and we're definitely seeing that disruption with traffic.

Sometimes 60% down for some clients that perhaps a little bit more generalized, 30% down for those that are a bit more specific.

Do you think that was deeper than what people anticipated? Yeah, I do.

I do.

I think...

We should have learned better by now.

You know, when you see those charts where it's adoption of new platforms and it's like Meta took this long to get a million users and, you know, OpenAI took 30 seconds to get 100 million users on the platform, whatever it is.

We should have known that the change was going to be really, really fast.

We're not good at learning that, I don't think.

But I think it surpassed even the expectations that we had, to be honest, that it would make so much of a difference.

And they're predicting, Gartner are predicting that 50% of all search behavior will be LLMs by 2028.

And I suspect that's probably a low ball as well.

So what's

the right response then? Do we chase the traffic or do we do something else?