Half of U.S. consumers now intentionally choose AI over traditional search, putting 20-50% of current search traffic at risk and impacting up to $750 billion in consumer spending over the next two years, according to research from McKinsey.
Thanks to AI Overview summaries added to the top of search results on Google, around 60% of traditional searches now result in no clicks (Bain), with users only half as likely to click through to a link when AI Overviews are present (Pew).
Beyond consumers, research indicates all of big brands’ core stakeholder groups are increasingly turning to AI for research, tasks and decision making.
- Almost all B2B buyers (94%) now use AI in purchasing. (Forrester)
- More than 78% of global investors now use AI tools to support investment-related decisions. (BridgeWise)
- Over half of U.S. government organizations are also using AI, including 57% of local agencies and 58% of state organizations. (Granicus)
- The rate of AI adoption among U.S. procurement professionals has tripled since 2023, with over three-quarters of procurement teams now embedding AI into their workflows. (Procurify)
So, what does this all mean? It means the factors that influence how companies are perceived among the public and within core stakeholder circles are quietly changing. The user time spent on traditional channels like Google search or social media is being replaced with time spent on AI. If a brand isn’t showing up in AI search, or is being portrayed negatively, that has serious and immediate consequences for brand awareness, reputation and trust.
Further, as click-through rates decline, companies can no longer reliably use traffic to their websites and “likes” on social media as proxies to measure their brand awareness and perception among target audiences. Nor can they rely on their owned channels alone to directly reach those target audiences.
These days, reaching people online isn’t just about posting something to get a click. It’s also about being mentioned in the many millions of AI chats taking place on a daily basis, which is not something brands can measure directly unless they’re using a dedicated tool for it.
Meet 3BL’s AI Visibility Tracker, the first built for brand reputation management
As more people turn to AI assistants for research and recommendations, visibility in AI chats is a meaningful driver of brand recognition, reputation, and trust.
Over the past year, we’ve heard our customers — large publicly-listed companies, many of them household names — ask the same question in different ways: What is AI saying about us? Is it accurate? Is it fair? And how does it compare to what AI says about our peers?
We couldn’t find a tool to answer those questions well enough for our customers. So we built one.
3BL’s AI Visibility Tracker goes beyond mention counts and rudimentary sentiment scoring to get to the heart of the AI conversations that truly shape how stakeholders see you.
Our database includes thousands of queries tied to brand governance, reputation and trust, asked by real people and curated by corporate responsibility experts. Unlike trackers built for product marketers, ours captures the nuance that communications and corporate affairs teams need to make strategic decisions, with a sentiment model based on more than keywords and direct access to the evidence behind every metric.
If you’re curious whether ChatGPT is your biggest cheerleader or your harshest critic, fill out the form below to see your score today.
