Zero-click AI search is changing ROI. Learn the GEO KPIs that replace last-click attribution: visibility rate, share of voice, citation lift, and pickups.
Due to AI overviews and zero-click answers, AI search caused devastating declines in web traffic. The traditional methods for tracking brand visibility fell out of balance and brands have been left scrambling to figure out how to react.
It was this “Great Decoupling,” when web clicks and demand fell out of sync, causing unevolved KPI stacks to make ROI look dismal.
Though, it simply required a new way to look at the situation. It wasn’t that nobody was seeing brand content anymore. Instead, it was that where they were seeing it had changed. Consequently, this changed the rules of measurement.
Earned media has become the key driver of brand visibility in LLM answer engines, surpassing traditional SEO, prompting brands to rethink how they measure ROI for their earned media strategies. This measurement must tie directly to business outcomes in order to prove impact, and relying on outdated last-click attribution, simply isn’t cutting it anymore.
Users no longer rely on page rank to decide which sites to click on and get answers — AI nearly made those clicks obsolete. As a result, website visits are way down, but that doesn’t mean brands’ bottom lines have bottomed out.
It means that web traffic is no longer a reliable proxy for business growth.
It’s not as easy to follow a clear funnel from traffic to final conversion, whether that's a demo booked or a point of sale. What was once more traceable now relies on higher levels of both brand authority and visibility, as consumers turn to LLMs to inform their purchasing decisions.
It’s more difficult to draw a direct line between ROI from efforts on increasing visibility as compared to marketing efforts meant to increase traffic like paid ads or SEM campaigns.
The lack of the ability to draw that direct line misses a huge piece of your brand’s overall digital footprint.
Brands need new means of measuring and reporting on their LLM presence, in a way that isn’t dependent on traffic. Now that clicks are optional, they’ve fallen off of their pedestal in a traditional KPI stack to make room for new KPIs.
This fundamental shift in measuring success makes earned media strategies more valuable than ever, due to the direct relation between earned media wins and AI visibility.
As we build this new measurement approach, we need to be able to take it to leadership as a clear story. That means defining the right GEO KPIs at each stage, with some metrics that show early wins quickly, and others that build momentum as brand authority compounds over time.
Measuring platform visibility starts with understanding your baseline LLM performance. These are the KPIs a lot of brands are hungry for right now to guide internal GEO conversations, and the good news is establishing a baseline is pretty straightforward.
Hot Tip : Use a GEO visibility platform like Scrunch to track prompt sets, platform-by-platform presence, and brand visibility changes over time.
There are only so many brands an AI answer can cite, so how you stack up matters, especially against competitors for the same prompts.
Why it matters : Stakeholders don’t just want metrics that say your brand showed up in AI. Rather, they want to hear: “We’re winning the conversation,” or “We’ve figured out how to do better.”
Early results from Stacker’s Citation Lift Study show that the more brands get their stories republished across third-party news outlets, the more they are cited as sources in LLMs. And it’s not just Stacker research showing this, Muck Rack’s Q4 2025 study reports that around 90% of AI citations come from earned media.
These are your traditional PR metrics. They’re not the whole outcome anymore, but they’re still worth tracking now that earned media has new pull in an AI-driven world.
Hot tip: Don’t overlook local media. Local storytelling carries significant weight in LLMs, especially as major news outlets refuse to let their sites be indexed within many AI platforms.
How to position pickups: Pickups are the critical lever of influence that impacts the outcomes of Platform Visibility and Share of Answer. This makes your brand’s earned media strategy essential.
Without last-click attribution, there are still ways to mark the effect of earned media on your brand’s bottom line.
When LLMs flipped search on its head, brands were actually given an opportunity: their pipeline could flourish without needing to drive proportional website traffic.
In 2026, PR and content marketing reporting should reflect this new reality. That means strategies shift and what’s measured does too. Search isn’t dead, but it definitely looks different.
Stacker’s content distribution model is built to expand platform visibility and drive Citation Lift — the ultimate KPI for the AI search era, mapping how brand discovery works in 2026.
Doriane is Stacker’s Director of Marketing. She previously headed marketing departments in various companies, owned a marketing agency for 7 years, and built a startup combining automated marketing workflows with a marketing services marketplace.
Photo Illustration by Stacker // Canva
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