WordPress VIP x 97th Floor: Investing in AI Discoverability and Measuring Impact

97th Floor CEO, Paxton Gray, and WordPress VIP CMO, Jodi Cerretani, closed out their three-part webinar series on AI discoverability. The final session covers where to invest, how to measure success, and how to prove ROI to your CFO.

Every CFO is asking the same question right now: what is AI visibility actually worth? It’s a fair question for a channel that’s hard to attribute. But the buyers have already moved.

Buyers Pick Their Favorite Before They Ever Call You

Paxton shared that 68% of Google searches now end without a click. When full AI mode is present, that jumps to 92%. Buyers do their research inside AI, then show up later by typing in your URL or searching your name.

He calls this shift the move from the keyword era to the specificity era. The old customer journey was easy to track. The new one happens out of sight:

• 94% of B2B buyers rank vendors before they talk to them
• Four out of five of those favorites win the deal
• 90% of B2B buyers now use LLMs to pick their favorite

In many cases, the sale is made before a buyer ever hits your site.

Budget Pressure Pushes Teams Toward the Wrong Channels

At the same time, investing is getting harder. Marketing budgets are near all-time lows, CMO tenure is shrinking, and many leaders respond by chasing short-term wins.

That pushes money toward paid channels that are easy to attribute. Paxton warned that teams are “at risk of chasing attribution more than actually chasing the audience and going where they are.”

Your Website Is the Lever Most Teams Ignore

Jodi pointed out that brands have more control than they think. AI has to pull context from the web, and “the number one source of authoritative content about your brand and your business is your own website.”

Yet in WordPress VIP’s own survey, only 17% of leaders ranked their website as a top investment priority for the next 12 months. That gap needs to close.

AI AI Discoverability Isn’t a Single Line Item

Paxton doesn’t treat AI search like media spend. It runs on investments you already make.

SEO is the foundation. Ahrefs data shows seven out of 10 pages cited in AI Overviews already rank in Google’s top 100. Google has also confirmed it uses query fan-out, so ranking for related subtopics feeds directly into AI answers.

Brand and PR carry real weight. An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found PR and brand building matter even more than backlinks for AI citations and mentions.

Technical work matters more than ever. SEO meant pleasing one bot. Now you’re dealing with many, and each one interacts with your site differently.

His takeaway: “there should be a coordinated investment in each of these existing line items.”

Decide What You’re Measuring For

Jodi made a confession on behalf of marketers. We’re good at measuring things. We’re less good at deciding what we’re measuring for.

Most leaders call AI discoverability a priority, yet haven’t defined what their metrics should tell them. Before you buy a tool or build a template, decide what business question you need answered.

A scorecard to start with

Lagging indicators are the north star metrics to share with stakeholders:

• Unpaid traffic: AI referral, organic search, and direct traffic combined
• Conversions: sourced and influenced leads, pipeline, and revenue

Leading indicators guide your own strategy: AI crawler activity, citations, brand mentions, share of voice, accuracy and sentiment, and branded search.

Set expectations on AI traffic

AI referral traffic is growing fast, but it’s still a small share for most brands. Jodi’s advice is to frame it as “small but mighty.” Research from Microsoft found AI-referred visitors stay longer and are three times more likely to convert than organic visitors.

Check AI crawler access weekly and track progress monthly. Save brand mentions, citations, conversions, and revenue for quarterly stakeholder reports.

The Results Can Show Up Fast

Paxton shared the story of an event and venue management software client. They were the big player in their space, but their pipeline was thinning and their close rate was dropping. AI search showed why. They sat at the bottom for citations and brand mentions.

They used those leading indicators to get leadership buy-in, then invested across brand, architecture, content, and third-party validation. Within three months:

• Citations more than doubled
• Brand mentions doubled
• AI impressions rose 36%
• MQLs grew almost 3x, and SQLs rose 143% from AI search, organic, and direct traffic

Their presence nearly doubled, and their pipeline impact nearly tripled.

The work pays off in other ways too. AI-ready content doubles as sales enablement. A clearer brand helps everywhere, not just in AI. And it prepares you for a future where AI agents handle more of the buying.

Give Your CFO a Floor and a Ceiling

For Paxton, “It all comes down to ROI.” Jodi shared a two-part model built to pass a CFO’s sniff test.

Sourced ROI is the floor. Count only revenue from AI referral traffic against your AI discoverability investment. In her illustrative example, $250,000 invested returned $400,000 in attributed revenue, a 1.6x return. It’s intentionally conservative.

Influenced ROI is the ceiling. Count revenue from AI referral, organic, and direct traffic. It’s more generous, since much of AI’s impact shows up outside direct referrals.

The real return lives somewhere in between. That framing speaks in the dollars and cents a CFO wants, instead of leading indicators they don’t.

Where to Start if You Can Only Fund One Thing

Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Profound can track mentions and citations, but they rely on sample prompts. Paxton trusts them for movement, not exact volume.

If he could fund just one thing this quarter, he’d start with brand consistency across the web, making sure your messaging is clear and compelling for your audience. Jodi would add an infrastructure audit. The best content in the world won’t help if AI crawlers can’t reach it.