The AI Visibility Illusion
When dashboards move but demand doesn’t
There’s a new comfort metric circulating in marketing right now: AI visibility, meaning citation tracking, or share of answers.
But I’m starting to see something familiar. As an industry, we’re repeating old SEO behavior in a new interface.
Here’s the pattern:
Define a tight set of conversational queries,
write content that mirrors those exact phrases,
track those same prompts,
and celebrate when visibility improves.
But improving performance on a prompt list you created isn’t the same as increasing demand, influence, or revenue, and the tools used to define the queries don’t have enough data to be right.
Right now, AI answer environments are volatile. There’s no universal source of truth for prompt volume, no complete transparency into answer construction, and no stable citation reporting across systems. Much of what we’re seeing is modeled and inferred.
Useful? Yes. Precise? Not exactly.
Jes Scholz (one of our AI Search Advisory Board Members at FOMO.ai) has been emphasizing that what matters in this era isn’t isolated phrase matching, it’s brand presence at real category entry points. In other words, are you showing up when genuine buying contexts are triggered?
That’s very different from appearing in a tracked set of neat, predictable prompts.
The risk is simple: when dashboards become the goal, strategy bends around them. Teams start writing to the measurement framework instead of to the market.
Short-term, the charts move, but long-term, it’s fragile.
If you’re investing in AI visibility, the better question isn’t “Did we appear for this phrasing? it’s: “Are we meaningfully present across the real conversations buyers have as they evaluate solutions?”
I would add that Jes rightfully argues for SoV (Share of Voice) is the key metric to focus on, plus revenue growth. Agreed, BUT at the same time SoV is very hard for a small SMB and as such we lean on GA (Google Analytics) and GSC (Google Search Console) to have reliable data.
What’s actually happening under the surface
AI search feels measurable right now, but it isn’t stable in the way traditional search once was.
There’s no equivalent of a clean keyword planner for conversational AI. Prompt “volume” is estimated. Citation tracking depends on sampling. Interfaces update constantly. Model behavior shifts without warning.
That means many AI visibility metrics are directional, not definitive. And when directional data gets treated as precise truth, strategy drifts.
We start optimizing for:
tracked prompts
neat conversational phrasing
citation triggers
short-term share-of-answer gains
Instead of optimizing for:
category demand
buyer confidence
trust signals
conversion influence
Those are very different priorities.
The incentive problem
The deeper issue isn’t the tools, it’s the incentives.
If performance is judged by whether a brand appears for a fixed list of prompts, then naturally, teams will write to those prompts. Titles will mirror them, headings will echo them, and as a result, pages will be structured specifically to trigger citation behavior.
In the short term, this works. Your dashboards demonstrate improvement, reports start looking good, and your nternal stakeholders feel great!
But it’s very brittle.
Because what you’re really optimizing is alignment with a measurement system, not alignment with real buying behavior. When models update or prompts evolve, those gains can disappear overnight; meanwhile, competitors can replicate the tactic in weeks.
There’s no moat in exact-match phrasing.
I met with a sales prospect a few weeks back, and they have found themselves in an extraordinary position. Working with an agency and a very large citation tracking tool, they optimized to the citations that were growing in volume, yet have lost almost 10% of their daily revenue from organic search in just over 90 days! Why? Because the agency was investing their time in content and backlinks to those exact queries, but those queries didn’t reflect what their audience was really asking.
Visibility is not influence
There are three separate things happening in AI search:
Demand — Are buyers actively trying to solve this problem?
Visibility — Does an AI system surface your brand in responses?
Influence — Does that visibility shape perception and drive action?
You can increase visibility without increasing demand.
You can increase visibility without increasing influence.
And when those lines blur, dashboards become vanity metrics.
Real strategic advantage comes from influencing category perception, not just appearing in an answer.
The better frame
Instead of asking:
“Did we show up for this specific phrasing?”
Ask:
“Are we structurally present across the decision journey?”
That means showing up in:
comparisons
alternatives
objections
implementation questions
pricing concerns
risk evaluations
category definitions
It means depth, not just alignment.
It means being useful throughout the conversation, not just visible in one moment, and requires that you understand the topics your audience are talking about, and within those, the questions they are asking.
That’s much harder work than engineering a citation, but it’s durable.
Where this is headed
AI interfaces will continue to evolve, measurement tools will improve, and data access will expand.
In fact, Bing has just released new tools that may start providing more grounded visibility signals, and our team has broken down exactly what that means and how to use it here:
https://learn.fomo.ai/p/bing-webmaster-tools-just-opened
And I suspect that OpenAI will need to launch some type of better solution if they are going to successfully launch ads inside their chats. Ad revenue might, yet again, be the driving force for development.
That’s progress, but even as tooling improves, the principle remains: if you optimize for the metric, you’ll eventually get trapped by the metric.
But if you optimize for real buyer conversations, you build something that survives interface shifts.
Dax is the CEO & Co-Founder at FOMO.ai, and author at 84Futures and dax.fyi. Take our free course, ‘How To Win With AI Search’.