• by Laurie Sullivan , July 31, 2025

Paid search continues to evolve as large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) redefine how people find and consume information. With this change, advertisers face a new challenge — the ability to understand the impact AI-based search results has on their brands. 

"Advertisers and agencies are scrambling to decode the seismic shift AI Search is triggering - 60% of consumers already use AI tools like ChatGPT in their search journey,” said Ashley Fletcher, CMO at Adthena, an AI search intelligence company.

Adthena has spent decades building advanced auction systems for Google Ads. In 2019, for example, the company raised $14 million in a series A funding round led by Updata Partners to support AI-driven search.

Now, as LLM-driven platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity redefine the ways users discover information, its data scientists and developers have built a platform -- Adthena AI Search Intelligence -- to help c-suite executives, media buyers and planners and creators understand LLM data-driven systems.

Similar to Adthena’s Search Intelligence solution for Google Ads, this platform is built in-house by the company’s engineering team and data scientists, each with more than a decade of experience.

The data captured and analyzed in the platform not only supports search results, but also machine-learning clickthrough rates (CTR) and the ability to understand local models. Designed specifically for enterprise clients, the platform pull in and analyzes new data daily.

There are four ways to analyze data in the platform. Platform performance shows how often external links appear in responses across 14 industries, highlighting sectors that benefit most from AI-generated content.

External link depth reveals the average number of links per LLM response, helping marketers assess competition by query.

The most visible domains list provides names of domains most frequently cited on ChatGPT and Perplexity, such as reddit.com and wikipedia.org, which allows brands to compare visibility of their products and services.

Domain-level performance enables marketers to search and analyze specific domains for visibility ranking, cross-platform presences, and engine-specific scores.

Clients can access new data daily via Adthena’s App. Other related reports expanding on this include AIO Landscape in Google so advertisers can understand where and when their brand appears in Google Search AIOs, including search query intent analysis.

“This benchmark report is just the beginning of clients gaining domain-specific insights with the same depth they have come to expect about Google Ads,” Fletcher said.