• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

Brands gained a framework to measure AI visibility Monday, developed by a working group at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

The “Measuring Visibility in the AI Era” focuses on the 4 P's of AI Visibility, an IAB framework that organizes visibility into a causal hierarchy.

It supports organic media for brands when consumers use AI-based search engines like OpenAI ChatGPT or Google Gemini to find their products or services.

Caroline Giegerich, IAB vice president of AI, told MediaPost this framework supports brand visibility in organic searches on AI engines.

"We are trying to give companies a good idea of what good looks like," she said. "I wanted to start with giving brands and publishers a way to measure visibility when someone shows up on their website from AI search."

The idea is to standardize measurement. More than 20 companies now sell AI visibility measurement tools, each using their own methods to measure, producing different, sometimes contradictory, results for the same brand or publisher.

The framework introduces a two-tiered classification so brands and agencies can determine whether the data they are buying is reliable enough for budget or strategy decisions, or only useful to spot early trends.

For publishers it provides standard visibility and disclosure metrics to understand how AI platforms use their content, and when site visitors click through from an AI engine to their website. Data then supports licensing discussions, and helps measurement providers differentiate fact vs. fiction.

The framework focuses on organic visibility, but the next steps will focus on paid media placements and attribution.

"We needed to start with organic and build on that," Giegerich said, pointing out that organic visibility is much more difficult to measure than paid media.

“If you’re a brand or agency and familiar with doing SEO or SEM, you are used to more of a straight line of data,” she said. “ChatGPT or Gemini are probabilistic models, which means they predict next works, making them variable.”

Giegerich said that for brands like Coca-Cola or Pepsi, it probably doesn’t matter, but brands in variable categories like moisturizers, one consumer could get “one-hundred different results, which is difficult for a brand to manage if they are trying to figure out how to show up in results.”

The working group that designed this framework included search agency representatives, including one from Walmart's data-science team. Microsoft Clarity also participated.

Ihab Rizk, senior product manager at Microsoft Clarity, said IAB’s framework is an important step toward a common measurement language for this new era.

Clarity’s participation is unusual because it owns a large language model (LLM), whereas most others participating in this framework do not.

Measuring Visibility in the AI Era organizes metrics into a causal hierarchy that the IAB called the “4 P's of AI Visibility,” which refers to how visibility translates into business value for both brands and publishers: presence, prominence, portrayal, and persuasion.

It boils down to whether the brand or publisher appears in an AI response, where and how prominently does the brand or publisher appear, and in what context, with what accuracy.

The AI visibility that drives action includes metrics, recommendations for strength, and post-citation clickthrough rate, which can bridge to IAB's forthcoming attribution framework.