Adrien Menard, Co-founder & CEO at Botify, a leading agentic and AI search optimization solution for brand visibility.getty​AI bot activity on websites increased by 5.4x last year, and the implication is simple: A growing share of customer discovery is happening through systems that visit your site, interpret it and ultimately speak for you. Both a new channel and a new customer, AI search acts as an intermediary between your brand and the end user, crawling, extracting, summarizing, comparing and recommending—often without prompting a visit to your site. ​Chief marketing officers (CMOs) need to internalize an uncomfortable reality. AI search won’t drive the same high-volume website traffic as before, but it will influence consumer decisions within AI interfaces, shaped by what AI can find, verify and trust about your brand, especially as agentic commerce accelerates.​To meet the moment, brand leaders need to answer two questions: Are my pages optimized for AI search? If not, what can I do?​Today’s AI Search Reality And Why Your Old KPIs No Longer Fit ​Marketing measurement was built for a world where search and discovery were relatively deterministic. You targeted keywords, tracked rankings, estimated clicks and turned visibility into traffic.​AI search breaks that model in three ways. ​First, there is no stable rank in generative answers. AI results are conversational and inherently stochastic. You can ask the same question twice and get two different answers. Traditional rankings determined by search algorithms, by contrast, were easier to measure. If you searched for “best running shoe,” you generally knew who would show up in the coveted, somewhat stable blue links. Trying to apply traditional rank-tracking logic to AI search is like measuring brand equity with a stopwatch.​Second, the customer journey is now an invisible conversation. In traditional search, you could infer intent from a query string. In AI search, customers provide more information to AI engines. They share detailed preferences and budgets, ask follow-ups and refine what they’re looking for. That conversation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and most brands can’t track or measure where they appear within it.​Finally, clicks carry new weight. We’re entering an era of zero-click discovery and AI-driven engagement within AI experiences that traditional analytics platforms can’t reliably attribute.​If you still equate visibility with sessions, you’re at risk of misallocating resources and underinvesting in the very work that determines whether AI systems recommend you in the first place.​A Better Measurement Philosophy​It doesn’t need to be perfect, but CMOs need decision-grade measurement. With AI search, this is achieved through a blended approach—combining hard, first-party data with directional visibility signals. This means looking at how bots and agents behave on your site and how different AI platforms represent your brands. ​To do this, start where the truth lives: log files. If AI agents are the new customers, then log files are your most honest source of behavioral data. Log file analysis tells you which bots are visiting, what they’re accessing and where they’re getting stuck.​This is also where many brands uncover an unpleasant truth: JavaScript-heavy sites can obscure dynamic content from AI bots, meaning the content you’re publishing may not be the content AI can actually consume.​After analyzing log files, refocus on technical priorities like reducing reliance on JavaScript, investing in richer and more consistent structured data and maintaining site health for efficient and reliable bot crawling. ​Then pair that with analytics to understand how often your brand shows up, where it appears and how it’s perceived by AI search engines. ​The KPI Translation CMOs Should Make Now​The good news is you don’t need to abandon traditional SEO concepts; you just need to translate them into metrics with depth for today’s landscape.​Here are the shifts CMOs can operationalize today:• Keyword Rankings To Presence Rate: How often are your brand/products mentioned and cited in AI search?• Backlinks To Citation Share: How frequently are you cited versus competitors in AI answers?• Domain Authority To Sentiment Mix + Trust Signal Strength: When you are mentioned, is the framing positive, neutral or negative? Does the model treat your brand as credible?• Indexed Pages To Enhance With Model Coverage: How discoverable is your brand across different AI models?• Journey Coverage To Align Content With Buyer Intent At Every Stage: Do you answer questions across the entire buyer journey in a format AI can summarize and recommend?• Assume Content Visibility To Analyze Bot Behavior From Log Files: Do you know which bots are on your site and where they crawl?​Think of these as governance tools. AI platforms are already using your site content to summarize your positioning, products and prices. If that representation is incorrect or outdated, you’re letting a third party narrate your brand rather than control how your brand shows up in search.​Why Prompt Tracking Won’t Save You​Many teams are defaulting to prompt tracking as the replacement for keyword tracking. This involves selecting a set of prompts, monitoring outputs and tracking changes over time. It’s not a complete waste of time, but it’s also not the most efficient way to increase visibility. Your rank in an AI answer fluctuates because the output is generated, not retrieved from a fixed list. And as you add more prompts, you often add more noise.​Use prompt tracking as directional guidance, but anchor your efforts in what you control: technical accessibility, structured clarity, content depth and bot behavior data.​Build Foundations—And Leave Shortcuts Behind​All of this can feel daunting. But everything you do to become AI-ready also improves traditional SEO.Cleaner rendering, stronger structured data, better intent coverage and healthier technical foundations are durable advantages in search, regardless of how the interface changes.But you have to act with urgency and realism. In an AI-mediated world, being found is increasingly separate from getting the click. The brands that win won’t be the ones chasing a new hack. They’ll be the ones building an AI visibility and performance framework now—before their competitors become the only brands the agents can see.​​Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?