By Sara Guaglione • August 24, 2026 •
Ads are starting to get served to bots instead of people. Nobody agrees on what that’s worth, or who gets credit for it.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau is trying to fix that. A new framework, due out Nov. 12, will tackle how to attribute ads served to AI agents, the mechanism increasingly standing between publishers and the humans who used to click through to their sites directly.
The IAB is working to “create a shared framework for measuring and crediting AI’s role in conversions, especially when traditional signals are minimized,” according to Caroline Giegerich, vp of AI at the IAB. The IAB is exploring new measurement frameworks and signals to quantify AI’s influence on purchase decisions, she added.
The stakes are bigger than they sound. If an AI agent reads a product page, weighs it against competitors and buys on a user’s behalf, who gets paid for that exposure? The publisher whose content shaped the answer? The platform that ran the agent? Nobody, because the evidence trail doesn’t exist yet? Because if traditional attribution signals (like UTM tracking parameters and referrals data) don’t reliably survive the customer journey in AI platforms, what evidence should count as proof that an ad encountered by AI contributed to a conversion?
