B2C isn’t far behind: NielsenIQ puts it at 42% of consumers researching products with AI.
That’s why bigger budgets are being allocated to AI search.
It’s also why we’re all scrabbling to work out how valuable our AI visibility strategies are.
Searches for AI attribution and ROI keywords have grown 212% over the last 18 months, according to our Keywords Explorer data:
AI search ROI, in its simplest terms, is the value you get back from your AI visibility work, divided by what you put in.
I’ll say upfront: I don’t think you can ever neatly prove AI search ROI.
At Ahrefs, we’ve always taken the view that trying to meticulously trace a sale back to every touchpoint is a losing game.
And AI search is one of the least trackable digital channels yet, so perfect attribution is even further out of reach.
Someone can get a complete answer inside ChatGPT and never visit your site at all.
When they do click through, referrer data can be stripped, so it just looks like direct traffic.
And even if someone acts on an AI recommendation, they don’t always tell you that’s what happened.
That said, leadership doesn’t need a perfect number.
They need a sensible estimate they can compare over time, and between what you can track and what your customers tell you, there’s enough data to build one.
If my manager asked me to report on our AI search ROI, this is the process I’d follow.
It’s not bulletproof, but it’s a method you can repeat every quarter, and it mostly uses data you already have.
How to estimate your AI search ROI
AI search ROI is the value you get from appearing in AI answers.
Formalized into an equation, it would be value minus the cost spent getting there, divided by that cost.
- Value equates to sales, traffic, awareness among people who never click, conversions, and better-informed buyers
- Cost covers content, technical work, tools and team time
Revenue is the obvious thing to measure when you’re calculating ROI, so that’s what the steps below focus on.
AI search ROI = (AI revenue − AI cost) ÷ AI cost × 100
But the other types of “value” matter hugely, and should be reported on alongside your ROI (we cover these in our follow-up article).
Step 1: Work out your AI costs
You have two types of costs to think about when you’re calculating AI search ROI:
Pure AI cost: The costs that only exist because of AI search, such as AI visibility tracking tools or agency retainers for AI work.