The Strategic Questions Behind AI Search and Our Approach

In an era where AI is reshaping how people discover information, brands face a fundamental challenge: how do you measure what you can’t see? Traditional analytics were built for a world of keywords and rankings. But when users turn to ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Mode instead of typing searches into a traditional search bar, the old playbook doesn’t apply.

As VP of Web Solutions at Similarweb, I focus on understanding this seismic shift in digital intelligence, from tracking brand visibility in AI-generated answers to measuring sentiment across platforms and building tools that compress hours of research into minutes.

Let me break down how we see it.

How does Similarweb position itself in the AI-powered analytics market?

Recently we won the Martech Award for Best Marketing Analytics Platform, and we faced especially tough competition in a year marked by so much disruption driven by AI.

At Similarweb, my guiding compass has always been to bring clarity to complex marketing environments, whether that’s for analysts deep in the data, CMOs shaping strategy, or practitioners executing day to day. Over the past year, that’s meant leaning heavily into AI.

We’ve built capabilities that help brands understand and grow their visibility inside AI-driven search, not just traditional rankings, but also include citations, sentiment, and presence in AI-generated answers. This is all built based on real user behavioral data to help marketers navigate in this new environment. At the same time, we’ve introduced AI agents that take hours of research and compress them into minutes, helping teams move from insight to execution much faster.

The goal isn’t to chase hype. It’s to give teams real data, real context, and practical tools so they can compete confidently in this next chapter of search.

How does Similarweb connect AI search data with broader marketing intelligence?

AI search doesn’t replace fundamentals like branded search, loyalty signals, conversion analysis, and marketing channel mix. That’s why our broader platform, from search to traffic to conversion analysis, remains critical.

AI visibility without brand demand is fragile. Traffic without conversion insights is incomplete. We connect it all.

We’re not treating AI as a feature. We’re treating it as a structural shift in search behavior. And we’re addressing it across SEO foundations, AI visibility, AI traffic, and full-funnel performance. That’s the difference between reacting to AI, and building for it. During this time, marketers should review the entire channel behavior as in many cases they complement each other in the consumer journey.

What’s Similarweb’s overall approach to SEO in the age of AI?

We’re doubling down on SEO, not slowing down.

SEO isn’t disappearing, it’s evolving. We continue to invest heavily in delivering the freshest data in the market, best-in-class site audit and rank tracking, and advanced keyword research capabilities.

But we’re evolving these tools for the AI era. In Rank Tracker, you can now see AI Overviews directly in the SERP landscape. In Keyword Research tool, you can identify whether a keyword triggers an AI Overview, zero-click behavior, and how AI impacts traditional search demand.

This ensures that the traditional SEO strategy adapts to AI disruption, rather than being blindsided by it. And speaking of being blindsided – we’re also bringing more solutions that help tell the full holistic story – we saw from some recent research by Aleyda Solis that SEO is not only losing clicks to AI, but to paid. In this changing environment, there’s more pressure on Paid – our new Monitor & Protect module helps brands control spend, be alerted to competitor bids on their own terms and more.

We’ve also got some cool new ways to operate and get data. Firstly, our SEO agent launched last year, does mass analysis on keyword groups to reveal the competitive landscape, your own performance and then identifies action items (and even generate content briefs) to win more organic traffic share.

And our data is now available via MCP and we’ve seen some of the best SEO teams using this in so many different ways – from deep research into the competitive landscape or specific competitors to dashboards combining ‘traditional’ SEO metrics with AI Visibility.

How does Similarweb help brands measure AI visibility and citations?

This is where we’re investing heavily, and where the market is demanding clarity.

Our AI Brand Visibility solution helps brands understand where they appear in AI-generated answers, who is being cited instead, how citation patterns change over time, and how visibility shifts across the entire topic landscape.

We’re focused on three pillars:

1. Clarity: clear measurement of presence in AI environments.
2. Real User Data: grounded in actual usage, not assumptions.
3. Actionability: deep citation insights so brands know what to fix and where to compete.

What is Similarweb’s AI Search Intelligence platform and how does it track brand visibility in AI engines?

There are already dozens of AI brand visibility tools on the market. For me, the priority wasn’t launching just another one, it was building something reliable, grounded in strong data, and genuinely useful. We already have hundreds of customers using our AI Brand Visibility to track how visible they are across multiple engines.

From day one, we focused on methodology and rigor. Take Sentiment Analysis, for example. Some software providers simply ask a chatbot, “What do you think about this brand?” and report back the answer. That can be interesting, but brands can do that themselves. What we do is different. We track the right topics and the right prompts that matter to a brand, based on real user data. We record every response, daily. Then we analyze those responses properly, looking at sentiment in depth, identifying what’s positive, what’s neutral, what’s negative, and where there’s room to improve. Our team regularly iterate to identify the proper sentiment within the context of the question and the answer.

It’s that discipline around the data, not just surface-level outputs, that really defines our AI visibility product.

What are Similarweb’s key features for measuring AI traffic and performance?

We know first-party measurement isn’t perfect, but it’s great for brands to see how much traffic they’re getting from different AI sources to their own site.

So I knew we needed to develop something that adds more additional layers of context. Our tool shows total traffic to any site from AI chatbots, including your direct competitors. Right now, ChatGPT drives the majority of that traffic. That may shift as Google’s AI Mode expands, but today the picture is pretty clear.

Beyond volume, we show trends over time so you can see who’s gaining or losing share. You can compare sites side by side for competitive analysis and benchmarking. We also break down which landing pages are attracting AI traffic, so, for instance, if you worked in ecommerce, you could check out the traffic coming to your competitors and see if it’s landing on their blog content, category pages, product pages, or the homepage.

And to complete the picture, we show the likely prompts that led users there. So you’re not just seeing the traffic, you’re seeing the full AI journey. Like I mentioned before, the primary reason to be visible in AI Search isn’t to get traffic, there simply isn’t much traffic to be won. But the traffic that is available tends to be very high intent and worth optimizing for.

What makes AI traffic valuable despite its small volume?

AI traffic is still small, but it’s powerful. Our studies show that in markets like US retail, traffic from Gen AI sources converts at a higher rate than any other channel. These users arrive with extremely high intent.

We enable brands to track traffic from AI sources, identify which landing pages are winning, reverse-engineer competitor success, and optimize to capture this high-intent demand.

What are you most excited about in the coming year?

This year, we’ve got a really ambitious roadmap, especially when it comes to AI data and product innovation.

One of the big challenges we’re tackling is volume in AI environments like ChatGPT. A lot of tools have tried to replicate traditional keyword search volume for AI, but the reality is: AI doesn’t work like Google. The way people interact with chatbots is fundamentally different, it’s more conversational, more contextual, and less keyword-driven.

So instead of forcing an old model into a new environment, we’re building something more meaningful. We’re using Similarweb’s real user data to assess demand across topics, not just keywords. It’s a much more nuanced way of understanding where attention actually sits in AI-driven discovery. There’s more to come on that soon.

We’re also focused on simplification. AI has added complexity to an already fragmented landscape. Our goal is to make life easier for SEOs, marketers, and CMOs by consolidating insights: connecting AI visibility, SEO performance, traffic, and broader marketing signals into one coherent story. That’s something we’re uniquely positioned to do because of the breadth and unbiased, cross-channel coverage of our data.

And finally, I have to give credit to our product and data teams. This space is evolving weekly, sometimes daily, and they’re doing an incredible job navigating that change while building something robust and reliable.

We’re building this alongside the market. So if you’re a Similarweb customer, or just someone thinking deeply about AI search, my door is always open. The goal is simple: create products that are genuinely useful, grounded in strong data, and help teams win in their markets.

How does Similarweb’s mission align with evolving digital intelligence needs?

Similarweb is and always has been primed for any evolution in the digital space, due to our unique data methodology, coverage and our core mission on helping businesses succeed, whatever the landscape.

During Covid, we helped businesses pivot in an increasingly competitive yet open digital space. Now in the AI revolution, we show businesses how various metrics are changing for themselves, their competitors and their industry overall.

We are also the only tool to showcase the performance of AI Search Intelligence themselves, so you can see the rising players, the market consolidation and more. For instance, we’ve recently seen Gemini’s traffic surge, something which the market wasn’t necessarily predicting.

What value does Similarweb bring for prioritizing AEO, given tight team budgets?

Like all of our tools, we offer products at different price points to suit a wide range of budgets. We see AEO as a natural part of the broader marketing and SEO ecosystem, which is why most Similarweb customers access AI Search Intelligence tools through our marketing packages.

For those who want to try it out or test the capabilities, we also offer a self-serve package available via credit card, making it easy for anyone to get started.

What’s Similarweb’s approach to providing intelligence for AI search engines?

As more people turn to AI-powered search engines, Similarweb is proud to partner with a growing number of companies across the AI ecosystem. One of our most exciting recent partnerships is with Manus, which is leveraging our market research and traffic data to bring Similarweb insights to more people than ever before. We will continue to empower marketers at the places their work is done.

The New Search Reality

The shift to AI-powered search isn’t slowing down, it’s accelerating. Brands that treat this as a distant future problem will find themselves invisible in the channels where their customers are increasingly turning for answers.

But visibility alone won’t win in this environment. Success requires understanding the full picture: where your brand appears in AI-generated responses, how those citations translate to traffic, what that traffic does on your site, and how it compares to your competitors’ performance.

At Similarweb, we’re building the intelligence infrastructure for this new reality, grounded in real user data, focused on actionable insights, and designed to help marketing teams compete with confidence rather than guesswork.

by Baruch Toledano

VP of Solutions

Baruch Toledano is Similarweb's VP of Solutions. He is a seasoned strategy and product leader, with over two decades of hands-on experience in digital marketing, SEO and ecommerce technologies. Prior to joining Similarweb, Baruch was the Chief Product and Growth Officer at Conductor, a leading Enterprise SEO & Content Intelligence solution used daily by large SEO and content marketing teams. He has also led the product management of Magento, an open source ecommerce platform used by millions of merchants globally.