Search historically offered a reasonable deal. You had a person searching, a results page popped up, a link was clicked and a site visited. Then the conversion, which may or may not have happened. The advertisers received the signals and while this measurement was never perfect, with look-back window differences or recency tossing a curveball, the actual journey had enough actionable data to support a decision. A business decision. Now this deal is breaking down.
People are no longer only entering “keyword” but asking full questions of LLMs. They’re adding context and following up on the answer, and the AI system does not retrieve a list of possible destinations but reads across them, synthesizes information and returns a response.
The search experience has changed from finding a source to getting an answer but the tech stack for measurement still relies on the same set of signals and assumptions, chief among them that value begins when a site is visited.
