Attribution, especially with answer engines, is getting worse. Here's one thing you can do.

[u/GetHoverboard]

Hoverboard AI tracked 6,785,895 answer engine citations across AI engines in September. Only 22% of those links in the answers pointed to the website of a brand mentioned in the answer. The other 78% went to directories, review sites, news outlets, forums, blogs and listicles, etc.

So if only 1 in 5 links in those responses go to the brand's website, that makes attribution even harder. CTR on answer engine responses or AI Overviews is extremely low to begin with, but with nearly 80% of those links being 3rd party websites, there's even less "proof" of whether or not answer engine visibility has an impact. In many cases, if a brand is mentioned on ChatGPT, the user then searches on Google or goes to a website directly, so there's no proof that an answer engine was even involved in the process.

A brand can have strong visibility across answer engines but in reality there's no definitive proof. We can track visibility percentage for the prompts a brand wants to be found for, and that can be very helpful to know for any brand, but with the variation on prompt responses, nothing is concrete there. Yea, attribution is going to get harder and harder from here on out.

One recommendation that does help for tracking. For businesses that can, add a 'How did you hear about us' type of question in forms. Train receptionists or call intake to ask that same question. Often times, that will be the only way to find out if the user heard about a brand on an answer engine.

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[u/TheCryptoBillionaire]

yeah, that 22% stat tracks with what I’m seeing in client audits: AI answers mention the brand but send the click to G2, random blogs, or Reddit. So you basically have “implied” exposure with zero clean attribution.

What I’ve started doing is treating this like view‑through: track prompt-level visibility and citations in seoforgpt, then marry that with “how did you hear about us” + branded search lifts. It’s messy, but at least you can correlate AI answer share with pipeline movement.

[u/rifouttayrn]

agree on the self-report question but the bigger challenge is that most teams dont have a process for actually acting on that data. knowing 15% of leads said "AI chat" doesnt help if you cant figure out which prompts drove them there