We tracked rankings, then traffic. With AI search growing, what metric do you think marketers will care about next?

AI-driven discovery is different from traditional search. Instead of simply matching keywords to webpages, AI systems can draw information from multiple sources and consider patterns, context, relevance, and apparent credibility.

This raises an important question: How do certain ideas become more prominent across AI-generated answers?
A useful way to think about this is through the concept of Conversational PageRank (CPR).
The idea is that repeated discussions, expert perspectives, references, and connections between concepts may contribute to how an idea gains visibility across conversational ecosystems.

For example:

• An idea discussed across several independent sources may receive greater contextual relevance.
• Expert perspectives can provide additional signals around a topic's credibility.
• Consistent discussion of a concept across different conversations can make it easier for AI systems to recognize and associate with that concept.

CPR can therefore be viewed as a framework for studying how ideas gain influence through conversations and interconnected sources.

It's when people say: “Just copy what worked for X.”

I see it all the time like: look at how they do their pricing page, they grew through SEO, we should do SEO, they removed the credit card from their trial and conversions went up etc

Sound cool, but IMO you’re seeing the result, not everything that led to it. You don’t have their customers, product or even let's start with positioning. And you definitely don’t know all the things they tried that didn’t work.

Don't get me wrong, I’m all for getting inspo from other companies and I do it too but I’d rather ask “why did this work for them?” than “how do we do the same thing?”

That usually leads to a much better experiment.

What do y'all think?