Why 85% of Your Brand’s AI Visibility Has Nothing to Do With Your Website

In this week’s episode of Voices of Search, we spoke with Kevin Indig, growth adviser to over 40 companies, including G2, Ramp, and Airbnb, and founder of Growth Memo, a newsletter deeply rooted in SEO and organic growth strategy. Kevin has spent the last several months building tools, advising brands through one of the most disorienting transitions the industry has seen, and thinking carefully about what it actually means to do good organic marketing when the rules are changing this fast.

Our conversation covered how to lead an organization through a metrics transition, why most budget conversations about AI and SEO are being framed completely wrong, and what the shift from traffic-focused to influence-focused organic strategy actually looks like in practice.

Key Takeaways From This Episode:

• 85% of brand mentions in AI responses come from third-party sources, not your website. Visibility is increasingly won off-site.
• The three skills that matter most right now are prioritization, attention, and judgment. The barrier to execution has dropped so far that knowing what not to build is as important as knowing how to build.
• Moving leadership from traffic metrics to visibility metrics requires a specific sequence: surface the assumptions, build the new model, then change the ways of working.
• Evergreen blog content is losing value fast. The content worth investing in now is research, thought leadership, mini products, and anything that builds a genuine off-site reputation.
• Share of voice is the metric every organic marketer should add to their toolkit today. Relative metrics are more meaningful than absolute ones when the landscape is shifting this quickly.
• Meta thinking, the ability to step back and reflect on whether you’re working on the right things, is the most important skill to develop as AI makes it possible to work on almost anything.

The Skills That Matter More Than Ever

Kevin opened with something that sounds basic but lands differently in the current moment: the hardest part of working with AI isn’t learning how to use it. It’s maintaining the discipline to work on the right things. 

These three skills define who gets that right:

• Prioritization: “The barrier to execution is so much lower,” Kevin said. When you can build almost anything, deciding what’s actually worth building becomes the job. Teams that don’t get this right will spend enormous time on things that don’t move the needle.
• Attention: If prioritization is about choosing the right path, attention is about staying on it. When the barrier to building is zero, a “vibe-coded” side project can easily swallow your week. You have to be more disciplined than the tools are fast.
• Judgment: This is the one most people underestimate. “You want to be careful because you cannot judge how good that really is,” Kevin said. When someone shares a script that claims to automate an entire agency function, you need the domain expertise to evaluate whether it actually delivers. AI can produce something that looks right without being right—and only experience tells the difference.

These skills are the foundation for gaining AI visibility, including how to lead a metrics transition without losing the room. As Kevin puts it, “in a world where anyone can execute, the scarce resource isn’t capability anymore. It’s the judgment to know what’s worth doing.”

How to Lead a Metrics Transition

One of the most practically useful parts of the conversation was Kevin’s framework for moving an organization from traffic-focused metrics to visibility-focused ones. It’s a change management problem as much as a measurement problem, and he laid it out in three steps.

Start with assumptions

Before proposing a new model, surface the assumptions that are no longer holding. “Traffic leads to conversions” was true for a long time, and now it isn’t. Making that explicit with leadership opens up the conversation rather than triggering defensiveness. 

“People change their perspective proactively, but they don’t have them changed,” Kevin said. “Try changing someone’s mind. Good luck.”

Have the new model ready

Leadership needs something concrete to grab onto. A vague directive to measure visibility won’t land. The model will look different depending on the type of business, but should include citations, share of mentions in relative context, impressions, and a clear line to revenue or market share. 

“Everything you sell—meaning the model you’re trying to pitch—has to ladder up in some way to revenue or market share. Otherwise, it will hit a glass ceiling.”

Explain how the ways of working change

This is the step most teams skip. It’s not just about new goals, but understanding how SEO now scales with capacity rather than budget. 

“For advertising, every dollar you put in creates, hopefully, a dollar plus one out. For SEO, it’s not that simple. You increase your capacity to create content, to make technical changes. That’s how you want to think about it.”

The Budget Conversation Nobody Is Having Correctly

Kevin’s take on the AI-reduces-cost narrative is worth quoting directly. When computers became mainstream in the late ’80s and ’90s, the prevailing theory was that people would work half a day and spend more time with their families. That didn’t happen. Output increased. The same dynamic is playing out now.

“Technology can go both ways,” Kevin said. “It can save resources, or it can increase output.” 

The question every team and agency needs to answer before the conversation about reducing headcount or cutting budgets is: would it make more sense to hold output constant at a lower cost, or to dramatically increase output at the same cost? Most teams aren’t asking that question deliberately enough.

He was also direct about the AI-washing happening in layoff announcements. “Most of the time that reason is not AI,” Kevin said. “Why would I want to reduce my potential output if AI can increase my output?” The headlines are a masquerade for economic headwinds and hiring cycles, not a genuine reflection of what AI is doing to productivity.

Where Content Investment Should Actually Go

With AI making it easier than ever to produce evergreen blog content at scale, Kevin’s argues that this is precisely why the value of that content is collapsing.“Any content that is a commodity, that is easy to create, search engines will either create themselves or answer outright in the search results.”

The shift he’s seeing is away from traditional blog content and toward three categories that are harder to replicate:

• Research and thought leadership that adds something genuinely new to a topic
• Mini products and interactive experiences that can’t be easily summarized or replaced by an AI answer
• Off-site reputation building, getting your brand mentioned in the right context across authoritative sources

That last one is the most important shift and the one most SEO teams are slowest to make. “85% of your brand mentions are influenced by stuff that’s not on your website,” Kevin noted. Optimizing your own pages is still necessary for trust and conversion, but the visibility battle is being fought elsewhere.

Share of Voice Is the Metric Worth Adding Now

When we asked Kevin which single metric every organic marketer should add today, his answer was plain and simple: share of voice.

According to Kevin, when rankings, citations, and mentions are all fluctuating faster than traditional SEO ever did, absolute metrics become less reliable. How many citations you earned this month matters less than how many you earned relative to your competitors. “You want to think more about relative metrics than absolute metrics because things change so much more with AI,” Kevin said.

On whether to prioritize classic SEO or AI visibility if forced to choose, the answer was AI visibility, without hesitation. “Everything is AI now. Even Google is pushing overviews hard, and AI mode is just a click away from becoming the default experience.”

The One Skill Worth Mastering

When asked what the single most important skill is as SEO evolves into broader organic marketing, Kevin’s answer wasn’t a tactic or a tool. It was meta-thinking—the ability to step back and evaluate your own thinking and behavior.

“It’s very easy to get sucked into AI,” Kevin said. “You get sucked into a stream, and you function more on autopilot.” When you can work on almost anything, being conscious about where you spend your time and what you’re actually working on becomes the differentiating factor. Not execution ability, not tool fluency—but the capacity to reflect on whether you’re still solving the right problem.

Influence Is the New Optimization

The through-line of Kevin’s thinking is a reframing that the industry is slowly accepting but not yet fully acting on: organic marketing has moved from a page optimization game to an influence game. The brands that show up in AI answers aren’t necessarily the ones with the best on-page SEO. They’re the ones that have built the most credible, consistent presence across the sources that matter.

That shift requires different skills, different metrics, and a different conversation with leadership. The teams that work through that transition deliberately, starting with assumptions and ending with new ways of working, are the ones that will be able to take advantage of what’s coming.

Voices of Search is a daily SEO and content marketing podcast hosted by Jordan Keone and Tyson Stockton. The show delivers actionable strategies and data-driven insights to help marketers navigate the ever-evolving world of search engine optimization and content marketing. New episodes air weekly, covering everything from technical SEO to AI discovery, featuring industry leaders and practitioners sharing real-world frameworks and proven tactics.

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