Your AI Visibility Problem Is Quietly Killing Your Ad Performance

Adobe's research tells a similar story—visitors from generative AI sources are 12% more engaged and 5% more likely to convert than traffic from paid search. Meanwhile, most marketing teams are running Google Ads campaigns in complete isolation from what ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity are telling prospects about their brand.

The Funnel Has a New Top

Here's what's actually happening when your prospects research solutions: They ask ChatGPT "what's the best [your category] for [their use case]." The AI names 2-3 brands. If you're not one of them, you don't exist in that buyer's consideration set—no matter how much you're spending on ads.

Then they search Google. They see your ad. But they've already been told by an AI assistant that your competitor is "the market leader" or "best for enterprise." Your ad now has to overcome an objection the prospect didn't even know they had.

The Data Nobody's Connecting

Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that web mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.664—stronger than any traditional SEO factor. Branded search volume correlation sits at 0.392.

Translation: the brands that AI recommends are the brands that get talked about.

What This Means for Paid Media

If ChatGPT consistently recommends your competitor when prospects ask "best [category] software," your cost-per-acquisition is higher than it needs to be. You're paying to acquire customers who've already been primed to prefer someone else.

Paid Search CTRs are declining 8-12 percentage points in categories where AI answers dominate. When your brand shows up in AI recommendations, you get the compounding effect—prospects arrive warmer, convert faster, and cost less to acquire.

Where Digraph Fits

We built Digraph to close exactly this gap. The platform monitors brand visibility and sentiment across seven AI systems—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Mistral, DeepSeek—and connects those insights to ad generation using psychology-backed principles that actually convert.