“We’re seeing branded search decline across the industry, so both how we measure it and how we grow it need a fresh look. The numbers rarely match from one tool to the next. Google Trends is good for direction and competitor comparison, but you can’t line its figures up against Search Console, and for smaller brands it’s noisy and imprecise. Search Console now builds its own branded-queries report with Google’s AI, and Ahrefs keeps shipping new features around AI and traffic. Welcome to the brave new world.”
— Alexandra Lamish, CMO at RichAds
Search isn't dying, but the way people discover brands has changed. More and more first touches now happen inside ChatGPT, Gemini or a Google AI Overview, where nobody clicks and nobody sees your banner.
For affiliates and advertisers, this hits in a quiet way. Branded queries are usually the cheapest and best-converting traffic you have. If fewer people learn about you, fewer people search for you, and your CPA creeps up without an obvious reason.
Below: why brand awareness drops in the AI era, how to measure branded search growth (with pros and cons of each tool), and what actually helps to push it back up.
So people search as much as before. The problem is where they meet your brand for the first time, and whether they click.
1. AI answers the question, so the user never visits. Ahrefs found that position 1 CTR fell from ~7% to 1.6% on queries with an AI Overview. ChatGPT handles roughly 12% of Google's search volume but sends 190x less traffic to websites. Every informational query that used to bring a visitor to your guide, landing or review now ends inside the chat. No visit, no logo seen, no memory formed.
2. AI recommends the same few names. SparkToro and Gumshoe ran 2,961 prompts and found the same brands in 55–77% of answers, no matter how the question was phrased. If the model already knows a competitor, it keeps naming them. Small and new brands get squeezed out of the shortlist.
3. AI cites the ecosystem, not your site. Only about 4% of AI citations come from a brand's own website (Profound, 27M citations). The rest comes from YouTube, Reddit, review sites and listicles. A brand that only invests in its own blog is barely visible to the model.
4. Attribution hides what's happening. 68% of consumers who get an AI recommendation check it on Google afterwards. That visit shows up as organic or direct, never as AI. Some teams see flat numbers and decide brand work doesn't pay, then cut it.
5. Brand budgets get cut for pure performance. This one isn't AI's fault. When every dollar goes to bottom-funnel campaigns, nobody fills the top of the funnel. It shows up a few months later as lower branded search and a higher CPA.
There's one piece of good news. Branded queries actually do better with AI Overviews: Amsive measured an ~18.7% CTR lift, and Seer found brands cited in an AI Overview get +35% organic CTR. People who already know your name still come to you. The fight is for getting known in the first place.
How to read the numbers without fooling yourself
1. Get mentioned where AI looks. YouTube, Reddit, review sites, niche forums and third-party listicles make up most AI citations. A thread on a forum like this one, a fair review on a niche site or a YouTube walkthrough all count. 40% of YouTube videos cited by AI have under 1,000 views, so depth matters more than reach.
2. Publish data people want to quote. Your own stats, case studies with real numbers, market reports. Precise figures get cited by journalists, bloggers and AI models. Vague claims don't.
3. Write so a paragraph works alone. AI reads pages in fragments, and 44% of ChatGPT citations come from the first 30% of a page. Put the answer first, then the proof. Each section should make sense if it's the only one the model reads.
4. Keep paid awareness running. Organic mentions take months. Paid reach puts your name in front of the right audience now, so there's something to remember and search for later. Video and full-page formats work best for recall.
5. Work the people who already know you. Retargeting, email and community keep warm users coming back. These are the people who search your brand by name, and AI Overviews help those clicks, not hurt them.
6. Measure monthly, judge quarterly. Awareness moves slowly. Expect the first signal in branded impressions and direct traffic after a few weeks of steady activity, and real conclusions after a quarter.
Block 1. Pop for reach, pre-roll for memory
The idea is to split the job between two formats. Popunders open your landing page in a full tab behind the active one, so they give huge reach and real visits, not just views. The catch: you have 2–5 seconds to show who you are, so the page has to be fast and clear. Pre-roll video plays before content the user chose to watch, when attention is already on the player. That's where recall gets built. A FreeWheel and MediaScience study found 33% unaided recall after one in-stream ad vs 12% after one social ad.
In a RichAds pop campaign for brand awareness across the USA, UK and Germany, 18.4M impressions reached 3.2M users and brought 412K visits, with time on site up 29%. Each person saw the brand about 5–6 times, which is roughly the repetition you need for recognition to stick. On RichAds you can run both formats from one account and track completion rate and post-view conversions for video, so you see deposits from people who watched but never clicked.
Block 2. Retarget, then measure against a baseline
The second part is what happens after the first touch. People who saw your awareness ads or visited the site go into separate segments, and each segment gets its own offer: a bonus for new users, a discount for email subscribers, something extra for loyal customers. Frequency cap at 1–3 impressions per user per day, and exclude people who already converted.
RichAds launched Retargeting on push, pop and pre-roll for exactly this. Your manager sets up the segments on the technical side. Before you start, record your baseline: branded search, direct traffic, current conversion rates. The guide's realistic timeline is first movement in 3–4 weeks and lasting results over months, with a split of about 60% brand building and 40% sales activation. If you want to test this setup, you can launch an awareness campaign on RichAds and ask your manager about Retargeting access.
— Alexandra Lamish, CMO at RichAds
Search isn't dying, but the way people discover brands has changed. More and more first touches now happen inside ChatGPT, Gemini or a Google AI Overview, where nobody clicks and nobody sees your banner.
For affiliates and advertisers, this hits in a quiet way. Branded queries are usually the cheapest and best-converting traffic you have. If fewer people learn about you, fewer people search for you, and your CPA creeps up without an obvious reason.
Below: why brand awareness drops in the AI era, how to measure branded search growth (with pros and cons of each tool), and what actually helps to push it back up.
Why brand awareness is falling
The panic number was Gartner's 2024 forecast: a 25% drop in search engine volume by 2026 because of AI chatbots. The real data from early 2026 looks different. A Graphite + Similarweb study of 40,000+ US sites found SEO traffic down only 2.5% year over year, while total discovery (search + AI prompts) grew 26% worldwide (review of 34 AI search studies).So people search as much as before. The problem is where they meet your brand for the first time, and whether they click.
1. AI answers the question, so the user never visits. Ahrefs found that position 1 CTR fell from ~7% to 1.6% on queries with an AI Overview. ChatGPT handles roughly 12% of Google's search volume but sends 190x less traffic to websites. Every informational query that used to bring a visitor to your guide, landing or review now ends inside the chat. No visit, no logo seen, no memory formed.
2. AI recommends the same few names. SparkToro and Gumshoe ran 2,961 prompts and found the same brands in 55–77% of answers, no matter how the question was phrased. If the model already knows a competitor, it keeps naming them. Small and new brands get squeezed out of the shortlist.
3. AI cites the ecosystem, not your site. Only about 4% of AI citations come from a brand's own website (Profound, 27M citations). The rest comes from YouTube, Reddit, review sites and listicles. A brand that only invests in its own blog is barely visible to the model.
4. Attribution hides what's happening. 68% of consumers who get an AI recommendation check it on Google afterwards. That visit shows up as organic or direct, never as AI. Some teams see flat numbers and decide brand work doesn't pay, then cut it.
5. Brand budgets get cut for pure performance. This one isn't AI's fault. When every dollar goes to bottom-funnel campaigns, nobody fills the top of the funnel. It shows up a few months later as lower branded search and a higher CPA.
There's one piece of good news. Branded queries actually do better with AI Overviews: Amsive measured an ~18.7% CTR lift, and Seer found brands cited in an AI Overview get +35% organic CTR. People who already know your name still come to you. The fight is for getting known in the first place.
How to measure branded search growth
No single tool gives the full picture. The practical setup is Search Console for your own clicks, Google Trends for direction and competitors, and one third-party tool for absolute volume and AI visibility.| Tool | What it shows | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console (branded queries filter) | Clicks, impressions, CTR and position for branded vs non-branded queries on your site | Free, first-party Google data. The filter classifies brand queries automatically, incl. typos, other languages and product names. Insights report has a branded vs non-branded card | Only Google, only your site. No competitor data. Some queries get misclassified. Not every site qualifies, and there's no history from before the filter was enabled |
| GSC regex filter (manual) | Same report, filtered by your own brand terms | Works on any property, full history up to 16 months | Misses anonymized queries, which tends to inflate the brand share. You need to maintain the term list yourself |
| Google Trends | Relative interest in a term over time, by country, compared with up to 5 terms | Free, long history, quick competitor comparison, shows seasonality | Index from 0 to 100, not real volume. Small brands often show "not enough data". Noisy at the weekly level |
| Ahrefs / Semrush keyword data | Estimated monthly search volume for brand terms, yours and competitors' | Absolute numbers, competitor benchmarks, many GEOs | Estimates based on clickstream panels, updated with a lag. Weak for small brands and niche GEOs. Paid |
| Similarweb | Branded vs non-branded search traffic share, direct traffic, competitor traffic | Good for benchmarking against competitors and the market | Panel-based estimates, accuracy drops for smaller sites. Expensive |
| AI visibility trackers (Ahrefs Brand Radar, Semrush AI Toolkit, Profound, Peec AI, Otterly) | How often your brand is mentioned or cited in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews | The only way to see AI "share of voice" and which sources the model cites | Young category, results depend on the prompt set you track. Answers vary run to run. Paid |
How to read the numbers without fooling yourself
- Record a baseline first. Branded clicks and impressions in GSC, your Trends curve vs 2–3 competitors, direct traffic in analytics. Without a "before" you can't prove an "after".
- Watch impressions, not just clicks. Branded impressions show how many people searched for you. Clicks also depend on your snippet, ads and AI Overviews on the page.
- Compare year over year. Many verticals are seasonal (betting around big tournaments, e-com before holidays). Month over month will lie to you.
- Look at branded share, not only the total. If non-branded traffic falls because of AI Overviews, the branded share grows even with flat brand demand.
- Check direct traffic next to branded search. People who get a recommendation from AI often type your domain straight in. Branded search and direct traffic together are a better awareness signal than either alone.
- Track AI mentions on a fixed prompt set. Pick 20–50 questions your audience actually asks ("best push ad network for gambling", etc.) and check monthly which brands show up.
How to raise brand awareness
The data points one way: people search for brands they've already met somewhere else. In an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, branded web mentions had the strongest link to AI Overview visibility (correlation 0.664), much stronger than backlinks (0.274). For ChatGPT, brand search volume was among the best predictors (Ahrefs). Branded search, web mentions and AI visibility feed each other. Here's what moves them.1. Get mentioned where AI looks. YouTube, Reddit, review sites, niche forums and third-party listicles make up most AI citations. A thread on a forum like this one, a fair review on a niche site or a YouTube walkthrough all count. 40% of YouTube videos cited by AI have under 1,000 views, so depth matters more than reach.
2. Publish data people want to quote. Your own stats, case studies with real numbers, market reports. Precise figures get cited by journalists, bloggers and AI models. Vague claims don't.
3. Write so a paragraph works alone. AI reads pages in fragments, and 44% of ChatGPT citations come from the first 30% of a page. Put the answer first, then the proof. Each section should make sense if it's the only one the model reads.
4. Keep paid awareness running. Organic mentions take months. Paid reach puts your name in front of the right audience now, so there's something to remember and search for later. Video and full-page formats work best for recall.
5. Work the people who already know you. Retargeting, email and community keep warm users coming back. These are the people who search your brand by name, and AI Overviews help those clicks, not hurt them.
6. Measure monthly, judge quarterly. Awareness moves slowly. Expect the first signal in branded impressions and direct traffic after a few weeks of steady activity, and real conclusions after a quarter.
One option: awareness ads in affiliate traffic
The RichAds team recently broke down this approach in their brand awareness guide. Two parts are worth borrowing even if you use other sources.Block 1. Pop for reach, pre-roll for memory
The idea is to split the job between two formats. Popunders open your landing page in a full tab behind the active one, so they give huge reach and real visits, not just views. The catch: you have 2–5 seconds to show who you are, so the page has to be fast and clear. Pre-roll video plays before content the user chose to watch, when attention is already on the player. That's where recall gets built. A FreeWheel and MediaScience study found 33% unaided recall after one in-stream ad vs 12% after one social ad.
In a RichAds pop campaign for brand awareness across the USA, UK and Germany, 18.4M impressions reached 3.2M users and brought 412K visits, with time on site up 29%. Each person saw the brand about 5–6 times, which is roughly the repetition you need for recognition to stick. On RichAds you can run both formats from one account and track completion rate and post-view conversions for video, so you see deposits from people who watched but never clicked.
Block 2. Retarget, then measure against a baseline
The second part is what happens after the first touch. People who saw your awareness ads or visited the site go into separate segments, and each segment gets its own offer: a bonus for new users, a discount for email subscribers, something extra for loyal customers. Frequency cap at 1–3 impressions per user per day, and exclude people who already converted.
RichAds launched Retargeting on push, pop and pre-roll for exactly this. Your manager sets up the segments on the technical side. Before you start, record your baseline: branded search, direct traffic, current conversion rates. The guide's realistic timeline is first movement in 3–4 weeks and lasting results over months, with a split of about 60% brand building and 40% sales activation. If you want to test this setup, you can launch an awareness campaign on RichAds and ask your manager about Retargeting access.
