Until recently the holy grail of digital marketing was the highly coveted first link on a Google search results page. That same result has seen an almost 60% drop in clicks on pages with AI answers. That has decimated traffic going to some e-commerce sites. Traffic coming from AI is a different story and it’s all about conversion.

Shaping the AI narrative is a nuanced process every CMO is now trying to map. At Qulture, we’ve developed a framework modeled around how the engines actually function. We start with what we call Fidelity, which is about understanding how accurately AI describes your brand world, then we measure Presence, how often AI includes your brand (and products) in the answer compared to your competition. Lastly, we analyze Authority, which explores how AI positions you for specific buying moments. With traffic from AI platforms generating 54% higher conversion rates, getting it right is critical to the bottom line.

Show someone a Hermès ad, a scarf in a field of white space, and they read wealth, restraint, and status without being told a word. Show it to an AI  model and it reads almost nothing. Researchers at INSEAD found that AI is largely blind to the cues luxury brands have spent a century perfecting. Sometimes it even reads restraint as cheapness. As smart as it is, it can't read between the lines.