If you ask a marketer to name the most challenging part of understanding attribution, their answer likely won’t inspire confidence.
Digital advertising has been “under fire” for being difficult to accurately measure, Doug Wyatt, Adobe’s senior director of media for the Americas, told AdExchanger, and LLMs have made it more difficult to draw the connection between visibility and outcomes. Adobe, for one, is struggling with “all of it.”
Right now, he said, trying to measure performance in AI search is “all hypothesis.” But through the adoption of affiliate automation platform Partnerize’s VantagePoint solution, he hopes to better understand what content is performing and how to compensate publishers accordingly.
Although Adobe has been one of Partnerize’s clients for going on four years, it’s just now adopting VantagePoint, a generative AI attribution solution launched in 2025 to help marketers understand how their content performs in AI search and which content is driving the most traffic.
On Tuesday, Partnerize released the Influence Compensation Lighthouse Program, the latest development of the VantagePoint solution. The program is an initiative that aims to support both publishers and marketers by establishing an industrywide standard for measurement and compensation in AI search and implementing it at scale.
Let’s get visible
Earlier this year, VantagePoint expanded to include publishers, too, with a focus on finding ways other than clicks to determine attribution.
Its latest updates now allow marketers to orchestrate payments to publishers directly through Partnerize’s payment rails and provide industry-certified validation in determining compensation.
The results from VantagePoint help advertisers understand the type of content that performs best, as well as the publishers that have the greatest sway, said Christine Rhea, senior director of acquisition marketing at luggage brand Away, which has been working with Partnerize for over half a decade and adopted VantagePoint back in February.
Seeing what publisher content performs best allows Away to “shift [their] investments toward those areas,” said Rhea, like focusing on getting mentioned by a specific publisher whose content leads to more conversions – and the whole process can now be done within Partnerize’s platform.
For example, a publisher might write an article about the best carry-on suitcase for summer trips that includes a recommendation for Away. If Away sees in VantagePoint that the article is surfacing in AI overviews and driving more conversions than other content, it can now, through the launch of the Lighthouse Program, pay that publisher directly through Partnerize.
If a brand pays $1 in commission for every $100 it earns in sales, for instance, the algorithm will determine what publisher or publishers earned what percent of the dollar, and Partnerize will convert to the appropriate currency and pay it out, said Partnerize CEO Matt Gilbert.
The appropriate payment is determined via an algorithm that was certified earlier this year by the Alliance for Audited Media, said Gilbert. The algorithm takes into account zero-click influence by tracking instances where someone visited a brand’s website immediately after searching a high-intent query in an LLM.
It then scores each source that contributed to the LLM session based on factors such as relevancy, recency and the source’s authority. The result is what Partnerize calls the “HaloIndex,” a ratio between a source’s total influence and what its influence would be if only last-click market share had been tracked.
If the halo effect is greater than 1, that means the publisher’s effect on discovery is greater than what would be measured by last-click alone.
Previous versions of VantagePoint didn’t have a way of connecting outcomes and attribution directly to payment, said Gilbert. The launch of the Lighthouse Program is “connecting all the pieces.”
Paying it forward
Within VantagePoint, brands can see how attribution is distributed across publishers, like which sources are most frequently clicked on within an LLM throughout the research process. Through these insights, Away has determined the best-performing article types are “deep dive” pieces that focus on its unique use cases, storytelling and case studies, as well as being featured in larger roundups, like a list of the best suitcases for weekend trips, according to Rhea.
Those sorts of articles are both SEO and AEO friendly, said Rhea, since they include keywords about the brand and its value propositions, but also feature language used in common LLM queries.
Before the rise of LLMs, a person might spend weeks researching a product by checking out different manufacturers and sellers and comparing prices. Now, said Adobe’s Wyatt, everything from awareness to conversion has been “compressed” into a matter of minutes, making it challenging to determine exactly what content drove what step of the journey.
“Right now, we just don’t have telemetry on that,” Wyatt said, adding that he’s excited to have access to data that shows whether the content that Adobe expects to perform is actually working.
The ultimate goal of VantagePoint, according to Gilbert, is bridging the “structural gap between visibility and what gets measured and funded.”
