Last-click attribution was old school even before AI search came around.
It’s “an antiquated model,” according to Camilla Cho, SVP and head of commerce and affiliate at Vox Media, which is planning to adopt a new publisher-focused generative AI offering from affiliate automation platform Partnerize that tracks what content is performing best in AI search.
The tool, released earlier this week, is an expansion of VantagePoint, a generative AI attribution tool Partnerize released last year for buyers.
VantagePoint for Publishers is aimed at (you guessed it) publishers who need to understand how their content surfaces in AI search results in order to strike fair compensation deals.
Now that the web is approaching zero-click, the need for new attribution methods has only grown more urgent, said Partnerize CEO Matt Gilbert.
“The click isn’t dead,” he said, “but it’s no longer the unit of truth.”
Publisher probability
VantagePoint allows publishers to track signals from multiple data sources, including first-party data and third-party data via APIs.
The data is then fed into an algorithm that assesses how effective a given piece of content is at driving purchases and determines its “relative weight” by analyzing signals such as product category and a consumer’s path through different webpages. It then maps those signals across hundreds of citations that inform an LLM’s response to see which content contributed most to conversions.
For instance, the algorithm can track the sequence of a user’s actions – like whether a person navigated directly to a brand’s website after asking an LLM for product recommendations – to identify which content was most influential in the consumer’s decision. It can also distinguish between different product categories (say, sneakers for newbie gym-goers versus for marathon runners) to understand which categories are most popular.
Knowing which searches lead to specific content helps publishers “refine” their coverage, said Cho, and strategically partner with brands whose affiliate content is already performing well on a publisher’s site.
The new normal
Tools like VantagePoint can also give advertisers a more transparent basis for compensation, while allowing publishers to prove value by connecting their content to brand performance.
The value exchange between publishers and search engines used to be far more straightforward, according to Cho. Google would crawl Vox’s content, she said, and, in return, Google would send clicks that Vox could monetize through ads, affiliate content and subscriptions.
But now, Cho said, “that’s starting to crumble.” Publishers like Vox are eager to find a new standard for compensation, since their content is still driving purchases – just without the site visits.
“The world doesn’t need another dashboard,” said Gilbert (and how right he is). What brands and publishers do need, though, he said, is the ability to connect content insights to “an economic engine.”
Gilbert eventually wants to make VantagePoint available to all publishers and advertisers, including ones who don’t use Partnerize’s platform directly. “You can’t have 50 standards out there,” he said. Ideally, people will align around a single metric that’s viewed as a “source of truth,” he added.
And he’s adamant that the companies building LLMs should not be that source. A future where every company is “grading their own homework” isn’t going to fly, said Gilbert.
“Are we really going to trust, you know, the next version of Google Analytics?” he asked. “That’s sort of tough to swallow.”
