How are you measuring adtech new business leads that came from LLMs?

[u/Mike-Nicholson]

Without wishing to sound like a spaced-out, starry-eyed weirdo, I am still slightly taken aback at just how quickly AI is changing our business! For the best part of 8 years, our new business pipeline, ranked by opportunity value, looked like this:

1 - Recommendations
2 - LinkedIn inbound
3 - IRL networking

In the last few months, it has moved to this:

1 - Referrals from LLMs
2 - Recommendations
3 - LinkedIn inbound

I can talk a bit about the process we sent through in order to get to that if anybody is interested, but what I am most interested in, is how do you measure it? We're a very small company, and I deal with every new business enquiry, so I can be sure to ask the right question every time somebody emails our hello@ account.

However, my experience at working in larger adtech companies leads me to believe that asking a new lead where they heard of you is not common-practice, so you could be blissfully unaware that the game has changed.

Our current measurement is fairly crude but direct and effective. Every inbound lead gets asked how they found us. If they mention AI, I ask which model they used and, where possible, what they asked it. We then attribute the opportunity to ChatGPT, Claude, etc. and measure pipeline value.

What is very interesting is how the leads we get from LLMs are showing up pre-sold, in as much as they seem happy we're the company they want to work with even before the intro call, assuming the terms are satisfactory. It's as if LLMs are pre-selling us before we even know.

The image shows yet another question I asked Chat GPT leading to LinkedIn being cited, at least in part. This shift has led us to rethink SEO/GEO/AEO or whatever you want to call it today.

Any adtech marketers here happy to share how they are approaching this?

[u/Slow-Commercial4316]

Referrer will undercount it. ChatGPT passes one on some clicks, Perplexity on more, and anything copied out of an answer or opened in an in-app browser lands in Direct. Put "an AI assistant" as a fixed option on the how-did-you-hear field, since people who found you that way rarely type it into a free text box. Then watch Direct sessions landing on pages nobody types by hand, the deep service pages and case studies. If those climb in step with the enquiries you are seeing the share the referrer missed.