Is AI Rewriting Attribution? Scott on The Super CMO Show

I joined Swami on The Super CMO Show for a conversation about something that is quietly reshaping how marketing works: AI is changing how customers discover brands, and it is making attribution harder than it has ever been.

The big idea we start with is what I call the AI dark funnel. More and more customer research is now happening inside AI chats, before anyone ever clicks through to your site. That early discovery, the part of the journey where someone forms an opinion about your brand, is increasingly invisible to your analytics. First-touch attribution gets much harder to see when the first touch happens inside a conversation you were never shown.

That leads into a shift I think every marketer needs to take seriously: SEO is evolving into GEO. It is not enough to rank in a list of blue links anymore. You have to make your website AI-ready, with clear structure, specific intent on each page, FAQs, how-to content, and original research that AI systems can actually understand and cite. Generic content will not cut it. The brands that win visibility in AI-led answers are the ones that translate their proprietary expertise, their real data and point of view, into formats AI can reference.

We also get into the measurement side, which is where my head usually is. When clicks no longer tell the full story, platform-reported ROAS becomes even less trustworthy than it already was. Google, Meta, email, and SMS can all claim credit for the same conversion, and they will. Independent, deterministic attribution, measured against your real orders, is how you cut through that and see what actually drove new-customer growth.

The thread running through all of it is that brand and first-party data are becoming more valuable, not less. As AI puts more distance between your brand and the customer click, building a brand people trust, capturing owned audiences, and continuously testing new signals is what keeps you growing. It is a genuinely forward-looking conversation, and if you are trying to get ahead of what AI means for marketing, it is worth the listen.

Listen to the full episode below.