Why Your Marketing Dashboard Is Lying to You (And What AI Search Has to Do With It) | AJ Ghergich, Botify [Part 1 of 3]

📬 You like this podcast? You’ll love the newsletter.
Join the weekly 3-2-1 on AI search + marketing: subscribe

Your analytics look broken. Impressions are up. Clicks are down. Conversion rates are off. And your leadership team wants answers.

AJ Ghergich, who leads the consulting and AI team at Botify, says this isn't a performance problem — it's a data model problem. And once you understand what's actually causing it, the numbers start to make a lot more sense.

In Part 1 of this three-part series, AJ breaks down what's happening inside brand dashboards right now, why bot traffic is up 4.5x in 2025, and what the 1:198 impression-to-visit ratio from AI crawlers actually means for how you report performance.

In this episode:

• Why the impressions-up, clicks-down pattern is showing up across brands right now — and what's driving it
• The difference between how Google crawls versus how AI engines like ChatGPT crawl your site (the ratio will surprise you)
• Why AJ says CMOs need to move from a clicks mindset to a visibility mindset — and how to make that case to leadership
• What JavaScript rendering has to do with AI visibility (and how to check your own site in under five minutes)
• Why AJ compares this moment in AI search to the early days of social media — and what the smart brands did then that's worth repeating now

If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do.

I'm an AI search visibility consultant and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com. 

Or request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/

Let’s connect:

LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | AI Search Visibility Consultant
Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Hey, welcome back to Foundin' AI. I'm Cassie Clark, a fractional content strategist and an AI search optimization expert. I'm also your guide through what's actually happening in search right now. Not the hype, but the real stuff. And if you've been hanging around LinkedIn or read it the last couple of days with this Google guide that just came out, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Today I'm kicking off a three-part series with AJ Gergic, who leads the consulting and AI team at Botify. Botify is an AI and traditional search platform, and AJ has been paying attention to how these AI engines work since way back when GPT 2 could barely form a coherence on it. If in this first conversation, well, let me just get straight into it, your dashboards are lying to you. Bot traffic is up and it's sorting your data in ways that are making leadership ask the wrong questions. AJ, bless him, also says something that I've been thinking for a while now. At a planet-wide scale, people are building their AI memory foundations. And if your brand isn't part of that, you are not just missing clicks, you are missing the story entirely. Let's get into that conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

So I'm AJ Gergic. I lead the consulting and AI uh team at Botify. Um Botify is an AI and traditional search platform that helps brands be found everywhere. We work with a lot of e-commerce and retailers. Everyone from big box retailers, um, you know, the shoes you wear on your feet, the clothes that are in your closet, um, to uh mid-market, smaller growth brands that are that are trying to break out. Um we're an international company, so we have offices in London, France, and New York.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

So I like to ask this to nearly everyone that comes on the show when did you start paying attention to how these AI engines work? Because I know you have the SEO handle over on X or Twitter. So you've been into it for a while.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

From from the very beginning. Um, I was super fascinated. Um, I remember when GPT uh two came out and it could barely kind of string together coherent sentences, and I was I was hooked. I was like, this is this is the future. Um I was sold. I I honestly like I was like way too sold. I think I got some psychosis or something. I I was like, oh, we'll we'll definitely have AGI by by 2026, you know. Like so I was I was very on it early and uh very in it early. Um so it's been fascinating to watch it go from hey, that's just an auto-complete text, to oh my gosh, this is AGI, oh wait, it's not, um, pump the brakes to it's changing, you know, the world's infrastructure right now. Um and uh pretty pretty cool um to to yeah, be involved all the all the all all along um the process.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

Yeah. Oh so you were also part of recently retail economics future of search and discovery research.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 3:43

With Richard Limb. Do you want to tell us about that before I start asking some questions?

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Yeah, uh honestly, we we did we um we did a study, Botify does, you know, we try to do a lot of thought leadership. Um, and so we worked with Datadome and AWS and did a lot of research around um, you know, bots, agent e commerce, put out a lot of information. It's a free study. Um, I don't know if we can we can link it or mention it. Absolutely. Uh but uh yeah, you can download it, snag it. It's it's a lot of those. I'd be honest, I've been in the industry a long time. A lot of those things are pretty, pretty like fluffy. Like this is data dense. It's got a lot of charts and graphs, a lot of like takeaways in it. Uh um it's it's worth the download and and the price, it's hard to beat the price. It's free. So I would snag it.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Free is always nice, but there is one metric in there where you mentioned that bot traffic is up 4.5 times in 2025. Okay, well, so what does that actually mean for brand analytics? And what are marketers getting wrong when they're looking at their dashboards right now?

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Yeah, I mean, I I'll come in hot on this one. It it means your dashboards are lying to you. That's what it means in plain speak. Um, so bot traffic is inflating impressions and it's masking performance. So I'll give you an example. In the in the report that I'm talking about, we mentioned the stat, um, there is an imbalance right now in kind of activity and impressions to visits ratio. So every one visit that open AI sends to a retailer, right? A retailer website, it performs 198 rolls. So let's just say it's one to 200 ratio, right? Google's ratio is one to six, and that's what we're more used to, right? Because search is that kind of thought-to-keystroke um moment where you're you have active intent. And so that's why you see this kind of like one to six ratio. It's around the intent. Um, right now, AI uh chatbots are a lot more in the discovery realm. So what's happening is there's this flood of impressions. That one visit to 200 impressions, it's making everybody's dashboards off. It's like, hey, our conversion rates are lower, our impressions are up, but our our clicks are down. Um, what's going on? And that's what's going on, is the discovery uh has taken off with AI, but not yet the transaction. And so the clo, there's not, it's not closing the loop. And so there's a donut hole in everyone's data.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

So what what do you suggest when we're looking at these? Like, how do we think about it?

SPEAKER_00 6:25

Yeah, so I I think it's similar to how you would think about early days of social. Um, at first you were like, hey, you know, well, I'm old, so you know, it's like uh Facebook or MySpace, you know, it's like we got we got likes, uh, and then you know, and then some board members like, well, we can't cash the likes at the bank, AJ. And I'm like, yeah, but they're gonna be great. This is worthwhile, it's visibility, you know. And then now today, you know, it's like who wouldn't launch uh, you know, a campaign on Insta, right? Like, of course you would, right? And who wouldn't do but there we know that there is a transactional value that occurs, whereas before it was all about discoverability. We're just in that cycle right now where most folks have adopted um AI for research and discovery, but it we the analytics aren't there, the tracking isn't there yet, and so it's really hard to close the loop. My point would be do the same things that you did, like the smart brands that jumped on social. Do we feel like that was a bad move? No, it was a good move. The smart brands that jump on AI Search now are going to be rewarded later. The the analytics will will come. Um, it will that donut hole will get closed. Um, don't sit on the sidelines because you can't track things perfectly, but do know that there's a hole in your data and you have to be okay with that.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

So my husband buzzes at me all the time because he'll say something and I'll be like, this is what I'm hearing you say. So this is what I'm hearing you say. Don't worry about the numbers right now, but do the research and do the work to optimize for AI search visibility and just it'll catch up later.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

Yeah, exactly. And and know that you're gonna see outside uh impression data versus concrete like transactional data, either clicks transactions, and know that that's normal and that it's not only happening to you, it's happening to everybody.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

So if I'm listening to this, my question is okay, I'm hearing I'm an SEO practitioner or I'm a content manager and I'm hearing you say this, but leadership is not on board yet. What am I saying to them to make them feel comfortable that hey, clicks are down, but this is what's happening?

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Yeah, I would say that they have to update their uh worldview um uh or data worldview. So the the the good thing and the bad thing is these executives have she, you know, she's a CMO, she's been trained on all this data. She's been trained that she has ROAS from paid media. She's been trained that she actually can attribute like in-store purchases to Instagram ads. It's not perfect, but she can do it, right? And so we're actually in this world where we're not used to not having data. Um, and we gotta go back to that uncomfortable space where we don't have the data to back up every single thing that we um that that that track every dollar to every, you know, uh uh every dollar spent to every outcome. Um they have to update their world model and they uh their their their data model. And it goes even more important than that. It's it's how their mindset is. Like a lot of CMOs are in that click mindset and they need to move to a visibility mindset. So she's tracking clicks and conversions. That's 2020 thinking, right? That's because that's the world that she lived in, the data reports that she gave. How many clicks did I get from Facebook, from Google? How many conversions did I get? What was my click-through rate? What was my cost? Like all that's logical. You don't rank in AI. It's it's stochastic, it's not deterministic. Whereas Google, you ranked. We I rank number two for this query, I get clicks, I track that, here's my revenue. So if if she stays in that mindset, she's gonna continuously get reports that make her unhappy because she's not updating her worldview to say, wait a minute, there's this whole other thing that's happening outside of my data collection stream that is important. These are the customers I want, those are the customers that are buying. That's the you know, 30-year-old demographic that we're going for, um, that are using chat. Like that's the buyer. You cannot ignore it. And so, yeah, if you keep that same, you know, clicks mindset, um, I think it's gonna harm you down the road.

SPEAKER_01 10:53

Yeah, I was doing some podcast research this morning, and the stat out now, the big one, is like 93% zero clicks in AI mode, which is a huge number, and it's the feature that's not a bug. Like the whole answer is the product now from Google.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

It's the job to be done. The job to be done was never to click, right? So, like, why why do we want to force the customer there? That's not what does the customer doesn't wake up and think, I want to click some things today. Like, she wants outcomes. And so if the AI can help us achieve an outcome faster and more informed, it wins. It's good for the customer. We just gotta, we have to, we like I said, you have to update your your mindset, or else you're just living, you're living in 2020, just like pretending that we're in a clicks world that you can just track that way. Um, so you have you have to update and evolve, or you're gonna you're gonna have a bad day every day, what because your numbers are gonna keep looking like they're down and you're gonna miss out on all the discoverability that could you could be celebrating if you update your mindset.

SPEAKER_01 12:01

Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, so there's another question I want to ask you. Um, so retail economics found that 73% of consumers have used AI assistants and 38% are using them for shopping. At what point does this stop being the nice to have and like an existential issue for brands? I I feel like we're there. What do you think?

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Yeah, we're we're we're there. Um the the it's just the very last mile. Um consumers are almost always there before the technology. Um consumers were there before Uber. We they just didn't know it yet. Um, consumers were there before Netflix, they just didn't know it yet. And so the moment Netflix dropped, right? Everyone went, well, that's better. You know, like I joke about it, you know, being being old. I I do miss walking the aisles of Blockbuster, right? Like trying to try to trying to see which Rambo I'm gonna rent, you know, or whatever. Uh so I I I miss that, but you know, apparently not everyone else did, right? And so the second a new process, new technology comes along, they will drop the old thing. They will drop the cab and go to Uber, they will drop Blockbuster, go to Netflix, they will drop me doing all the research to buy a pair of socks and let the AI do it, right? That's been the pattern of human history. And so it's here. The only thing that isn't that is still a bit of hype is the last mile. The consumer, if you talk to anybody, go go talk to some, you know, few folks at a bar and ask them, uh, which one of you would allow uh an agent to run your checking account? You'll get no hands raised, right? Like no one will be like, yeah. But like in a couple years, I think that's commonplace. Like we won't even think twice, like, oh, Bank of America, I'm sure they have an agent running on my whole thing, right? But we're not there at the last mile. But all of this is pent-up demand, pent-up consumer demand. They are waiting. She is ready to buy those socks with an agent, but the technology isn't quite there for the last mile for the trust. The moment it happens, it'll be a flood. And everyone will be like, oh my gosh, it came out of nowhere. No, it didn't. It's been there the whole time. There's just been a lack of trust to that it can do the last mile properly. Um, but it's there. The pent-up demand is there because all the discoverability is moving to chat anyhow. And once discoverability is there, it's like the again going back to the Facebook effect. They started a business with no monetary value, but they got an audience. And if you capture an audience, you can monetize an audience. So they capture everybody on discoverability, and then you move them to transaction by easy connections to Shopify and so on, you win.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

So I think what's interesting about all this is that with like traditional Google with the Templou links, the burden of research is on the user. You have to be the one to go find it. Now with Chat GPT or Gemini or whichever one you're using, right? It does it for you. And I think that says something about the instant gratification that we're getting used to.

SPEAKER_00 16:03

Yeah, I I think it's also just human nature. Like, um, you know, people are are lazy by nature, and that's not a bad thing. Um you're a hundred percent right. Your instinct is right on. Um, I sound like an AI. You're absolutely right.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

Um, tell me you use Chat GPT without delay.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

Right, right. Great insight that most people are missing. Um, the um as soon as you can offload that, you will. You'll drop it like a bad habit. So, right now you have to think of all the work you have to do. You have to think of the idea, you have to formulate the question in a way that Google will get it right. You have to look and scan and summarize all the links, decide which one doesn't look like a scam, click on that one. You have to read the article, you have to go back, you have to search and sort the Amazon reviews and see which one is fake and which one is real. And like all of that is a lot of like is like an effort economy that's been going on that's been running on you as the GPU. And if you can offload that effort to an AI, if you trust it and if you believe it knows you, that's the other thing, the personalization layer. If it knows you well and it knows your habits, and you can trust it, you'll offload that like laundry, right? Like the second they come out with a robot that can do laundry, I think you know, who's gonna be like, no, but I really like doing laundry, right? No one likes doing any of this, they will offload it in a heartbeat. So yeah, you you're 100% right. Absolutely right.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

Yeah, so I think as marketers, we need to think about the I hate to say it this way, but I'm gonna say it this way. I used to teach seventh grade students, you have to think about you have to think about the user as a seventh grader. Like they will find the shortcut if it's there.

SPEAKER_00 17:50

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because again, it's jobs to be done. It's not the job to be done. The job to be done isn't to click on blue links, summarize things, read reviews. That's not the job to be done. Right. So, yeah, anything that's not the job to be done, the customer will drop for the actual outcome.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

Right. So, what's the worst case scenario for a brand that ignores all this for another 12-ish months?

SPEAKER_00 18:14

I I would say the thing that people should really be thinking about. If I was a CMO and I talked to a lot of, I get to talk to a lot of CMOs um uh as a perk of the job, so I get to get a little bit of insight into how how you know how she's thinking across companies. Um, one thing that I'm having a conversation with is that everybody is making building the memory uh foundation with their chats right now. And so right now I'm talking to my chat, it's learning about, you know, hey, I have you know three kids and here's their ages, and like I like this and I don't like that, and you know, he writes this way. So my memory layer is being established and it's happening at a planet-wide scale. No one had AI a few years ago and they didn't have memory, so it's all being built now. I just can't conceive of a world where you wouldn't want your brand part of her memory foundation, right? Like if you're, you know, Zappos or somebody and you're it's like you can't just sit it out and go, oh, okay, I'll just let her memory blocks be built with you buy shoes not here, right? You you must become part of that story. And obviously, it's the same thing with marketing. You know, if you're a smaller brand, it's not everybody's story. But I I really think getting into the foundation of building as everyone's building up their memory layer is is a sneaky way to think about it. Um, obviously that could go bad, you could be manipulative. I think about it in a positive way, right? Um, but I I I would not let that sit out and let everybody else be part of this her story and my brand not be.

SPEAKER_01 19:54

That's a good way to think about it. And as you're talking, I'm thinking about how Gmail has the personalization thing now where it's like reading all of your emails and then it pulls it into Gemini. Like, there's so many things that go into this that I don't think we've all connected just yet.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

Yes. Yes. Now we just need one to read all my LinkedIn messages and tell people no. But yes.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

You know, I was sitting here thinking this morning, like, I should probably took up my inbox.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

No, don't do it.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

That's a tomorrow project. That's a tomorrow project. Um, okay, so you also mentioned in this report this is the last question that I want to ask you about AI visibility. You mentioned in that report that JavaScript rendered content is largely invisible to AI crawlers. I have seen, gosh, I don't know so many people on LinkedIn within the last maybe three weeks talking about this very specific thing. Now that feels like it's a bigger problem, and I'm sure it is, but how common is this and how would a brand even know if they're being invisible because of the JavaScript rendering?

SPEAKER_00 21:00

Yeah, um, you know, obviously, you know, tools like Botify, we handle this for you, you know, plug plug, but um it do simple things. Like right now, if you um you're like, I'm not technical at all. Do you have a Chrome browser? If you do, um download the uh DevTools uh uh plugin or uh extension, and you're like, I don't want to do that, just do it. It's a little it's a little extension. Uh you click it and you can turn off JavaScript. Turn off JavaScript on your PDP and then refresh it, right? Now see what content is there and what's not there. Obviously, you know, a company like Botify, we're doing this at scale for hundreds of bots and check like, but I'm just saying, just right now, if you're like, I'm on shop, I have a Shopify side, I want to look at your site with JavaScript on and off. And you'll be so very, very surprised. A lot of times, like reviews and other things that are loaded externally will go away. And product carousels and things like that. Um, I was just with, I'll leave their name out, but just a major shoe brand um at their headquarters, uh, that we would all we all know who they are, right? Um, and we all have them in our closet. Um and what we were doing is we were showing them their products side by side, and we're like, this is what Google sees, here's your product, they see 5,000 words. Here's what Chat GPT sees, it sees 3,000 words. And my point is, what are you comfortable with being lost in the context in those 2,000 words? What if that was like the use case? Like someone's looking for shoes to for walking with knee pain, and that are you are you okay with 2,000 words of content being lost, context being lost? Um, so I think about it as an accessibility issue. So if you had a user who has accessibility issues, maybe you maybe uh vision issues, you might give them larger fonts. Like AI has accessibility issues, it can't access everything. And so you really need to think about serving it just like you would a customer that has accessibility issues. Um and a lot of what you see where AI hallucinates and makes things up, it's just simply a lack of context. It'll improve over time, but it's a major issue right now. Right now, because most of the web was in and modern web is built on JavaScript, and so it having rendering issues causes a lot of headache for brands.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

That's part one with AJ. And as always, I want to leave you with the one thing I'd actually do this week if I were you. Go pull up your analytics. Look at your impressions versus clicks. At this point, that Google glitch that we talked about a couple weeks ago, it should be fixed. So if your impressions are up and clicks are down, that's not a performance problem. That is AI discovery working on your behalf, and your current measurement framework might not be keeping up with it. The move here is to update what you're measuring. Start tracking visibility alongside those clicks. Are you showing up in AI-generated answers? Is your brand being cited? Those are the new baseline questions. As AJ put it, the smart brands that jumped on social early were rewarded. The same thing is happening right now with AI Search. You don't have to have it all figured out. You just have to stop sitting on the sign lines waiting for the perfect data. This is your sign to go experiment. It's a lot of fun tracking it, trust me. Part two drops next Tuesday. AJ touches on AI governance and who really need to seat at that table when figuring that out. If you want help figuring out where your brand stands in AI Search today, head over to CassieClark Marketing.com to get started with an audit or check out the info in the show notes below. As always, I would love you forever if you left a review or shared this with a friend. Thank you so much. That's it for today's episode. Until next time, stay visible.