The top brands being mentioned often get a bigger portion of the response as well, so this is worth fighting for. Placement directly impacts the influence of the recommendation. In an AI's justified shortlist, being at the top is crucial for winning the transaction.
Measuring this is not as easy as in traditional search, where the major search engines reports both clicks, rank and click through rate. You can also expect the click through rate of AI to be a lot lower then from a search engine.
Analysing conversations we see that LLM's often cite different pages then traditional search engines would.
Search engine: Shows link directly to the product page where you can find information.
AI answer engine: Cites pages like "return policy", "shipping" to find relevant information instead of the product page. AI answer engines also prioritise third party source like Trustpilot, niche blogs or news outlet over pages that brands control themself.
When AI answer engines site pages that does not link straight to the product page the traditional user pattern of "Search, Forage, Decide, Navigate" gets replaced. The user ask the AI for guidance, but there is no navigation involved in this step.
The navigation to find out how to acquire a product only starts when the user feels that they have gotten enough guidance from the AI answer engine, and feel certain about "their" deccision.
