Why the Best CMOs Are Getting Comfortable With Ambiguity

Organic traffic is down. Organic conversions are down. The instinct is to ask what's wrong with organic.

Sam Brown, our VP of Client Services, has been in enough client dashboards to know that question is often a trap. One client she reviewed recently showed organic traffic falling and organic bookings falling, yet site-wide bookings had doubled year over year. The growth showed up in paid. The brand's AI visibility had climbed, branded search volume rose with it, and paid spend on branded keywords captured demand that organic used to own. One channel looked broken. The business was thriving.

That gap between what channels report and what's actually happening is the problem Sam works through every day. Her conclusion is blunt: the hunt for perfect attribution isn't just failing. It's making marketing teams worse at their jobs.

Buyers Don't Click, Even When You Show Up

Sam has this conversation with clients weekly. Zero click is the environment where buyers spend more time on off-site research than on-site. They get what they need from a social post, a YouTube video, or an AI chat without ever visiting a brand's website. Sam searches almost entirely from mobile, and it goes straight to AI mode.

"I cannot remember the last time that I clicked on an organic link that was not for work," she said.

The pattern holds inside AI platforms too. Citations appear, but people rarely follow them. Sam checks whether the sources are names she trusts, then stops. Getting cited is not the same as getting the visit. "Zero click is still really prominent in LLMs if you show up," she said.

Optimize for the Second Search

Citations are easy to count, and GA4 referral channels can capture the clicks that do come through from AI platforms. Some clients see real traffic and revenue there. But our team puts its effort into tracking brand mentions: instances where a client surfaces as a recommendation or a top provider when someone asks an AI which company to consider.

The theory is that you're optimizing for the second search. A buyer does the research inside AI, learns about a handful of companies, forms a preference, then types a URL directly or runs a branded search. That second search is where intent crystallizes. If a brand isn't present in the research phase, it's not in the running when the decision gets made.

"We really view it as a critical brand awareness play," Sam said.

That's the mechanism behind the client whose bookings doubled. Brand mentions rose, reputation in AI strengthened, branded search volume grew, and the revenue arrived through channels organic never got credit for.

The Need for Credit Made Us Worse

The deeper issue is what happens inside marketing teams when channels compete for credit.

"I think that we've gotten really, really distracted by the need for credit, and it's forced us to be worse marketers," Sam said.

Specialization accelerated the problem. Once marketing split into SEO, paid, content, and performance, each group needed its own proof of value. The number took over. SEO specialists chased organic traffic regardless of quality. Executives still complain weekly that organic traffic isn't what it was two years ago, without being able to say what that traffic was worth.

Sam's response is a set of questions. What was the quality of that traffic? "What was the revenue of the business two years ago?" What role did organic play in it? "That's not always a question that they can answer."

And perfect attribution was never real to begin with. Sam has worked with hundreds of companies. She's never seen it, and never had a point of contact tell her they trusted their attribution. The industry built strategy on a foundation that didn't hold.

Track Outputs, Correlate to Revenue

Sam's alternative is discipline over precision. Track your initiatives and when they went live. Name the bets attached to them. Then watch whether revenue moved. Stop chasing perfect attribution and start chasing the right goal.

The journey for most B2B marketing teams has run from organic traffic to organic conversions to MQLs to SQL conversion rates. Each step got closer to revenue. The next step is to go all the way.

"If an SEO specialist or an entire marketing team focused on improving conversion rate of leads that turn to sales qualified, or leads that turn into just plain old closed revenue, that's going to be better," she said.

Credit debates won't vanish. But when a baseline exists and the number is moving, the argument over who caused it matters less than the fact that it moved. "I don't really care if it's the sales team that got a lot better at their jobs or if it's the marketing team that got a lot better at their jobs," she said. "Either way, they're both focused on that number and the number is increasing."

GEO Starts With the Audience, Not a Database

Traditional SEO runs on keyword research: short phrases, indexed, with search volume attached. GEO has no equivalent database, and that makes it the hardest part of the new landscape.

"With GEO, you have to really understand your buyers intimately in order to be able to understand what questions they're asking throughout each stage of the funnel to ensure that you have content that can meet them where they're at in that journey," Sam said.

That's why audience research has become the bedrock of how our team builds strategy. In practice, that means:

• Interviews with sales teams to surface the questions buyers ask, the pain points behind them, and which competitors are in the running at each stage
• Interviews with clients' customers directly, the people who just made the buying decision
• Google Search Console reviews to catch the long-tail queries already showing up
• Search term reports from paid campaigns to spot themes in longer, conversational queries

Sam cited a stat that 15% of searches every day are brand new, never searched before, and said she suspects the real number should be far higher as conversational AI search takes over and no two prompts look alike.

"There's not going to be a data set that's like 10 people search this exact question this exact way because everybody's changing that," she said.

Audience knowledge lets a team publish for searches no tool can prove are happening. On client sites, that content has turned into more brand mentions, not just citations, and into bottom-line revenue.

Blend the Roles, Reset the Goals

Sam's advice for leaders starts with what she calls a little bit of a wild idea: stop organizing around specialties.

"Specialties in marketing were created because there was only so much that an individual could do," she said. "But now that technology is where it's at and we can blend those, I say, get your team focused on those bottom line metrics, focused on revenue, or focused on some version of revenue."

Product marketers are becoming engineers. Designers are becoming developers. The lines are blurring, and in her view that blurring is the route back to doing great marketing, because the specialties killed it a little.

The organizational stakes are real. Attribution fights make teams work against each other rather than with each other, and nothing slows a business's ability to grow more than that. Teams that share a goal around revenue move faster, and solving the credit problem in marketing carries over to how a whole organization works together.

Goal-setting is the shared responsibility that makes it work. "It's the leader's responsibility to ask, what should we be looking at?" Sam said. "And it's the marketer's responsibility to have an answer and to be willing to defend that answer or change that answer as needed."

Set a bad goal and you make the wrong bets. Set the right one and the ambiguity stops being a threat. "The closer we can get to bottom line, the better," she said.

Resources: 

Reach Sam at: samantha@97thfloor.com 

Connect with Sam on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brownsamanthak 

Connect with Paxton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paxtongray/ 

Looking for an agency that'll be worth the investment? 97th Floor creates custom, audience-first campaigns that drive pipeline and conversions. Get started here: https://97thfloor.com/lets-talk/. 

About Sam Brown: Sam has been a marketing leader for over 7 years. Her early career was dedicated to developing and executing on results-focused marketing campaigns for enterprise clients in an agency setting. She has managed Key accounts including Google, Dell, and AT&T. In her current role at 97th Floor, she leads  our fulfillment teams, focusing on nurturing a thriving culture and enhancing client experiences. Her marketing knowledge and expertise span over both B2B and B2C industries. She manages a department of over 40 individuals, and is passionate about fostering career growth and empowering her team to reach their full potential.