Oh great, another reason to hate my job slightly less than I already do. But yeah, you're spot on - pure click reporting has been a joke for a while now, and most teams are just pretending they've figured it out while panic-switching metrics like it's a game of musical chairs.
branded search lift is probably the only thing saving my sanity right now. Watch your own damn brand searches go up after an AI Overview mentions you - nobody clicks, but they sure as hell Google you. It's like being famous but poor. "How did you hear about us" forms are ugly and low-tech, but actually catch data that all those fancy attribution models miss entirely. Because surprise - AI surfaces don't play nice with your pixel.
I've been manually checking the same 20 queries every week across the big LLMs. It's tedious, but it's honest work. Better than trusting some automated tool that claims to track AI citations while probably hallucinating itself.
The real shift is this: stop obsessing over a single metric. Clicks aren't dead, but they're not the only signal anymore. Track a basket of nonsense - branded lift, impression share on AI-heavy queries, self-reported sources - and accept that you'll never have a neat little dashboard again. Single metric thinking died with last year's budget
