--- title: "LLM Listing for CMOs is a Useful Signal but bad KPI" url: "https://cmotimes.com/insight/llm-listing-for-cmos-is-a-useful-signal-but-bad-kpi/" author: "Neetu Sathe" published: "2026-09-25" updated: "2026-09-25" --- # LLM Listing for CMOs is a Useful Signal but bad KPI There is a race today to get mentioned, cited, or ranked by an LLM. So much so that there are hundreds of articles appearing nearly every day on LinkedIn, especially from non-marketing professionals, on how they have “won” the LLM game. However, for marketing heads and CMOs, this remains a void they are scrambling to fill. It is easy for a CMO or marketing head to get lost in the noise and try to catch up with the latest trend so as not to get left behind, or worse, come across as unaware in front of their CEOs and board members. In this frantic race, it is important for CMOs to pause and prepare a brief for their management, pointing out that getting listed by an LLM is a useful and encouraging signal, but it should not be the only KPI they follow. The denominator for LLM visibility is still small and may not deserve a disproportionate budget. Despite the growing hype around getting cited on LLMs, there is still a small share of actual search behavior. A 2026 SparkToro/Datos analysis of millions of desktop devices across 41 search-heavy sites found that in the U.S., roughly 80% of searches still happened on traditional search engines, versus only 3.2% on AI tools. Google alone represented 73.7% of desktop searches; Amazon, Bing, and YouTube each had more search activity than ChatGPT. This means that if a CEO/board members want to allocate significant resources based simply on following the latest trend, rather than where the buyer actually discovers the product, they are neglecting a much larger discovery environment. And for CMOs, LLMs should be just that - essentially a part of their discovery environment and not the singular point of discovery. This also makes for the strongest argument against targeting “LLM rankings” as KPIs. Ahrefs analyzed data across 76,000 websites and estimated Google sends 190× more website traffic than ChatGPT. Google accounted for roughly 40% of site traffic in its dataset; ChatGPT accounted for about 0.21%. Its estimated click-through rate for ChatGPT was also about 96% lower than Google’s. Additionally, Pew Research examined 68,879 Google searches from real U.S. users and found that when an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result only 8% of the time, versus 15% without an AI summary. More importantly, users clicked a link inside the AI summary itself in only 1% of visits. So while saying that we were mentioned in 58% of ChatGPT prompts does make for good vanity numbers, it theoretically can receive no traffic or attributable demand. Also, LLM rankings or citations are not stable like traditional rankings. To keep getting cited requires a very specific prompt environment that cannot be scaled easily. A 2026 Conductor experiment ran 14,000 API calls across four LLMs, 10 industries, seven intent types and five personas. It repeatedly asked identical prompts and measured whether the same brands came back. For purchase-intent queries, only about four out of every 10 brands overlapped between two runs. Recommendation prompts had roughly 49% brand overlap. Different LLMs also behaved materially differently. Academic research similarly finds that AI engines differ significantly in their sources, freshness, languages and sensitivity to query phrasing. And a 2026 Semrush analysis of 50,000 brands makes an important measurement point: visibility changes prompt by prompt, so winning one tracked prompt does not mean a brand “owns” the underlying topic. Hence, vanity metrics like “We are #2 on Claude/Gemini” are just that - meaningless vanity unless the model, date, geography, persona, prompt, intent, search/retrieval mode and repeated-run methodology are specified. But for a CMO, what is important is building a strong brand that can eventually lead to LLM visibility. Ahrefs analyzed 75,000 brands and found that the strongest correlates of AI visibility included widespread brand mentions across the web, YouTube mentions, branded anchors and branded search demand. And LLMs themselves have mentioned that **Trust **rather than creating slop content is what gets citations. Hence, for CMOs, it is important to treat LLMs as a useful and good signal that their brand environment is healthy and working. LLM visibility means a strong brand that is created by investing in PR, building community and thought leadership along with expert and opinionated content creation and distribution. Optimizing specifically for LLMs may create an opportunity-cost problem. Suppose a CMO has a $2 million marketing budget which previously they would have invested in brand development through multiple channels like YouTube, creator partnerships, paid marketing, customer reviews, etc. But now, let's say they invest the majority of the marketing budget in a new marketing program designed to increase the “AI share of voice”, how will they be able to provide evidence that this will generate more returns than the alternatives? There will be a much higher bar they will be setting themselves that they cannot reach. So where should AI visibility be in the KPI stack for a CMO? Traditionally, if you tier the KPI stack, AI Visibility should be at the bottom of the list and not at the top: Tier 1 should still be **business outcomes** - qualified pipeline, market share, CAC, etc. Tier 2 should still be **demand **- branded search, website visits, compounding growth, etc. Tier 3 should still be **distribution **- earned media penetration, media presence, coverage, etc. Tier 4 now should be the added layer of **AI visibility** that can confirm what the CMO has been talking about - how well their marketing activities are working. AI visibility should sit at tier 4 and not tier 1 since there is no direct way to pay for organic rankings but only for profitable customer acquisition. The same marketing discipline should be applicable to LLMs, i.e. treating them as another layer of distribution. In the end, AI visibility is only valuable to the extent of incremental demand and revenue it creates. --- Marketing professional with over a decade of experience in B2B marketing and Market Segment Growth. Currently leading the marketing efforts at [Product Marketing 101](https://productmarketing101.com), I specialize in developing and executing innovative go-to-market strategies that drive business growth and enhance brand visibility. I have a proven track record in diverse industries including cybersecurity, contract management, legal tech, global notarization, business applications, and BFSI. I am passionate about leveraging data-driven insights and creative solutions to achieve exceptional results. Let's connect and explore opportunities to collaborate and create meaningful impact.