In this episode of the Visibility Brief, Yext SVP of Marketing Rebecca Colwell is joined by Tim Rickards, Senior Director of Value Consulting at Yext, to tackle one of the most uncomfortable realities facing marketing teams today: declining web traffic and broken performance metrics.
Marketers have spent years watching impressions, clicks, and sessions to gauge success. But as AI tools start answering questions before anyone even visits a website, those signals aren't telling the full story anymore. So if clicks are down… does that actually mean performance is worse?
Drawing on decades of experience in financial services and conversations with marketing leaders across regulated industries, Tim explains how AI is reshaping discovery, flattening the funnel, and forcing teams to rethink how success is measured in an environment they can't fully see.
The episode breaks down:
Why web traffic and click-through rates are declining
What "good enough" answers mean for marketers
Which metrics still matter — and which don't
How the funnel is flattening, not disappearing
What to track in an AI-driven visibility model
The mindset shift marketers must embrace
If you're a marketing leader staring at soft traffic, messy dashboards, and tough questions about performance in the age of AI, this episode will help you reset — and refocus on what visibility really means now.
Episode Links
Transcript
Rebecca Colwell (00:05) Hi Tim, welcome to the Visibility Brief.
Tim Rickards (00:07) Hi Rebecca, thanks for having me on. So happy to be here.
Rebecca Colwell (00:10) We're so excited to have you. ⁓ Tim Rickards has over two decades of marketing experience, especially in the financial services space. You spent 18 years at Charles Schwab. And today, you lead the value consulting team at Yaxed. I'd love for you to give our ⁓ listeners just a little bit of context around what the value consulting team does.
Tim Rickards (00:30) Short thing, so we're a specialized team designed to help our customers optimize their spend with Yext. We're focused right now specifically on financial services and healthcare. And we have experts in content strategy, supervision and compliance, digital transformation, and then data analysis. So there's eight of us. We talk to a lot of customers throughout a year. I would say 30 plus is probably conservative. ⁓
Tim Rickards (00:56) And it's a lot of work, but it's a great way to get a good sense of the challenges people are facing and how they're looking to make their programs better.
Rebecca Colwell (01:05) Absolutely. It's interesting because we were chatting a little bit offline and one of the most alarming trends that we are hearing from marketing leaders we're chatting with is all around measurement and performance. we're looking back at performance metrics for 2025 and we're seeing a sharp decline in web traffic. So I would love to understand in the conversations you're having, why do you think brands are seeing such a drop in web traffic?
Tim Rickards (01:33) So there's a bunch of things at play. ⁓ But I think the biggest one is buyers, potential buyers, they can research and evaluate options without ever going to anyone's website. whether they're using, directly using an LLM like chat GPT or Claude or Perplexity, or whether they're using AI mode or search engine AI summaries, ⁓ their initial questions and answers are being handled by something that's basically invisible. As brands, we don't have access to what's going on there. We can't track it. And so the initial impressions are definitely dropping and ⁓ it's a very stressful situation when you see those trends and you don't have an easy answer.
Rebecca Colwell (02:17) That's right. It's been the metric that we have used for so long to assess performance at the top of the funnel, right? Like, we, our brand visibility, are we being found? we showing up in search? So I understand how LLMs are driving a decline in search impressions and traffic to the website, but can you help me understand why click-through rates are dropping?
Tim Rickards (02:40) Sure, so the way we think about it, and this is somewhat simplistic, but I think it's a useful way to think about it, is that the average person, they're getting a good enough answer from the AI helper. And they often don't need to go any further. Good enough can mean just the information that answers the basic question. And sometimes those can be addressed by traditional search responses, but often the AI summary is the easiest thing.
But then it can also go to this in-depth conversation. And that might walk through several back and forths and answer a deeper question or provide a more complete answer. So as an individual, and I'm sure you've experienced this, it's great. I can ask a complicated question, I get an answer, I don't have to click anything, I move on with my day. But for us as marketers, it's kind of a nightmare because everything's happening in a format that's essentially non-trackable.
Rebecca Colwell (03:28) You it's interesting because you're right, as a consumer, it's a fantastic experience as a marketer. I'm losing that traffic, but I guess it sort of begs the question, was that traffic, valuable traffic in the first place? Like if they were just seeking an answer to a question, but never intended to convert ⁓ to purchase my service, book an appointment, that sort of thing, ⁓ maybe I'm just sort of sloughing off some of the vanity metrics, let's say. And I'm curious if you're seeing that play out in conversion rates, have conversion rates from people who do come to the website. Have those declined as well? Are they saying steady? What are we seeing in the data?
Tim Rickards (04:16) just broadly, see them essentially steady. Sometimes they dip, sometimes not, but that actionable ⁓ data, right? The people clicking and making decisions, entering their name for a newsletter, making a purchase, that stuff's pretty steady. Map clicks, phone clicks. ⁓ And I think your hypothesis that ⁓ some of the activity that used to happen from clicking is now being handled by AI, and it wasn't necessarily that quote unquote valuable, is pretty accurate. The problem...
however, is that you're losing that direct chance to influence what people consume about your brand. So the, you know, and that's, think a big deal, especially for brand marketers. You say that to someone who's a brand specialist and they get very, very nervous, which I totally relate to. So part of what's happening is the funnel. I mean, we've always talked about how the funnel isn't really a funnel. We used to talk about it as like a really complicated broken trumpet or like a trombone, right? With all kinds of pipes going in every direction.
But I think what's happened now is that it's flatter and broader. ⁓ The purchasing experience is almost too big for us to contain it. And so the part that we can track now is what we own. And we're often missing the part that's driving decisions. So back in the day, which was a year ago, six months ago, ⁓ clicks represented an accurate look at curiosity and intent. And in a way, that was the only way to express interest, is I'm going to click on a link.
Remember, you'd have your browser with 83 tabs because I want to buy this product and I need to look at all the things. So I'm going to click and open up all these tabs. That was interest. That was good signal. But now that's happening inside of a thing we don't control. So we don't see what's going on. Last thing that comes to mind is I always make sure with customers who talk about this, it doesn't mean that clicks are meaningless. They're not. You've got traditional search activity, which frankly,
Traditional search queries are like 5.4x what we know from AI queries, right? So there's still a bunch of activity there. ⁓ So there's some value to the metric in that framework. But also it's just that they don't give us the full story outside of our own channels. So how people are making the decisions, that's the part that's fuzzy. When they're clicking and coming to us, that's meaningful and we can optimize that and try to convert.
Rebecca Colwell (06:38) Metrics for marketers are absolutely essential to our livelihood, right? We're constantly trying to validate that we've made the right investment decisions. There's that famous quote.
Tim Rickards (06:47) Green arrow,
red arrows, and Harvey balls, yeah.
Rebecca Colwell (06:52) Exactly, Like personally, know, constantly like looking at the numbers and trying to figure out where do we, where do we tune the tiles and knobs here? ⁓ But they're often a reflection of the environment that we're operating in. So if the environment has changed, perhaps our metrics need to change and how we evaluate performance. So I'm curious how you're thinking about ⁓ what we should be doing differently with metrics. Should we be discounting some of the things we've been looking at before or exploring something new.
Tim Rickards (07:23) Yeah, I mean, I would say that I wouldn't discount what we see, but I would put it in a different context. And I think what we're going to, what we see in traditional funnel reporting is distorted. ⁓ Top of funnel, even mid funnel. think it just looks smaller or weaker than it actually is because there's a bunch of stuff happening that we just can't see. When you get to the bottom of the funnel, especially on the pages that you owned, that you own and you can control. I would say that's far more accurate.
Tim Rickards (07:53) But that top and middle is going to look very weak and that's going to be very uncomfortable. And so I think there's really the opportunity to apply metrics that are more related to the AI activity, the AI search activity. But it can be difficult. had a customer I was talking to in December and she just had this really confused tone in her voice. She's like, these numbers don't look good. And more importantly, I don't have a way to explain it precisely.
That was really the problem. ⁓ So that's what I would say about when you think about looking at that report.
Rebecca Colwell (08:29) Yeah, it is really uncomfortable. The numbers don't look great and how do I explain this? So what kind of coaching did you provide for her or others to work through this transition?
Tim Rickards (08:42) You know, I think the first thing is, and this is kind of funny, you know, this is pretty self-evident, pretty obvious, but I find it really useful to repeat and say to folks. I get, often I get head nods and people are like, right. So this Google ecosystem, it's defined what we've done for online marketing for 20 years or more. I mean, it's not, and it's not just the metrics that we measure and what we call them, but it's even the roles inside a marketing department.
There are whole infrastructures based on Google search, right? And SEO and buying display advertising and all of the things. So this situation just extends well beyond the fact that we're seeing a decrease in impressions. ⁓ And that brings a bunch of questions to us as marketers. What numbers report, do we even report to explain this performance? How are we going to forecast? How do we provide rationale for our budgets?
or even specific functions. So all of these questions are beginning to come up. So if I'm talking to someone who leads a functional team, ⁓ I focus on explaining the new ecosystem, but let's be clear, I don't have to explain this to most people. They get it, but we have a discussion. We acknowledge, hey, this is a new ecosystem. And then I really encourage them to seize this as an opportunity to develop a point of view that they can pass up to their leaders. I think that's key.
When you're in asenior manager, director, senior director position. ⁓ And you own a specific, let's say you own organic search, you should, you are well served to have a point of view on how we should treat this, right, in your organization moving forward. So embrace those changes, have an informed opinion. And I've had a couple people ⁓ attached to that idea and have some success. It's helped them be more active. senior leaders, you know, S level, C level, the message is more about seizing this strategic opportunity and start adapting as soon as possible immediately if they haven't already. I think the challenge with that high level is AI extends not just to marketing impressions and effectiveness, but Rebecca, even in our firm, it's everywhere. So it's in the functional role. How can I use AI to do some A, B, C better? So it's important to separate this specific idea that
This is about AI search and visibility. Focus on that as a distinct thing. And then develop a response. And we always say, we're happy to work with you to do that. But develop this response and give folks that are in the unique position to make the changes, right? Give them, enable them to be able to drive those changes. And it's a little uncomfortable because you always want to be exceedingly precise with folks at that level because they're so busy. And this is not super precise. But I think coming across as this is a challenge that actually is a huge opportunity to win is helpful.
Rebecca Colwell (11:44) gosh, absolutely. It's interesting. We've been operating from a playbook, kind of a known playbook for, to your point, 20 years. And we get very, very comfortable with that. So it is a huge opportunity, especially for senior leaders to come out in a sort of ⁓ perspective and a point of view and sort of question, does this playbook make sense? Have we been, you know, I think a lot of us have been ⁓ de facto kind of falling into the Google world for such a long time, maybe without even questioning if there are. Alternative approaches to drive visibility. I think it's kind of exciting. So you've done a fantastic job of kind of explaining how discovery has shifted. ⁓ I would love to pivot into some practical tips. So what are three things that teams could be doing differently right now to succeed in this new era?
Tim Rickards (12:38) So the three things really, this is something that is supported by our research, our UX research, but optimize your content for AI. So everywhere you publish, and you should be publishing in all the best places, we have a product for that. if you're not, always prioritize being clear over being clever. You need to be discoverable by AI. There are essentially two Internets now, one for the bots and one for the humans.
Tim Rickards (13:06) I was a creative for a long time as a copywriter and part of me is sad that the flash video, know, the splash video with a lot of really big words and stuff, that just doesn't work in the AI world. So what you write and what you publish needs to be digestible. That's huge. Build your authority. So it's important to remember that this authority may be indirect second and third hand.
because it's going to appear in an AI response. But offer original insights, include incredible sourcing for your information, and just be very consistent. ⁓ I don't think this is a common behavior now, but I think it will become more common. People will begin to look at ⁓ the citations in AI responses as they become more comfortable, I believe. And they will even start to click through to those source articles. And you want to appear in there. ⁓ in the way that you think is best and that is consistent and true with what your brand is and what your services are.
Rebecca Colwell (14:10) It's an interesting kind of reversal of the Google ⁓ flow. In Google, you click the link and then you read. Now you read and click the link, maybe as a validation, which I find myself doing a lot now is checking those citations. ⁓
Tim Rickards (14:13) It is. Mm-hmm. It's kind of best practice too. You know, I have teenagers ⁓ and they get a lot of their quote unquote news from TikTok. And we often say, have you triangulated that with, right, with, have you looked at two or three other credible news sources for that information? It's become a joke in the house, but I think it's very important to do that. You have to think that, okay, where do I go beyond the response to truly dig in? I think that we'll see more and more of that. The third thing really is just distribute beyond your site as much as you can. So whatever the quote unquote truth or the quote unquote essence of your company is, make sure that it exists everywhere where the models pull from. And that's a diverse set. not, they don't pull from the same places. So make sure you're there and make sure you're showing up in the way that you want to. And that'll build trust. It'll build consistency. And we think that's the, that's the long-term way to win.
Rebecca Colwell (15:14) Absolutely. I think it's been the essence of marketing since the beginning of time or since the beginning of marketing itself, right? At the end of the day.
Tim Rickards (15:22) It's cool. is that I was having this conversation the other day, ⁓ you know, with a buddy of mine and we kind of came up together and we were talking about what was happening and we were just saying, chatting back and forth, I this kind of goes back to square one when, you know, I came in as a copywriter and the whole point was like, you know, you got a communications brief and these are the things we think are important about our firm and this is how we talk about it.
And then your job is to translate that into something that's interesting and compelling. I think it's the same here. ⁓ But you can't use fluff. ⁓ You can't hide the meat of what you're saying behind a bunch of words now. Because if the models don't like it, they don't like it. And the only way you can go to find out that they don't like it is you have to dive into what they're doing. So it's best to stick to the basics in many ways.
Rebecca Colwell (16:14) Absolutely. Yeah, I think there was an era where we got away from finding the ⁓ marketing, the best product or having the best solution for the market and figured out how to optimize for visibility in a way. And now it's maybe coming back to the best brands will be surfaced because the facts and the truth about those brands are out there everywhere. And our job as marketers is to distribute that information cleanly and build those authority signals, as you said.
Tim Rickards (16:27) Mm-hmm.
Yeah, the sorting through the marketing blah, blah used to be our job. And now the AIs can do it. And so let's not feed them with a bunch of blah, blah. Now it's time to give them the real info. ⁓ And I think that's really best practice too for areas where there isn't a ton of differentiation. Or there's a product that is kind of difficult to define or explain. services is like that.
Rebecca Colwell (16:49) Yes, yes, yeah.
Tim Rickards (17:12) How do you explain to somebody that you're helping them meet future goals or reduce their risk? Very difficult. But if you remain factual ⁓ and clear, you have a better chance of achieving that.
Rebecca Colwell (17:25) Absolutely. ⁓ It's interesting because financial services is such a highly researched, considered purchase too. So I imagine a lot of people are leveraging LLMs to conduct that research.
Tim Rickards (17:36) ⁓ yeah.
We so back back when I was in Schwab, we did a bunch of shopping research and we looked at the journey that people would take and we graphed it in terms of, you know, behavior over time. And we used to say that there were maybe if you're lucky in your life, you have two hands worth of of big financial events. Maybe you have 10. Most people have three to five. Something happens. You get promoted.
You get an inheritance, you have a kid, you buy a house, you have a parent or a relative that passes away. ⁓ You might go through a difficult time in your life, you get laid off. It's a small number of things when you really need help. ⁓ And then at some point, if you're fortunate enough, your finances become complicated enough that they're too hard to deal with. It's not a lot of things. aside from those events, most people aren't that interested in financial services, honestly.
Numbers, money, it's uncomfortable. But how do you stay present in that moment, So that you're in the decision set. So we would see this in the beginning, a huge burst of activity that might last a few months, tons of visits, tons of research, tons of comparison. Then there would be a dead period and we weren't really sure what was happening there. Sometimes people got tired. Sometimes maybe it was seasonal. And then there would be another bump as they move towards actually making a decision. But folks would make their own spreadsheets. They would read all of the industry news.
Right nerd wallet, kept fingers all those places to see who was best. Well, now I can just do all that inside of GPT. I mean, it takes me two prompts and not only will the chart show me all the different products, it'll show me all the costs of their exchange traded funds or the cost of their advice. It's all in front of me. It's instant. So that really changes the game when you think about those types of companies.
Rebecca Colwell (19:29) Absolutely. Okay, we've talked about what teams need to do differently. What should they stop doing? Like what metrics should we stop tracking?
Tim Rickards (19:40) So it's so hard for someone with a marketing background to ever say we're going to stop tracking something, right? It's it's like, it's like genetically. ⁓ so what I would, right. We have to count everything. would say that the, the click through as, as the main indicator for performance, I would stop doing that. That comes with an and.
Rebecca Colwell (19:52) I feel seen.
Tim Rickards (20:10) like all good improv, yes and. The and is I would double down on click through on the pages or spaces I own. Right? So when I get people to a place that I own, I want to optimize that and make sure that I'm converting as much as possible. When I'm thinking about what's happening out and top and mid-phono, it's just not that important. It's comforting that it, let's say that it's flat, right? That's great. But I wouldn't say that's the end all be all.
Rebecca Colwell (20:39) Okay. And what should we be thinking about in the new realm of AI visibility? Are there particular metrics you would encourage us to start tracking?
Tim Rickards (20:48) Yeah, I think there are several, right, that you can think about. I think that share a voice versus competitors is a good start for your priority topics. In one way, it's good. It's always good to see how you're comparing to everybody else. I think that that's probably phase one. Once you feel comfortable with how you're competing, you can dive into different metrics. But I think that'll give everyone a good top line view at what's happening.
My guess is that it's probably fairly equal between the top players and anti-vertical. But for AI, I think that's a good place to start.
Rebecca Colwell (21:28) Okay, and are there any signals that we can use to connect visibility to outcomes without over-complicating it?
Tim Rickards (21:37) Yeah, so I think so. mean, AI visibility as a metric itself is great because it'll show you your presence in those topics and questions. So that's one. if we just use financial services, if you're talking about 529 plans for college savings, how are you showing up there?
How often and in what format are you showing there? And then I think in terms of citation and mention rate, so
are you getting into conversations? Because this is the weird thing of thinking about AI search is that as a marketer, I'm going to prepare all this information on my site. And then AI is actually going to quote unquote take it and use it to answer somebody else's question. So instead of me marketing, I'm a source. It's like I become an information source for somebody else. That's the citation. So I want to make sure that I'm showing up a ton in the citations.
Rebecca Colwell (22:31) It's interesting, it sounds like a mindset shift to me.
Tim Rickards (22:35) It is. It really is. It's really more about earning your presence across AI search activity and trust. So is your information showing up? Is it what's being selected? And then is that generating the trust or that displays the trust in your formation? Then is that downstream turning into the activities that you can start to trackanything that any owned space or own channel.
Rebecca Colwell (23:07) Are there any other mindset shifts that you would encourage marketers to embrace as we, as we know that AI is going to continue to take a larger share of this visibility?
Tim Rickards (23:16) Yeah.
This is a really good question. It's a tough one because I'm writing a check that doesn't debit my own account. ⁓ But I would say that I think the mindset shift needs to be aggressively take advantage of this opportunity. Move away from being too concerned with displacement and move forward positively and aggressively to embrace what's happening now. It's not replacing traditional search 100 % yet, right?
It isn't everything is not all AI, but it's huge and growing and it's a wonderful way to start getting active and start figuring out how you can optimize to improve your overall performance.
Rebecca Colwell (24:02) Well, I think that's a wonderful place ⁓ to wrap for today. It's just some great pearls of wisdom for marketers. And I can see why they really enjoy working with you and your team to get maximum value and navigate this change. ⁓ If you like what you heard today, ⁓ subscribe, share with your friends, or head to yex.com to learn how we help brands stay visible in an AI-first world. Thank you again, Tim. We'd love to have you back again soon.
Tim Rickards (24:26) Rebecca, my pleasure. Thanks so much.
