Diary / field note
Adobe just put a price on AI visibility
AI visibility is turning from a hunch into an operating metric, and that changes how brands need to think about being found.
Adobe has launched Brand Visibility, a tool for tracking how brands show up across AI answer surfaces.
That sounds like a neat product launch.
It is bigger than that.
Adobe says the product combines Semrush’s AI visibility data with Adobe’s content tools, giving marketers a view of how often a brand appears across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity AI.
The number that matters is not the dashboard.
It is the behaviour underneath it.
Adobe says AI traffic to U.S. retail sites rose 1,324% between October 2024 and May 2026. Travel was up 2,215% over the same period.
Those numbers will not be evenly distributed. Some sectors will be noisy. Some brands will see little. Some will find the attribution messy.
But the direction is obvious.
Discovery is moving upstream.
The old marketing stack was built around a human searching, clicking, comparing and then deciding.
The new stack has an AI system doing some of that filtering before the human even arrives.
That makes brand visibility inside AI answers a real commercial question:
- are you named
- are you cited
- are you understood correctly
- are competitors being recommended instead
- can you connect that answer visibility back to pipeline or revenue
That last bit matters most.
Most AEO and GEO talk still sounds like early SEO: tactics, prompts, hacks, weird little tricks.
Adobe is pushing it into workflow.
Sense how the brand appears. Find the missing citations. Update the owned content. Measure whether the change affected bookings, pipeline or revenue.
That is the interesting part.
Not “rank higher in ChatGPT”.
Prove the answer layer is changing demand.