Blog / Brand, Non-Brand and Citations: The Search Metrics Worth Reporting Upward

For years the standard advice in B2B organic search was to push hard on non-branded terms and let brand search look after itself. Stephan Marais, head of SEO at Somebody Digital, thinks that advice has run out of road.

“Where we traditionally said organic search needs to impact non-branded search, don’t worry about brand search, brand search will come, I don’t think that holds true anymore,” he says.

The reason is what AI search actually retrieves. “It’s no longer a page being surfaced in AI. It is a brand being surfaced, as a result of that brand being able to demonstrate their topical authority around what they are trying to do.” Retrieval has taken over from ranking as the thing to design for, and a brand with visible authority on a topic is what gets pulled into an answer.

Shift from Non-Brand Rankings to AI Retrieval & Citations

Marais separates two pieces of work that often get treated as one. Being crawlable and indexable is the foundation, and it still matters. Being cited in an AI answer is a different achievement with different inputs.

“You could be indexed, your entire site could be indexed, but you would not be cited anywhere in AI search,” he says. Traditional SEO work keeps the door open. Authority, topic coverage and the experience, expertise, authority and trust signals around your brand decide whether anything walks through it.

Indexing vs. Being Cited

If organic sessions are a weaker signal than they used to be, the reporting has to move. Marais points at three things.

Visibility in AI search, measured as both mentions and citations. He rates citations as the stronger of the two, though both are worth tracking. Then the brand and non-brand split, which usually settles the panic in the room on its own: brand growing its share while non-brand informational queries fall is a healthy picture, not a decline. And click-through rate on brand terms, which in Somebody Digital’s client data has been climbing while site visits soften.

“Brand ultimately, in most cases, converts higher as well,” Marais says. “Your site visits may be dropping, but your click-through rate for brand search is increasing, so the value is really high.”

Three Metrics for Board Reporting

A meaningful share of what gets you cited never touches your domain at all. “What is said about you is not just contained on your site,” Marais says. “It’s contained across the whole web.” Software review sites, aggregator round-ups, another brand’s comparison piece: all of it feeds the picture an AI assembles of you.

His steer is to take back what you can. Where a third party is answering questions about your product’s gaps or capabilities, answer them yourself, properly, on your own site. “Instead of that being surfaced on third party websites and taken over so that you don’t have narrative control, take that in-house, answer those questions succinctly and give a way forward.”

And the old backlink logic still holds, in a slightly different coat. “A citation from an authoritative source pointing to you, citing your work or your original data, is exceptionally important.”