As discovery shifts beyond the click, Awin is advancing how marketers understand and act on influence – combining new data approaches with platform innovation to drive more sustainable growth for brands
Awin, the global marketing technology platform, is evolving its approach to discovery as AI-driven experiences reshape how consumers find and evaluate brands, shifting influence into increasingly invisible, zero-click environments. To address this, Awin is announcing a new partnership with ScalePost alongside a series of platform enhancements, including AI Visibility and Smart Search, designed to help brands optimise business performance.
As consumer shopping journeys become increasingly fragmented across search engines, social media, publisher content, and AI-powered experiences, so too does the difficulty in understanding how consumers discover brands. With around two thirds of Google searches now ending without a click, marketers face mounting pressure to demonstrate performance and justify investment, all whilst operating with only a partial view of what really influences customer decisions.
Awin’s partnership with ScalePost gives marketers a more accurate view of how AI is influencing brand discovery, moving beyond existing approaches that rely on modelled or synthetic user data. Acting as an additional measurement layer, ScalePost uses first party data to measure real AI citations, giving marketers more clarity into which content is playing a role in driving their brand visibility in AI platforms.
The benefits of the partnership for marketers are further bolstered by its collaborations with Peec.ai and Profound to provide a more complete view of influence across the customer journey. Specialist expertise in AI-driven discovery measurement is combined with Awin’s diverse global network to deliver deeper behaviour intelligence at scale.
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Making AI-driven discovery measurable
Awin is announcing a series of new platform capabilities including AI Visibility and Smart Search to help marketers navigate the evolving discovery landscape and connect outputs to tangible business outcomes.
- AI Visibility
- For advertisers: Shows when and how brands are surfaced in AI-driven experiences, including where publisher content contributes to that visibility. This helps advertisers better understand performance and make more informed investment decisions.
- For publishers: Provides visibility into how their content influences discovery and engagement, supporting greater recognition of publisher contribution across the customer journey.
- Smart Search
- Advertisers using Smart Search are twice as likely to invite a partner than those using traditional directory search. Using natural language prompts, Smart Search helps marketers find the right publisher partners faster, reducing manual effort and accelerating programme growth.
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“When AI-driven discovery and trusted publisher influence are measured alongside clicks, the economics start to shift,” said Adam Ross, CEO at Awin. “The problem was never a shortage of data. It’s that most of what the market offers is modelled from sampled prompts, so it tells you what an AI might say, not what it actually cited and surfaced.
He continues: “We’ve grounded our approach in real, first-party citation data and connected it to the conversion signals already running through our network. Awin data shows that accounting for AI interactions can increase observed engagement by three to six times. That gives marketers a more honest view of what drives customer decisions, and the confidence to invest and grow on their own terms.”
