James Richardson, founder of Optimising, warns that brands can win the AI visibility race while going backwards on revenue, comparing it to past SEO ranking obsessions. He notes that Google began reporting AI visibility inside Search Console on 3 June, and Bing followed on 17 June, initially in the UK and then globally, making a previously premium metric free. Richardson argues that a citation in AI answers does not mean a person chose you or bought anything, citing SparkToro’s latest numbers putting ChatGPT at roughly 0.2 per cent of referral traffic. He adds that Mike King of iPullRank has shown that in newer “agentic” search, citation counts under-count a brand’s real footprint several times over, making the metric both disconnected from revenue and often simply wrong.