Adobe tracks AI visibility as chatbots threaten search revenue
Adobe has developed a tool to track brand mentions in AI-generated responses as the shift from search engines to large language models forces chief marketing officers to redefine how they measure and protect revenue.
Adobe has built an internal tool called LLM Optimizer to track and improve how often its products appear in AI-generated responses. After deploying the technology, the company recorded a 200% increase in brand visibility for products like Acrobat and Firefly.
The tool was developed after Adobe experienced measurable declines in traffic and revenue historically driven by traditional search engines. As consumers increasingly use large language models to compare products and summarize reviews, brands that fail to surface in these AI recommendations risk being excluded from the purchasing funnel before a customer ever reaches their website.
This migration of product discovery is forcing marketing leaders to expand their mandate beyond campaign management into enterprise technology and capital allocation decisions. Lara Balazs, Adobe’s chief marketing officer, noted that understanding how AI systems surface products is now as critical to revenue as traditional search engine optimization.
To execute this shift, companies are discarding traditional marketing structures in favor of cross-functional groups. Balazs refers to these as mission teams, though others call them swarms or tiger teams. These units combine marketers, engineers, product managers, and data specialists around specific business objectives rather than legacy marketing functions.
This operational pivot requires marketing executives to develop financial fluency and technical literacy. “If you are not talking to your CFO all the time, your CIO, your CTO, any business constituent around that C-suite table, you really are at a disadvantage,” Balazs says.
The urgency to adapt is complicated by the absence of an established industry framework. “For years it was always, ‘Spend less with more impact,’” Balazs says. “Now I hear, ‘There’s AI. Do that.’”
Balazs describes the evolving role of the CMO as a chief marketing orchestrator, a position that requires guiding technology investments without an engineering background. “I am not an engineer. Most marketers aren’t,” she says.
For investors and board members, the key takeaway is that marketing budgets are increasingly funding data infrastructure and AI integration. The executives who successfully navigate this transition will not necessarily be the most technically skilled. “Mindset is going to matter,” Balazs says, adding that the competitive advantage will belong to those who “embrace the gray.”
