New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ Of Bluefish

Marketing Operations Productivity

Evidence and data. Forrester research states, “Consumers’ rapid shift to natural language and multimodal search, the voracity of answer engines’ bots, and answer engines’ ability to fill the top of the funnel require marketers to significantly adapt content, technical, and measurement practices.”⁶

Interviewees explained that content management and site health optimization are critical to ensuring their brands remain visible and trusted across answer engines. With Bluefish, marketing teams gained access to prioritized consumer and competitive insights that identified which optimizations actions would drive the greatest impact. Interviewees said this reduced time spent on manual analysis and helped them focus efforts more effectively. They also described using the platform to scale optimization efforts across more brands and channels.

• The senior director of search capabilities at a pharmaceuticals brand said: “In Bluefish, I have a dashboard where recommendations are surfaced every day and prioritized based on potential impact: high, medium, or low. It saves my team a lot of time and gives us the flexibility to cover more brands or more web properties than we would have been able to [cover without it]. It helped us understand where to focus our time. This is one of the things that was really attractive to me.”

• The director of GEO at an insurance brand said:

  • “Tool adoption is key first. It can help a lot of teams save time. We already delivered [phase one of our AEO-friendly optimization efforts]. We have the results and are in market. The action plans are there with briefs. We have committees and meetings by line of business. It’s really a running program right now.”
  • “We are planning to release our first YouTube channel based on the insights that we have around opportunities on visibility. Additionally, we have never done digital PR … but now it is part of the plan. We know that if we want to win LLMs, it’s not just the website. We need to have thought leadership around themes that were surfaced with Bluefish. It is a multichannel initiative. We aim for a level of synchronicity in terms of the themes we want to address.”

• The director of SEO at a personal care brand said:

  • “Bluefish gives an understanding of which of the activities teams do that are most valuable to driving our AI visibility. I expect it to save time in that teams are not wasting time doing something that isn’t going to have an impact.”
  • “I was able to provide our PR team with a couple months of data to say, ‘Hey, I am very confident based on this dataset that these are the 20 publications that you should talk with for pitching these products because they consistently are cited in LLMs.’ … There’s so much stuff that we can operationalize around this data.”

• The agentic commerce strategic at a health and beauty brand said:

  • “The baseline audit found that our brand was ranked as number two in mascara, foundations, and concealer. We also found that we were significantly underperforming with clean beauty seekers, one of our consumer segments. We created buying guides and beauty education articles. We enhanced our content on our makeup and skincare pages to add more relevant keywords and improved internal linking and highlight timeliness. The optimizations were all directed by Bluefish.”
  • “Initially, we had an analytics person who we were going to bring on to do what Bluefish is doing for us. We saved the headcount [by having Bluefish analyze the results and help] us prioritize optimizations.” 

• The global head of search at a travel brand said:

  • “The user group will expand [because] we are a global company. I would imagine that the international business units will have access to this tooling very soon. The business operations teams as well as our local marketing teams responsible for improving [AEO] for their individual brands would definitely be interested in using this.”
  • “I do think that this tooling will improve productivity over time. … We get information about which AI platforms are the most powerful. It tells us where the majority of our traffic is coming [from], which is very good.”

• The associate director of generative and agentic AI at a CPG brand said:

  • “Given our focus on social, we are working to optimize our content on YouTube so that LLMs can effectively crawl through and cite our content. We are also exploring Reddit as well. Bluefish has been facilitating best-practice sessions.”
  • “One of our longer-term initiatives is our earned PR strategy: thinking about which publications we should go after and how we show up to ensure we get top listing or top rankings. Our PR team is very well versed in all of the various brand audits.”
  • “The digital teams have also implemented [AEO] on our owned brand sites and retailer PDPs (product detail pages) to drive more relevance and influence with LLMs and consumers.”

Modeling and assumptions. For the composite organization, Forrester assumes:

• Six members of the marketing team are impacted by Bluefish in their day-to-day work. This number increases to 12 members in Year 2 and 24 in Year 3.

• These marketing team members spend 70% of their time on content management and site health optimization tasks.

• In Year 1, the impacted marketing team members improve their productivity by between 5% (low) and 15% (high), increasing to 7% (low) and 17% (high) in Year 3.

• The average fully burdened annual salary for a marketing professional is $160,000.

• The composite has a productivity recapture rate of 50%, meaning half of all work is recaptured for productive activities.

Results. This yields a three-year projected PV ranging from $119,000 (low) to $306,000 (high).

Performance Lift

Evidence and data. Forrester research states, “Measuring and identifying opportunities to grow visibility across engines sets brands up to grow market share.”⁷ Interviewees reported that after completing brand audits and implementing optimizations, their organizations began tracking improvements in all core AI metrics and citations. They said these gains increased the likelihood that their brands were present, trusted, and cited in AI-generated responses, expanding their influence over buyers’ decision-making. Interviewees also reported a growing share of brand revenue influenced by answer engines.

• The associate director of generative and agentic AI at a CPG brand said:

  • “A lot of the teams are working on making those [AEO] updates and have implemented the recommendations. We have seen great progress on moving the needle on some of our AI performance metrics. One brand team was able to make the appropriate adjustments on our website. Previously, the website was not even ranked among the top five influential sources in AI responses, but now it’s ranked among the top three, which is really great to see. It goes to demonstrate how the team is able to run with the [AEO] principles Bluefish has shared.”
  • “Here is one example that was supported with the Bluefish data: One of our brands was lagging on a particular topic versus competition, and after the [AEO] updates, our visibility score improved by 15 points. The gap between competition widened significantly, which was great to see.”
  • “Having retailer visibility on their LLMs and how we might track our performance on those LLMs is important. I think the retailer PDP optimizations is probably the area where we could double-click into. [For example,] if we were to optimize, do we see any uptick in our conversion, in our sales from an e-commerce perspective? This might be a closer in way for us to evaluate true business metrics.”

• The agentic commerce strategist at a health and beauty organization said, “After implementing the optimizations [Bluefish] shared with us, we saw an increase in visibility, citations, and share of voice.”

• The global head of search at a travel brand said, “The percentage of revenue influenced by these answer engines is trending in an upward direction.”

• The director of SEO at a personal care brand said: [Our retailer page] is more of a closed ecosystem. The question I’m interested in is whether increased visibility within the LLMs we can influence correlates to revenue growth for a product. We’re going to run tests around AI visibility. If visibility increases and revenue increases too, what else are we going to attribute that lift to?”

Modeling and assumptions. For the composite organization, Forrester assumes:

• Bluefish monitors five of its brands in Year 1. This number increases to 10 in Year 2 and 20 in Year 3.

• The average annual revenue per brand is $1.75 billion.

• The percentage of revenue attributable to answer engines without Bluefish is 3% in Year 1, 3.5% in Year 2, and 4% in Year 3.

• In Year 1, the percentage of revenue attributable to answer engines with Bluefish increases between 2.5% (low) and 5% (high). This increases to 5% (low) and 8% (high) in Year 3.

• The composite has an operating margin of 12%.

Results. This yields a three-year projected PV ranging from $9.2 million (low) - $15.5 million (high).

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Cross-functional alignment. Forrester research states: “AEO is a fragile, sprawling process that spans numerous stakeholders. … The SEO should collaborate closely with content marketers and web developers, who have the greatest sway over content’s persuasiveness and distribution on and off brands’ sites as well as sites’ crawlability and indexability. Paid media practitioners, PR professionals, social media managers, and brand marketers complement these three core AEO roles by collecting and analyzing the voice of the customer and impacting brand visibility and sentiment across owned, earned, and paid media.”⁸
  Interviewees said Bluefish helped bring these stakeholder groups together around a shared set of insights and priorities. The head of SEO at a personal care brand said: “For example, we track [retail platforms] in Bluefish. That was a really smart idea because it allows for cross-collaboration between teams that usually don’t talk to each other.”

• Change management support. Interviewees emphasized the “team sport” nature of AEO but also recognized the need for guidance around how to best organize team members and their roles to ensure program success. The director of GEO at an insurance brand said: “The questions we have today as a marketing team are: Where should this function live? Is it a business unit? Is it transversal? Is it part of a strategic pod? Who do you hire? Do you hire more on data or on brands? The conversation we had with Bluefish in the past months were really around what would be the ideal team. What does an [AEO] task force look like? They came with very, very good recommendations.”

• Reduced brand risk. Interviewees explained that Bluefish provides insights that allow their marketing teams to address and get ahead of negative brand sentiment that could lead to lost sales. The director of search capabilities at a pharmaceuticals brand said: “There’s a section of risks that shows either a negative sentiment or that looks strange for us to review. I don’t even know how we would have found that without Bluefish. It helps give us a lay of the land and understand how people are talking about us, so we can correct inaccuracies and again try to surface the main product information that we need to.” The associate director of generative and agentic AI at a CPG brand said: “This helps inform brand health because LLMs are essentially interpreting our brands on behalf of us to consumers. This is a good gut check of the state of our brand where we might need to strengthen or bolster our messaging and communications.”

• Marketing-team skill development. Interviewees explained that aside from technical implementation, Bluefish acts as a strategic partner that shares and brainstorms on AI marketing-related topics alongside their own teams. They also stressed that the Bluefish team dedicated time to sharing knowledge and skills with their marketing team. The associate director of generative and agentic AI at a CPG brand said, “Bluefish has been a great thought partner along our journey in understanding the fundamentals of what this space presents to us and what we should do about it.” The director of GEO at an insurance brand said: “I discuss with Bluefish and also share with my executives that we want to make sure our teams are upskilled and trained to this new marketing function. It’s very important. That’s one area where Bluefish is very good at being flexible and very present within trainings.”

• Content strategy evolution. Interviewees shared examples of how understanding AEO has led to investing deeper in earned media. The global head of search at a travel brand said: “This helps us manage and track investments in third-party content. If we’re working with influencers or bloggers, we can understand how often those third parties are being cited in types of answers. This has allowed us to evolve our strategy where we’re not solely focused on first-party content. We’ve actually made the decision to increase our investment in third-party relationships.”

• Traditional SEO enhancement. Interviewees emphasized secondary benefits to their organizations’ overall search programs as a result of optimizing content for answer engines. The global head of search at a travel brand said: “Your ability to refresh content and make it relevant on a regular basis is good across the board. We’re seeing lifts to our regular SEO numbers as a result of this AI push. We’re actually doing a better job with just regular search.”

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Bluefish and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Expanded AI marketing measurement. Forrester research states, “Organizations must have the ability to track performance across traditional search engines as well as AI-powered search features and answer engines, incorporate insights into marketing intelligence and reporting, and share insights cross-functionally.”⁹ Interviewees said their brands were still in the early stages of measuring the impact of AI marketing efforts and were exploring how to integrate AI marketing performance into broader marketing measurement frameworks. The associate director of generative and agentic AI at a CPG brand said: “I still have good faith that we’re on the right path because if we weren’t doing this, we would be losing out to competition. How can we better link our efforts here with understanding how consumers navigate search today? How can we better involve our measurement approach, looking not only at paid search results but also organically with AI search in the mix?”

• Adoption of future Bluefish capabilities. Interviewees expressed interest in additional Bluefish capabilities that could support future optimization efforts. The director of SEO at a personal care brand said: “Bluefish has an extension that can help [us] understand audience data for whom different subsets would be potentially seeing [our] AI ads. We’re going to start piloting that, which could be quite valuable. They also have an effort to do a lot more with product attribute data to feed directly into ACPs and UCPs to make a measurement feedback loop. I’m extremely bullish.” The head of agentic commerce at a health and beauty brands said: “We’re highly aware of the capability that helps brands create content. We’re actively looking for that solution to help scale content faster.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).