Your Attribution Is Broken. Blame AI Search.

Plus - the tool that shows you when AI is actually citing you

August 12, 2026

Riding Into the Future, founded by Dea Leftwich, brings inner-city kids into the horse world and opens doors to confidence, patience, consistency and post-secondary education scholarship money. What starts as a conversation about horses quickly becomes a powerful story about purpose, timing and community. Dea shares how volunteering at stables during a season of deep loss led her to equine therapy, a mounted patrol opportunity and finally a 4-H club designed to give kids free riding lessons, transportation, meals, and a path to educational support.

Fix your attribution, fix your data

Your customer asked ChatGPT for a recommendation. It named your brand. They Googled you, clicked a branded search result and converted.

Your dashboard didn’t show you the full picture of what happened. In fact, it said organic search, when really it was an AI assist.

AI-driven discovery is growing fast and last-click attribution has no idea it exists. How can you optimize spend based on bad data?

Try this:

  • 📝 Update your lead form. "How did you hear about us?" with an option for AI assistant or chatbot. List them out for further data.

  • 🗣️ Ask on sales calls. You can add a tag in your CRM. Anytime a prospect mentions AI was part of the process, log it.

  • 📊 Watch your branded search volume. An increase in people searching your exact brand name, with no matching ad or campaign, leads to an AI-driven discovery.

  • 🔍 Check what AI tools actually say about you. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini buyer-intent questions in your category. Are you mentioned? What are they saying about you? Is it accurate?

  • 📅 Review monthly. Add to your rotation of must do check in’s and stay on it.

Otterly.ai

You can't fix what you can't see or don’t know. How often are AI tools mentioning your brand? Find out with Otterly. ai. It tracks your brand's visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and more.

  • Runs your target prompts on a schedule and shows you when and how often you get cited

  • Tracks competitor mentions in the same answers, so you can see who's winning the AI answer instead of just the SERP

  • Flags sentiment, not just presence, so you know if the AI is actually recommending you or just name-dropping you

If you're serious about AI search this year, this is the kind of visibility you need before you can improve anything.