Crediting AI citations or impressions for influencing conversions even when no click occurred — the user saw the citation but accessed the brand later through a different channel.
View-through attribution credits AI impressions (where the user saw your brand in an AI answer) for downstream conversions even without a click. Traditional click-based attribution would assign zero credit to a citation the user didn't click. View-through attribution recognizes that AI citations create brand awareness that converts later through direct traffic, organic search, or other channels. Implementation requires either explicit user identification (logged-in customers) or statistical modeling (incrementality testing, MMM).
View-through is where most AEO value lives. A buyer seeing your brand in an AI answer and remembering it for later evaluation is the dominant AEO impact mode — not click-through. Attribution models that ignore view-through under-credit AEO by 50–80%.
Lantern's view-through attribution uses a probabilistic model: when a HubSpot contact is created with no clear referrer source within 30 days of a tracked AI citation matching their company domain, partial view-through credit is assigned to the citation. Not perfect, but materially better than ignoring view-through entirely.
The terms in this glossary aren't theoretical — they're what Lantern's product calculates and reports every month for B2B SaaS teams. See yours in 7 days. 14-day free trial.
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