The Firms That Measure Brands Are Losing Theirs
We pulled twelve months of brand search demand on twenty-four firms across brand strategy, measurement and the AI-visibility upstarts. Fourteen of the twenty-two readable cells fell, and four of the five that rose sit in the same lane.
Somebody on your team is about to renew the brand tracker. The invoice arrives, the line item has been there four years, and the conversation about whether to keep it lasts about as long as it takes to forward the email. The firm on the invoice is one of the names everyone knows. That is most of why it is still on the invoice.
I wanted to know what was happening to those names. Not their revenue, which private firms do not publish, and not their quality, which no number reaches. Just how many people go looking for them — the ordinary, boring measure of whether a firm is still the one that comes to mind. On November 10 we pulled twelve months of US search volume on twenty-four firms: the brand-strategy specialists, the measurement houses, the strategy consultancies, and the small set of upstarts selling visibility inside AI answers.
Fourteen down, three flat, five up
Twenty-two of the twenty-four cells came back with a readable direction. Fourteen fell. Three held flat. Five rose.
Twelve-month change in US brand search for Interbrand — the oldest and most cited name in brand valuation — down to 1,300 average monthly searches. Ipsos fell 45%, Kantar 33%. The two largest measurement names in the set are the two falling hardest.
The brand-strategy tier is small and getting smaller. Landor at 2,900 and flat, Wolff Olins at 1,900 and down 21%, Interbrand at 1,300 and down 46%, Siegel+Gale at 590 and down 19%. Prophet returns no published volume at all. Four readable firms, 6,690 monthly searches between them — a whole competitive tier that would fit inside the brand demand of one mid-sized software company.
The measurement houses are larger and moving faster. Ipsos at 27,100 and down 45%. Circana at 12,100 and flat. Kantar at 5,400 and down 33%. Analytic Partners at 1,900 and down 16%. Taken together, the two biggest names in the tier lost between a third and a half of their public attention in a year.
Five things rose. Semrush AI visibility went from 140 to 390, up 179%. A term for the category itself, decision intelligence, rose 23%. Aera Technology rose 14%. EY-Parthenon rose 22% — the single riser from the legacy field. A fifth riser, an AI-visibility vendor, is held out of this piece for reasons in the case below.
Four of the five risers sit in the AI-visibility and decision-intelligence lane. Every brand-strategy specialist and every measurement firm in the set is flat or falling. That pattern survives dropping the held cell entirely.
What a falling number here does not mean
Brand search is not revenue. A firm can lose half its search demand and grow, because the work arrives through relationships, incumbency and procurement lists rather than a search box — which is exactly how most of this industry sells. Ipsos down 45% tells you how many people typed the name. It tells you nothing about what the firm billed.
Three more limits belong on the table before anyone quotes the figures. The strategy consultancies — McKinsey at 90,500, Bain at 40,500, Accenture Song at 4,400, Deloitte Digital at 3,600 — carry an unresolved confound, because their search includes job seekers, students and news readers. Four of those five fell between 17% and 19%, a uniformity suspicious enough that it may be an artifact of how Google bands these numbers rather than five independent declines. BCG and Nielsen are absent from the set rather than small in it: we measured long-tail phrases instead of their brand terms, which was our error in constructing the pass, and their figures are withheld rather than reported low. And the risers move on small bases, where a single banding step is most of the percentage. The directions are well evidenced across four separate terms. The magnitudes are not.
Lippincott, and the 40,500 that measured a nursing textbook
Measured November 10, 2026The first read of this pass put Lippincott at 40,500 monthly searches, which would have made it the runaway leader of the brand-strategy tier and the tier itself look an order of magnitude larger than it is. Lippincott is also Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, the medical and nursing publisher. The monthly series gave it away: 74,000 in September, 60,500 in February, 22,200 in July, 18,100 in December — peaks at the semester starts and troughs at the breaks. A brand consultancy's name does not move with the school year. The cell was voided before anything was built on it, and a second cell in the same pass is still held for the same kind of collision, which is why one riser is unnamed above.
A brand name you share with a bigger business is not a measurement — it is two measurements added together, and the seasonality usually tells you which one you are reading.
| № | The decision | The window | What it buys |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | What the tracker is actually for — a number the board expects, or a decision somebody makes with it | Before the renewal conversation | The right to cancel |
| 02 | Whether the questions still match the buying — unaided recall in a market where answers arrive pre-assembled | At renewal | Relevance of everything downstream |
| 03 | Who you add rather than who you replace — the new lane measures something the old one does not | Next budget cycle | Coverage, at a second cost |
| 04 | What would make you drop either one — named in advance | Before you sign | The ability to stop |
The reason 02 matters more this year than last: a brand tracker asks people what they remember. A growing share of the buying journey now runs through an assistant that answers without the person recalling anything, and the two AI-visibility terms in this set rising fastest are the market pricing that gap. Whether the new vendors measure it well is a separate question, and this pass does not touch it. What the pass shows is where attention is moving.
- You have a tracker renewal inside two quarters. The window to ask what it is for closes when the invoice is approved.
- Nobody on your team can name a decision last year's tracker changed. That is the test, and it is a fair one to put to the vendor as well as to yourself.
- Your category's buyers start with an assistant. Ask ten recent buyers how they built their shortlist before you commission anything that assumes they recalled it.
- Not yet, if your brand has a name collision. Fix the measurement before you act on it — see the case above, which cost us nothing only because we checked.
- CEO An incumbent tier where fourteen of twenty-two cells are falling is a tier losing its hold on the category, not just on traffic. The tension is that incumbency still wins procurement. Treat the renewal as a category decision, not a vendor decision.
- CFO The tracker is a recurring line that nobody has defended on its merits in four years, and this pass cost $0.36 to run. The tension is that canceling removes a number the board is used to seeing. Make the renewal argue for itself once, in writing, before it is approved.
- CRO If buyers now build shortlists inside an assistant, unaided recall measures a step that happens after the shortlist is set. The tension is that nothing in the new lane is proven yet. Ask ten recent buyers how they built their list, before buying either instrument.
- CPO Four of five risers sit in one lane, which is where the tooling and the talent will go next. The tension is that early categories ship thin products at confident prices. Pilot one vendor on one brand, scoped to a quarter.
- Legal A multi-year tracker contract signed on incumbency is the kind that auto-renews past its usefulness. The tension is that shorter terms cost more per year. Shorten the term rather than the scope, and keep an exit at each renewal.
- Risk One cell in this very pass measured a nursing publisher at thirty times the true figure, and a second is still held. The tension is that the collision check is boring and nobody budgets for it. Screen every brand term for a homonym before any number is reported upward.
Reconciled. CFO and CRO pull hardest against each other here: one wants the recurring line defended or dropped this quarter, the other wants to know what buyers actually do before changing instruments. Risk sides with CRO, because acting on a measurement you have not screened is how the Lippincott cell nearly got published. The course that satisfies the most seats is to hold the renewal to a single quarter rather than cancel or re-sign — long enough to ask ten buyers how they built their shortlist, short enough that the answer still changes what you sign.
Before the next tracker invoice is approved, ask the vendor to name one decision their data changed at your company in the last twelve months.
Put it in writing, to the account lead, with a date on the reply. A good vendor will answer in a paragraph and the answer will be specific — a pack reformulation, a media reallocation, a positioning change, with the month it happened. A vendor who answers with engagement statistics or a summary of the dashboard has told you what the line item is buying. Run the same question past your own team before you send it, because the honest answer is as likely to be about how you used the data as about how they supplied it.
- What it costs
- An email, a fortnight of waiting, and a slightly colder relationship with an account lead you have known for years. If the answer is thin, the real cost is the quarter you spend replacing something that was easy to keep.
- How you'll know
- By the reply. A specific decision with a date means renew and ask it again next year. A general answer means run the renewal at one quarter rather than one year, and spend that quarter asking ten recent buyers how they built their shortlist.
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