How do communications professionals measure the search impact of their media hits?

Communications teams measure the search impact of media hits across three layers, and most stop at the first one. Layer one, search ranking: do the placements actually appear when someone runs the branded queries that matter, or are they buried? This is trackable query by query, before and after, which is what IMPACT™ is built to do. Layer two, AI citation: do the AI engines pull the coverage into their answers when asked about the company or executive? A placement that never enters the source pool the engines draw from has no effect on what ChatGPT or Gemini reports, and AIQ shows whether it does. Layer three, downstream signals: referral traffic from the placement, lift in branded search volume, and movement in the wider entity footprint. Read together, these answer the question PR is rarely asked to answer: not did we get coverage, but did the coverage change what people find and what the engines say.