When a shopper asks ChatGPT which shampoo works best for a sensitive scalp, the answer doesn’t depend on which creator had the most followers last quarter. The AI reads trust and evidence. That distinction is forcing a rethink of how creator campaigns get built, measured, and funded.
Jason Yehuda Neuman, SVP of Applied AI and Vertical Strategy at PartnerCentric, sat down with Net Influencer Senior Editor Ceci Carloni to explain what that rethink looks like in practice. At PartnerCentric, an affiliate and creator marketing firm serving Fortune 500 clients, he now leads influencer strategy and the firm’s AI-oriented tools.
Yehuda has more than a decade of experience across marketing and creator partnerships. He spent more than two years at ByteDance, where he led Influencer Marketing for CapCut as the app scaled to become one of the most downloaded globally. Earlier, he spent seven years at Talent Resources, a celebrity endorsement agency, where he founded and led its digital division and worked on digital engagement for names including Nicki Minaj and Kylie Jenner.
The conversation covered AI discovery, follower count as an obsolete metric, the attribution gaps brands have tolerated for years, and a new approach to connecting creator content to direct revenue without requiring a trackable link.
1. Creator Campaigns Now Have Three Metrics
Brands have historically evaluated creator marketing on two dimensions: awareness, measured by views and reach, and lower-funnel performance, measured by tracked sales. A third now applies.
“Will the LLMs see trusted creators talking about your brand?” Yehuda said. “And will it include that in its results when somebody asks what kind of detergent should I buy?”
LLMs pull from publicly available content when forming recommendations. Creator videos, particularly on YouTube, have been ranking as LLM sources for two to three years, according to Yehuda. TikTok and Instagram content is beginning to appear in results as well. A brand’s creator program is now producing inputs to AI recommendation systems, whether or not the brand accounts for this in how it builds campaigns.
Yehuda frames the new evaluation as a three-part check: can the creator drive views and positive engagement, will their call to action convert, and will their content influence AI visibility for the brand.
2. YouTube Set the LLM Standard. Short-Form Is Catching Up.
When LLMs first began indexing creator content, YouTube dominated. A 15-minute video gives a language model far more text and signal than a 30-second TikTok, and LLMs were initially better equipped to extract meaning from longer, denser content.
“TikTok and Instagram are starting to help fill in the gaps,” Yehuda said. His reading of the pattern: YouTube establishes core context about a product, what it does, who uses it, and why it works. Short-form content on TikTok and Instagram builds an ecosystem of supporting trust signals.
YouTube pricing already reflects the depth differential. A 60-second integrated ad read inside a YouTube video costs as much or more than a dedicated post on TikTok or Instagram, and a dedicated YouTube video runs three to four times the cost of the same format on short-form platforms, according to Yehuda. The LLM advantage may not change those ratios, but it adds a return dimension that brands have not yet priced.
3. Brands Pushed Hard for Attribution. The Gap Was Always There.
The industry’s push for performance measurement was not wrong. It was, in Yehuda’s view, incomplete.
“A lot of the attribution has always been unattributable,” he said. Shoppers who see a creator post routinely don’t click the link in bio. They Google the brand directly, go to Amazon, or revisit the site days later after a retargeting ad. The tracked sale registers under a different channel.
The dynamic produces recurring friction inside companies. Yehuda describes situations where creator campaigns launched, organic traffic spiked sharply, and the brand’s SEO team claimed the improvement. “There’s a direct correlation between starting the creator efforts and better organic traffic,” he said, but the attribution rarely flows back to the creator program.
One specific problem compounds this: most brands assign a single tracking link to a creator across all placements, covering stories, bio links, affiliates, and syndicated posts. Yehuda says he has rarely seen a brand use separate links per placement type. Without that segmentation, brands are discarding the signal that would let them identify which creator formats actually drive transactions.
4. AI Visibility Is the Brand’s Responsibility, Not the Creator’s
Creators are not going to optimize their content for LLM indexing. That is not their job, and expecting them to understand the brand’s competitive search position is a misallocation of responsibility.
“Your internal person who’s handling creators is going to need to start getting good at understanding what kind of content is going to affect LLMs,” Yehuda said.
The workflow he outlines starts with AI visibility monitoring. Three platforms operate in this space, according to Yehuda: Peec AI, Profound, and AthenaHQ. Brands input category prompts, track where they rank in AI-generated responses versus competitors, and then work backward. Value propositions that need to rank get built into creator briefs.
The adjustment is targeted. If a brand is underrepresented when shoppers ask about products for sensitive skin, the brand ensures that language appears in creator content, without scripting the creator verbatim. The creator delivers the concept; the brand controls which concept gets delivered.
5. Follower Count Prices Risk, Not Results
The persistence of follower count in creator briefs reflects a measurement habit, not evidence that it produces better outcomes.
“The follower count came from the idea that if you have a certain follower count, you can reach that amount of people, which is completely false,” Yehuda said. Platform algorithm changes eliminated that relationship more than a decade ago.
A creator with a million followers and 20,000 average views is delivering 20,000 views. That is what the brand is buying, and it should be priced accordingly. Creators with large follower counts price on the number, not the view average, creating a persistent gap between cost and output. The higher the follower count, the wider that potential gap.
Yehuda’s preferred approach: average views across the last 10 posts, with outliers stripped. When two videos from a creator who averages 30,000 views spike to a million, those get excluded. The benchmark is what brands reliably receive, not what is theoretically possible.
6. Connecting Views to Revenue Without a Tracking Link
The “FUSE Influencer” tool PartnerCentric developed addresses the attribution problem.
Creator video distribution follows a gated progression, Yehuda explains. The algorithm serves a new video first to roughly 200 accounts. If those viewers watch it fully, it advances to 5,000. Success there moves it to 30,000, and the cycle continues until watch time drops. FUSE tracks view counts minute by minute, then correlates those gating events against website traffic data, identifying spikes in site visits that align with each threshold transition.
In a recent test, a creator video generated approximately 4,000 views and produced 132 website visits and five sales, according to Yehuda. The correlation was traceable in the timing data even without a single link click.
The tool does not resolve how to pay out that creator. It does confirm which creators are producing web traffic and revenue direction, giving brands evidence they previously lacked. “If you think a creator is driving sales and views to your website,” Yehuda said, “give them a piece of the pie so they keep doing it more.”
7. When Three Budget Lines Become One
Creator, affiliate, and AI visibility spend are converging because the same piece of content now works across all three simultaneously.
Yehuda expects efficiency gains as brands stop treating them separately. A creator video that drives awareness, produces tracked and untracked sales, and ranks in LLM results delivers returns across historically separate line items from a single investment. Brands that segment those outcomes into separate programs are counting the same dollar into different buckets.
Budget, Yehuda notes, will have to shift from somewhere. He points to traditional marketing and in-person events. A clothing brand recently AI-generated an entire fictional social club set in Lake Como to feature its product in lifestyle imagery, avoiding travel and venue costs entirely, according to Yehuda. The brand value that experiential activations once provided can increasingly be approximated digitally.
“Creator is going to get more powerful,” he said, “because there’s an incredible piece of media that’s affecting three different major areas of your discoverability journey.”
Cecilia Carloni, Interview Manager at Influence Weekly and writer for NetInfluencer. Coming from beautiful Argentina, Ceci has spent years chatting with big names in the influencer world, making friends and learning insider info along the way. When she’s not deep in interviews or writing, she's enjoying life with her two daughters. Ceci’s stories give a peek behind the curtain of influencer life, sharing the real and interesting tales from her many conversations with movers and shakers in the space.
When a shopper asks ChatGPT which shampoo works best for a sensitive scalp, the answer doesn’t depend on which creator had the most followers last quarter. The AI reads trust and evidence. That distinction is forcing a rethink of how creator campaigns get built, measured, and funded.
Jason Yehuda Neuman, SVP of Applied AI and Vertical Strategy at PartnerCentric, sat down with Net Influencer Senior Editor Ceci Carloni to explain what that rethink looks like in practice. At PartnerCentric, an affiliate and creator marketing firm serving Fortune 500 clients, he now leads influencer strategy and the firm’s AI-oriented tools.
Yehuda has more than a decade of experience across marketing and creator partnerships. He spent more than two years at ByteDance, where he led Influencer Marketing for CapCut as the app scaled to become one of the most downloaded globally. Earlier, he spent seven years at Talent Resources, a celebrity endorsement agency, where he founded and led its digital division and worked on digital engagement for names including Nicki Minaj and Kylie Jenner.
The conversation covered AI discovery, follower count as an obsolete metric, the attribution gaps brands have tolerated for years, and a new approach to connecting creator content to direct revenue without requiring a trackable link.
1. Creator Campaigns Now Have Three Metrics
Brands have historically evaluated creator marketing on two dimensions: awareness, measured by views and reach, and lower-funnel performance, measured by tracked sales. A third now applies.
“Will the LLMs see trusted creators talking about your brand?” Yehuda said. “And will it include that in its results when somebody asks what kind of detergent should I buy?”
LLMs pull from publicly available content when forming recommendations. Creator videos, particularly on YouTube, have been ranking as LLM sources for two to three years, according to Yehuda. TikTok and Instagram content is beginning to appear in results as well. A brand’s creator program is now producing inputs to AI recommendation systems, whether or not the brand accounts for this in how it builds campaigns.
Yehuda frames the new evaluation as a three-part check: can the creator drive views and positive engagement, will their call to action convert, and will their content influence AI visibility for the brand.
2. YouTube Set the LLM Standard. Short-Form Is Catching Up.
When LLMs first began indexing creator content, YouTube dominated. A 15-minute video gives a language model far more text and signal than a 30-second TikTok, and LLMs were initially better equipped to extract meaning from longer, denser content.
“TikTok and Instagram are starting to help fill in the gaps,” Yehuda said. His reading of the pattern: YouTube establishes core context about a product, what it does, who uses it, and why it works. Short-form content on TikTok and Instagram builds an ecosystem of supporting trust signals.
YouTube pricing already reflects the depth differential. A 60-second integrated ad read inside a YouTube video costs as much or more than a dedicated post on TikTok or Instagram, and a dedicated YouTube video runs three to four times the cost of the same format on short-form platforms, according to Yehuda. The LLM advantage may not change those ratios, but it adds a return dimension that brands have not yet priced.
3. Brands Pushed Hard for Attribution. The Gap Was Always There.
The industry’s push for performance measurement was not wrong. It was, in Yehuda’s view, incomplete.
“A lot of the attribution has always been unattributable,” he said. Shoppers who see a creator post routinely don’t click the link in bio. They Google the brand directly, go to Amazon, or revisit the site days later after a retargeting ad. The tracked sale registers under a different channel.
The dynamic produces recurring friction inside companies. Yehuda describes situations where creator campaigns launched, organic traffic spiked sharply, and the brand’s SEO team claimed the improvement. “There’s a direct correlation between starting the creator efforts and better organic traffic,” he said, but the attribution rarely flows back to the creator program.
One specific problem compounds this: most brands assign a single tracking link to a creator across all placements, covering stories, bio links, affiliates, and syndicated posts. Yehuda says he has rarely seen a brand use separate links per placement type. Without that segmentation, brands are discarding the signal that would let them identify which creator formats actually drive transactions.
4. AI Visibility Is the Brand’s Responsibility, Not the Creator’s
Creators are not going to optimize their content for LLM indexing. That is not their job, and expecting them to understand the brand’s competitive search position is a misallocation of responsibility.
“Your internal person who’s handling creators is going to need to start getting good at understanding what kind of content is going to affect LLMs,” Yehuda said.
The workflow he outlines starts with AI visibility monitoring. Three platforms operate in this space, according to Yehuda: Peec AI, Profound, and AthenaHQ. Brands input category prompts, track where they rank in AI-generated responses versus competitors, and then work backward. Value propositions that need to rank get built into creator briefs.
The adjustment is targeted. If a brand is underrepresented when shoppers ask about products for sensitive skin, the brand ensures that language appears in creator content, without scripting the creator verbatim. The creator delivers the concept; the brand controls which concept gets delivered.
5. Follower Count Prices Risk, Not Results
The persistence of follower count in creator briefs reflects a measurement habit, not evidence that it produces better outcomes.
“The follower count came from the idea that if you have a certain follower count, you can reach that amount of people, which is completely false,” Yehuda said. Platform algorithm changes eliminated that relationship more than a decade ago.
A creator with a million followers and 20,000 average views is delivering 20,000 views. That is what the brand is buying, and it should be priced accordingly. Creators with large follower counts price on the number, not the view average, creating a persistent gap between cost and output. The higher the follower count, the wider that potential gap.
Yehuda’s preferred approach: average views across the last 10 posts, with outliers stripped. When two videos from a creator who averages 30,000 views spike to a million, those get excluded. The benchmark is what brands reliably receive, not what is theoretically possible.
6. Connecting Views to Revenue Without a Tracking Link
The “FUSE Influencer” tool PartnerCentric developed addresses the attribution problem.
Creator video distribution follows a gated progression, Yehuda explains. The algorithm serves a new video first to roughly 200 accounts. If those viewers watch it fully, it advances to 5,000. Success there moves it to 30,000, and the cycle continues until watch time drops. FUSE tracks view counts minute by minute, then correlates those gating events against website traffic data, identifying spikes in site visits that align with each threshold transition.
In a recent test, a creator video generated approximately 4,000 views and produced 132 website visits and five sales, according to Yehuda. The correlation was traceable in the timing data even without a single link click.
The tool does not resolve how to pay out that creator. It does confirm which creators are producing web traffic and revenue direction, giving brands evidence they previously lacked. “If you think a creator is driving sales and views to your website,” Yehuda said, “give them a piece of the pie so they keep doing it more.”
7. When Three Budget Lines Become One
Creator, affiliate, and AI visibility spend are converging because the same piece of content now works across all three simultaneously.
Yehuda expects efficiency gains as brands stop treating them separately. A creator video that drives awareness, produces tracked and untracked sales, and ranks in LLM results delivers returns across historically separate line items from a single investment. Brands that segment those outcomes into separate programs are counting the same dollar into different buckets.
Budget, Yehuda notes, will have to shift from somewhere. He points to traditional marketing and in-person events. A clothing brand recently AI-generated an entire fictional social club set in Lake Como to feature its product in lifestyle imagery, avoiding travel and venue costs entirely, according to Yehuda. The brand value that experiential activations once provided can increasingly be approximated digitally.
“Creator is going to get more powerful,” he said, “because there’s an incredible piece of media that’s affecting three different major areas of your discoverability journey.”
Listen to the full conversation on “The Big Three” podcast.
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