Questions, answered directly.
Common questions about Arcalea, our platforms, and how we approach marketing intelligence, attribution, and AI search visibility.
About Arcalea
Arcalea is a marketing intelligence firm that connects marketing investment to revenue outcomes. We build and operate four proprietary platforms: Galileo for multi-touch revenue attribution, Compass for search intelligence and competitive positioning, the AEO Index for AI search visibility tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, and QMA for quantitative market assessment. Our work sits at the intersection of data science, paid media, and organic growth.
Arcalea works with mid-market and enterprise organizations across B2B services, financial services, healthcare, higher education, e-commerce, real estate, and professional services. Our methodology is industry-agnostic but particularly well-suited for organizations with complex, multi-touch sales cycles where attribution clarity creates the most competitive advantage.
Arcalea is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois at 73 W. Monroe, Chicago IL 60603. We work with clients across the United States and have been recognized on the Inc. 500, Fortune's Most Innovative Companies list, and Financial Times Americas' Fastest Growing Companies.
Team Delta is Arcalea's core delivery team: data scientists, engineers, strategists, and media specialists who work directly on client engagements. Unlike traditional agency models, Team Delta is organized around integrated revenue outcomes rather than siloed service lines. Every engagement draws from the same team that builds Galileo, Compass, and the AEO Index.
Traditional agencies optimize toward channel-level metrics like impressions, clicks, and platform ROAS. Arcalea optimizes toward revenue. We use first-party attribution data, predictive modeling, and AI visibility measurement to connect every marketing dollar to actual business outcomes. We build proprietary technology rather than resell third-party tools.
Galileo, Compass & AEO Index
Galileo is Arcalea's multi-touch revenue attribution platform. It uses first-party, cookieless data to track the complete customer journey from initial touchpoint through conversion, applying machine learning attribution models to calculate each channel's actual contribution to revenue. Galileo also includes predictive modeling to forecast future performance under different budget scenarios.
Google Analytics attribution (including GA4's data-driven model) is constrained by Google's own data ecosystem and tends to favor Google channels. Galileo uses first-party data collection that is platform-independent, applies customizable ML attribution models, and connects attribution directly to revenue rather than proxy metrics. Galileo's methodology has been qualified as expert witness evidence in federal court under Daubert standards.
Compass is Arcalea's search intelligence platform. It provides competitive keyword analysis, share of voice measurement, and content gap identification across organic search. Compass assessments quantify the revenue opportunity available in a client's search category and benchmark their current position against competitors.
The AEO Index is Arcalea's AI search visibility tracking platform. It measures how often a brand appears in AI-generated responses across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, providing share of voice metrics, citation source analysis, and competitive rankings. See our published Higher Ed AEO Index and Surrogacy AEO Index for examples.
Yes. Galileo's attribution methodology has been presented and accepted as expert witness evidence in federal court proceedings, subject to adversarial cross-examination under Daubert standards for scientific validity. This requires attribution models to be reproducible, documented, and defensible under challenge from opposing experts, a bar most commercial analytics platforms do not meet.
AEO & AI Search
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content, schema markup, and entity data so that AI systems select and cite your brand in generated responses. As AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini become primary discovery channels, appearing in AI-generated answers requires structured data, entity authority, content depth, and citation-worthy sourcing that traditional SEO alone does not provide.
SEO optimizes for human clicks on search results. AEO optimizes for AI systems selecting your content as a source in generated answers, often without a click occurring at all. The signals overlap but differ: SEO emphasizes keyword targeting and backlinks; AEO emphasizes entity clarity, structured schema, answer-first content structure, and the citation-worthiness that large language models use to identify authoritative sources. Read more in our AI Is the New Search Engine guide.
FAQPage schema is the highest-density AEO signal for most content pages, surfacing Q&A pairs directly into AI retrieval systems. Article schema with dateModified and author attribution signals freshness and credibility. Organization schema with sameAs links builds entity recognition across knowledge graphs. For service businesses, Service and LocalBusiness schema add specificity AI engines use when recommending providers.
The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is a standardized Action Schema framework launched by Google and Walmart that enables AI agents to access real-time inventory, pricing, and availability data and execute transactions without requiring a website visit. For brands, the UCP means paid media placement alone is insufficient: organic data must be schema-structured and machine-verifiable, or paid ads will not serve regardless of bid levels. Read the full breakdown in The AI Shopping Wars.
The AEO Index currently tracks brand visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. These four platforms represent the primary AI-mediated discovery channels for most B2B and B2C categories. The index measures citation frequency, share of voice relative to competitors, and the specific source pages being cited for each brand.
Marketing Attribution
Multi-touch attribution distributes credit for a conversion across all the marketing touchpoints that influenced it, rather than assigning full credit to a single interaction. Common models include linear (equal weight), time-decay (more weight to recent touches), and data-driven ML-based weighting. Galileo uses a customizable ML approach that adapts to each client's actual customer journey patterns. Learn more in our multi-touch attribution guide.
Platform ROAS measures what happened within Google's or Meta's ecosystem: clicks recorded, conversions tracked by pixel. True revenue attribution uses first-party data to track customers across all touchpoints and ties the result to verified revenue. The gap is often significant. One documented case showed a 4.8x predicted ROAS that produced only 1.2x actual return. See the full case in Decoding the Myth of Google's ROAS.
A 3:1 LTV:CAC ratio is the widely cited benchmark for sustainable growth: every dollar spent acquiring a customer should return three dollars in lifetime value. Ratios below 1:1 indicate value destruction with each acquisition. Ratios above 5:1 may suggest underinvestment in growth. The right target varies by industry, sales cycle length, and margin structure.
Predictive revenue modeling uses historical attribution data and funnel dynamics to forecast future marketing performance under different budget scenarios. In practice it lets marketers answer questions like: what happens to CAC if we move 20% of Meta budget to Google Ads, or what is the revenue impact of doubling SEO investment over 12 months? Galileo's predictive module runs these simulations before budget decisions are made.
Paid Media & Organic Search
Arcalea manages campaigns across Google Ads (search, display, Performance Max, YouTube), Meta (Facebook and Instagram), LinkedIn, Microsoft Advertising, programmatic display, and connected TV. Channel selection is driven by attribution data showing which channels produce the lowest CAC and highest ROAS for each client's specific customer journey.
Arcalea's SEO work is driven by Compass data: keyword opportunity quantification, competitive gap analysis, and share of voice benchmarking. We treat organic search as a compounding asset, not a monthly deliverable. Content strategy is built around topical authority clusters, and all on-page work incorporates AEO signals: schema, entity clarity, answer-first structure, and freshness signals.
GSTIC stands for Goal, Strategy, Tactics, Inputs, Cadence. It is Arcalea's proprietary planning framework for connecting revenue targets to day-to-day marketing execution. Goal defines the business outcome. Strategy defines the approach. Tactics are the specific channels and programs deployed. Inputs are the data, content, and budget required. Cadence defines the measurement and iteration rhythm. Read the full breakdown in our GSTIC framework guide.
Yes. Content strategy and production is part of Arcalea's Earned and Owned media capability. We build content with an AEO-first structure: answer-first headlines, FAQPage schema, and structured hierarchies that match how AI systems parse and extract information. Content is always planned against keyword and citation opportunity data rather than editorial schedule alone. Browse our full Insights library.
Working With Arcalea
The typical starting point is a conversation with the Arcalea team to understand your goals, current measurement setup, and competitive context. Most engagements begin with a quantitative market assessment that establishes baseline metrics and identifies the highest-priority opportunities. Contact us here or call 312-248-4272.
Arcalea's clients range from growth-stage companies with $10M+ in revenue to enterprise organizations with multi-hundred-million dollar marketing budgets. The common thread is a need to connect marketing investment to measurable revenue outcomes. Galileo scales from single-channel SMB deployments to complex multi-brand enterprise attribution environments.
Arcalea has been recognized on the Inc. 500 at #149, Fortune's Most Innovative Companies, Financial Times Americas' Fastest Growing Companies, Great Place to Work, Titan 100, and Crain's Chicago Business Notable Entrepreneurs. Arcalea is also a certified Google Premier Partner.
Yes. Arcalea co-authored case study materials with Professor Mohanbir Sawhney at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. The three-part series centers on Elysian Fertility as the subject organization and covers attribution-driven marketing strategy. These materials are used as teaching cases in graduate business programs.
A quantitative market assessment (QMA) is Arcalea's structured diagnostic process for benchmarking a client's competitive position across 10 dimensions: brand awareness, digital portfolio health, analytics configuration, paid advertising efficiency, SEO, local search, Amazon marketplace, user experience, secondary platforms, and data science maturity. It is the starting point for most new engagements.
Still have questions?
Talk to the Arcalea team directly. We're straightforward about what we do, how we work, and whether it's the right fit.