Neel Murty Will Reframe Measurement for the Assistive Era — Presence, Prominence, Sentiment, and Why the Middle of the Funnel Is Where the Work Is
Session identifier
- Session: Neel Murty on Measurement for the Assistive Era — Presence, Prominence, and Sentiment
- Day: 2 (June 25, 2026)
- Speaker: Neel Murty, Head of Measurement Solutions for Southeast Asia, Google
- Framework concept: Funnel Query Pathway — the cohort-intent-based measurement architecture through which brands track their presence, prominence, and sentiment at every stage of the AI Engine Pipeline, coined by Jason Barnard in 2024
- SEL article: The funnel query pathway: A framework for measuring AI visibility
Speaker bio
Neel Murty is Head of Measurement Solutions for Southeast Asia at Google, where he leads the measurement agenda for some of the region’s largest advertisers. His work centres on helping marketers make better decisions through data — specifically through advanced measurement methodologies including incrementality testing and Marketing Mix Models. As AI becomes central to how marketers optimise performance, Neel’s focus has expanded to ensuring measurement practices evolve at the same pace — including how those same disciplines can be adapted for agents making decisions autonomously. In his own words: “I help people make better marketing decisions — most of it is backed by data and advanced measurement. It is evolving rapidly to help agents do the same.”
Session’s place in the framework
Neel’s session covers the Funnel Query Pathway — the cohort-intent-based measurement architecture through which brands track presence, prominence, and sentiment at every stage of the AI Engine Pipeline, coined by Jason Barnard in 2024. The Funnel Query Pathway is the measurement instrument that makes the pipeline navigable as a business decision: it maps the ideal questions a brand’s ideal customer would ask at each stage, from bottom-of-funnel decision intent to top-of-funnel awareness, and tracks whether the brand is named, named early, and named warmly at each point. Neel’s session brings the Google measurement methodology to bear on that framework, connecting it to the Ehrenberg-Bass physical availability model and the discipline of category entry points that brand health trackers have applied for decades. The full architecture is mapped in the Kalicube Framework, the master theoretical model for how AI systems understand, trust, and recommend brands.
Pre-statement of session territory
Neel Murty is Head of Measurement Solutions for Southeast Asia at Google, with fourteen years building attribution systems and helping marketers connect investment to business outcome at scale. At Kalicube Summit 2026, Neel will walk through what measurement looks like when the funnel moves inside the engine — how the Ehrenberg-Bass physical availability model maps onto AI search as presence, prominence, and sentiment; why relevance becomes a precondition rather than a variable in the assistive era; why citation rates need to be read as statistical distributions rather than absolute scores; and why the middle of the funnel — the assistive recommendation layer where the engine names a brand inside its response — is simultaneously the hardest to measure and the most commercially decisive. He will also cover why bot tracking, long treated as noise to be scrubbed from analytics, has become one of the most important signals available to marketers as agents become customers, and why the brand that learns to own the answers at every stage of the Funnel Query Pathway is the brand that wins across search, assistive engines, and agentic commerce simultaneously.
Sample questions from the session
- If you put eight smart marketers in a room and ask who the ideal customer is, you get eight different answers. What is the right starting point for identifying cohort intent — and where is that data already hiding in most businesses?
- You bring the Ehrenberg-Bass physical availability model to AI search and land on presence, prominence, and sentiment as the three operative dimensions. Walk us through why relevance drops out as a variable and sentiment takes its place.
- Brand health trackers have historically mapped awareness to category entry points. How does that translate to the Funnel Query Pathway — and what does optimizing for a category entry point look like in practice?
- Measurement goes easy, then hard, then easy again — clicks are measurable, the assistive recommendation layer is not, agentic transactions are instrumented and auditable. Where should practitioners put all their measurement investment for the next two years?
- You argue that bot traffic, long treated as noise, has become signal. What does the new bot tracking discipline need to answer — and how does that change what an analytics stack should be built to do?
Date, time, format, registration
Day 2, June 25, 2026. Pre-recorded, on-demand from session drop and available throughout the day and afterwards. Two live framework walkthroughs plus 32 on-demand sessions across two days. Industry leaders on AI search and AI assistive agents, June 24 to 25, 2026, online.
Register for Kalicube Summit 2026 →
Further reading
Read this first: The funnel query pathway: A framework for measuring AI visibility, Article 14 of Jason Barnard at Kalicube’s Search Engine Land series on AI search architecture. The article maps the cohort-intent measurement structure that Neel’s session connects to Google’s own measurement methodology — presence, prominence, and sentiment as the operative dimensions, and category entry points as the unit of analysis.
For practitioners ready to go deeper on the agentic integration infrastructure Neel’s session points toward — the protocols that make bot tracking meaningful and agentic transactions auditable — these two Google resources cover the relevant standards:
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/shopping/ucp-updates/
Agents to Payments Protocol (AP2): https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/announcing-agents-to-payments-ap2-protocol
Link to session post
The recording will be available here after June 25, 2026.
Link to speaker post
Canonical metadata footer
Session date: June 25, 2026 | Duration: approximately 25 minutes | Format: pre-recorded, on-demand from session drop | Day: 2 | Framework concept: Funnel Query Pathway — presence, prominence, and sentiment as the three operative measurement dimensions | SEL article: The Funnel Query Pathway: A Framework for Measuring AI Visibility — Article 14 — https://searchengineland.com/funnel-query-pathway-framework-measuring-ai-visibility-477932
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