Every interaction a potential client has with your business is an event. The trace is what happens when you stop treating those events as disconnected noise and start treating them as a single, continuous chain.
The trace has seven links. Most businesses can see two or three of them in isolation. Almost none can see the full chain as one continuous record. moonquake's job is to make the chain visible — and then to attribute the outcome back to the beginning.
A potential client hears about you somewhere. For a growing number of businesses, that somewhere is an AI search engine — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews. moonquake monitors where your brand is cited and which competitors are cited for the same queries. This is the origin of most modern customer journeys, and most analytics platforms are completely blind to it.
They follow the citation to your website. A conventional analytics system records a pageview. moonquake records a pageview and the citation that caused it — the AI engine, the query they were asking, the context in which your brand showed up.
They're anonymous when they arrive. Anonymous traffic is what every B2B business complains about — you know someone visited, but not who, so you can't act. moonquake resolves identity when possible (with consent, through known-visitor matching services) so the anonymous stranger becomes a known person you can actually reach out to.
They do something — read a page, open a chat, fill a form, make a call. Every engagement is recorded against the same identity record, so the second visit, the third, the eleventh all stitch together into one coherent relationship history. No more "this person has visited 47 times but we've never spoken."
At some point they become a lead, then a scheduled appointment or signed contract. The calendar entry, the CRM deal, the booked work — all of them attach to the same identity record. The trace now has a direction, not just a history.
The work gets done. The invoice gets sent. The project wraps. For service businesses especially, this is where most measurement systems lose the thread — the operational reality of delivery happens in tools that don't talk to the marketing stack. moonquake keeps the thread intact.
The invoice clears. Revenue is attributed not to the last click or the first touch, but to the full chain — every contributing event, from the AI citation onward, gets credit for its role in the outcome. You can finally see which channels, which messages, which moments actually produced the money.
Imagine an addiction recovery services business. A prospective family searches Perplexity for "sober living Phoenix Arizona." The AI engine cites a client business as one of three recommendations, including a short paragraph describing their approach. The family clicks through to the website.
Over the next eleven days, different family members return multiple times from different devices. One fills out an inquiry form. Two weeks after the initial citation, a family member calls. A week after that, a booking is made. The operator completes a two-month program. An invoice for $12,400 is sent and paid.
In most businesses, that entire chain would look like a mystery in the books. "We booked a client from somewhere — probably word of mouth." In moonquake, it's a single record: Perplexity citation on date X for query Y produced a $12,400 outcome on date Z, 28 days later, through 20 distinct events across three people on four devices. You know what's working. You can invest more in it.
Attribution isn't guessing. It's recording what actually happened and then refusing to forget.
Conventional analytics was designed for e-commerce: single-device, single-session, click-to-purchase timelines measured in minutes. The internet stopped working like that fifteen years ago. Today's customer journeys span weeks, devices, channels, and offline touches. Traditional analytics treats every disconnect as a lost case. moonquake treats every disconnect as a puzzle to resolve.
The tooling to do this has existed in pieces for years. Identity resolution services exist. Server-side tagging exists. CRM systems exist. Invoicing systems exist. AI search citation monitoring is newly possible. What hasn't existed is the operating system that wires them together into one coherent chain with the brand record at the center.