The New Reality
With the introduction of AI Overviews and AI Conversation Platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc.), the organic search landscape has become increasingly more complicated. Many brands are experiencing decreases in organic traffic, and in some cases, have reduced their SEO investments as a result.
In many cases, your SEO team might not have the right strategy, but it’s also likely that they haven’t adapted their reporting to this new world of organic search. Conveying the value of SEO or GEO is more important than ever, and it all starts with an understanding of how you track and report on performance in this evolving landscape.
What to Measure
At the end of the day, it all boils down to the metrics that ultimately drive business growth. In most cases, that’s going to be some form of leads or revenue, but even those are lagging indicators of a successful SEO strategy. In this post, we’ll outline what lagging and leading indicators you should monitor in order to properly measure performance and act on insights.
Lagging Indicators
Your leads, revenue, and even traffic, should still continue to serve as your north star, and you should always ask yourself whether or not you are seeing an increase in business performance as a result of your organic search strategy. However, even these core metrics have become more complicated than that.
Historically, you would have pulled leads/revenue from your reporting platform (GA4, Adobe Analytics, etc.) with a filter for organic search, but with users starting to use AI Conversation platforms more and more, we’re seeing less traffic coming through traditional organic search and instead coming through as a referral. In addition to organic search, you’ll now want to filter for AI referral traffic to get a better sense of the complete picture.
Leading Indicators
Alongside the core metrics, it’s valuable to monitor supporting metrics that act as early indicators of performance. Many already have some of this in place, but some of this is also a product of the industry evolving.
- Keyword Rankings: Monitoring your website’s ranking for relevant keywords within traditional search continues to remain important. The majority of organic search is still done with traditional search engines, so you still need to keep a close eye on this.
- AI Mentions: Similar to keyword rankings, the focus is on measuring visibility, but specifically when your brand is mentioned within AI Conversation platforms. The AI platforms don’t always include a link to your website, so the emphasis is on brand mentions. In addition to this difference, AI results are heavily personalized for each user, and users are much more likely to have unique long-tail searches. So similar to tracking keyword rankings, there are a number of GEO tracking tools that can help with this, including:
- Server Log Analysis: Many SEOs have monitored server logs prior to this shakeup, but the AI evolution has drastically increased the value in it. In addition to tracking traffic and mentions from AI platforms, you can also measure how often those AI platforms crawl your website through your server logs. Each of the AI platforms have unique crawlers, which you can use to track how often they crawl your website, and serve as an early indication of wanting to return your website more often. For example, there are three different ChatGPT user agents, each used for a different purpose:
- OAI-SearchBot: This is the agent that ChatGPT uses to link to and surface websites within its search results. These crawls happen in real time as users conduct their searches.
- ChatGPT-User: Used when users ask ChatGPT a question, and may visit a web page to retrieve the information needed.
- GPTBot: Used to train its foundational models.
Moving Forward
SEO strategies do not drive overnight success with a dated measurement approach, but with a more comprehensive set of metrics, you can effectively measure the impact of your strategic initiatives on leading indicator KPIs.
The organic search landscape is evolving quickly and it’s critical that the way you measure success evolves quickly as well. Through a combination of lagging and leading indicators, you’ll have the right pieces in place to successfully measure performance and act on opportunities.