Blog: Modern SEO Measurement Playbook

SEO has never been more important and more difficult to report on than it is right now. Search engines have evolved, consumer behavior has shifted, and AI-driven discovery is reshaping how people find information. Despite these shifts, marketers continue to use an outdated SEO measurement playbook. Relying on metrics that no longer tell the full story.

If the search landscape is evolving, the way we measure it needs to evolve, too.

The Problem with Old-School SEO Reporting

For years, SEO success was measured using a familiar set of metrics:

• Keyword Rankings
• Organic Traffic
• Organic Conversions

These metrics aren’t wrong, they’re just incomplete in today’s search landscape. Traditional SEO reporting was built for when search results were mostly just ten results on a page, rankings directly correlated with organic traffic, and consumer journeys were straightforward. 

In that environment, success was easy to justify. Today, that model breaks down.

Why Today’s Landscape is More Complicated

There are several realities that legacy SEO reporting fails to account for:

• Increase in places to search: Google is still the priority, but with the introduction of AI Search (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) and increased usage of social media platforms (YouTube, TikTok), there are far more places where consumers are searching for brands and information.
• Search behavior varies by platform: How consumers interact with traditional search is often far different from how they interact with AI search. For example, there was a study that was done that found the average traditional Google search was 3 words long, and the average ChatGPT search was 42 words long. This makes it difficult to rely on historical target keywords, given how search behavior varies by platform.
• Zero-click searches are growing: With LLMs & AI Overviews, consumers are finding information without having to click into a website. As a result, many websites are seeing a decrease in organic traffic, further proving that, at times, traffic has been more of a vanity metric.
• Conversions rarely happen on first-touch: Consumers leverage multiple channels in their journey, and attribution reports under credit brand discovery channels.

The Modern SEO Measurement Playbook

A strong measurement playbook blends traditional SEO metrics, AI Search visibility, and business outcomes.

1. Search Visibility (Not Just Rankings)

You should continue to leverage keyword ranking platforms, but it’s only part of the picture.

When it comes to visibility, you now have to consider your presence in AI search. However, this is increasingly difficult with how personalized AI searches are.  To effectively measure AI visibility, you need two different types of tools in your playbook:

• Estimated Overall Visibility: Again, with how personalized AI search is, you’ll never have a tool that provides a complete, accurate picture of your visibility. However, there are tools (ex. Ahrefs Brand Radar) out there that can provide you with an estimate to use as a benchmark or a comparison against your competitors. 
• Priority Prompt Visibility: In addition to overall visibility, you should also hone in on prompts you know your target audience is using to either discover brands, compare options, or make a decision. Tools like Athena, Profound, Ottery, etc., will then give you much more granular reporting specifically for those prompts. Not only can this help you determine where you have visibility, but also help you determine whether or not you are mentioned with positive or negative traits.

Between these two tools, you’ll be able to pinpoint where you have strengths and weaknesses from a visibility standpoint.

2. Traffic (Not Just Organic)

Traffic is still an important metric to keep an eye on, but the way in which we measure it has shifted. 

With the zero-click landscape, it’s not uncommon for websites to have seen a traffic decline over the past year or so. The decline is most often coming from upper funnel blog traffic that’s now easily answered without a user ever having to get to your website. As a result, traffic isn’t the impactful metric many once thought it was. Traffic is still incredibly valuable to measure, but you should do so by measuring the traffic to the pages most likely to drive down-funnel business impact.

With the introduction of AI search, it’s also important to broaden how you filter for traffic. Traffic coming from AI models (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) is typically attributed as referral or direct traffic in most reporting platforms (GA4, Adobe Analytics, Hubspot, etc.). So, as a starting point, broadening your reporting to include referral and direct will give you a better understanding of how AI search is playing into the equation. 

In most reporting platforms, you can dive a layer deeper by looking at the referral source to understand which AI models are not only driving traffic, but which ones you should prioritize from a measurement standpoint.

3. Conversions/Revenue (Not Just Organic)

The ultimate measure of SEO success hasn’t changed. At the end of the day, it still comes down to whether or not your SEO efforts are driving the growth of your business. Celebrating traffic improvements means nothing if you don’t have the down-funnel performance to show for it.

Similar to how traffic is measured, it’s important to filter beyond organic conversions/revenue in this new landscape, and begin including both direct and referral sources to account for the impact from AI models.

Bringing It All Together

The modern SEO playbook isn’t about abandoning traditional metrics, it’s evolving them.

Strong SEO measurement helps connect visibility to business outcomes. As search continues to evolve, the brands that win won’t be the ones chasing rankings and traffic. They’ll be the ones measuring what truly matters.