Monitor, test, and adjust

Julia says: “Monitoring, testing, and adjusting.

The search landscape will keep on changing. What we've seen so far in 2025 and 2026 is nothing yet.”

How is the search landscape continuing to change?

“Right now, the buzzword in SEO is the ‘great decoupling’, where we see impressions going up and clicks going down. I see it more as a democratisation of the search landscape, with new players in the field now.

Google is suddenly getting a lot of competition because people don’t just perform their searches on Google or Bing anymore, as they did historically. There are now all these LLMs out there like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, etc. Google has expanded the AI overviews. They've rolled out AI Mode. I've also suddenly seen quite a significant amount of traffic from Yahoo for some of my clients. We don't yet know where that's coming from. Then there's still DuckDuckGo and Ecosia out there.

However, ChatGPT seems to have become the big competitor to Google, even though the actions and searches that are performed in those places aren't exactly equivalent. We've seen a democratisation there, because Google is not the default for everything related to search anymore.”

How are the actions and searches within ChatGPT different to traditional search?

“With LLMs, people put in questions and have conversations, which is something that did not happen in Google before. In Google, traditionally, people put in one word or two words, or if we go extra-long tail, maybe some search queries had up to seven or eight words. It was never what we would linguistically define as a sentence.

In ChatGPT and Perplexity, people put in prompts that are real sentences with a proper question mark at the end, or even whole paragraphs where they describe the issue in more detail. That's a big change. What people do in ChatGPT is not exactly the equivalent of something that would have happened in Google before. That is already a big distinction.

Some early studies have shown that the trend is asking a question in ChatGPT, having a conversation, but still performing a follow-up search on Google to go to that website, find that brand, and check them out directly. ChatGPT is not really doing that well at the moment, but they're obviously working towards that with embedding shopping experiences so that you can buy directly in ChatGPT and not have to leave.

There are also already tools out there that track these behaviours, which are incredibly expensive. They speak about agentic search and these things. There seem to be voices out there that say, at some point, everything we do will just be a conversation with a bot. I don't fully agree with that, but we see this distinction there in what is done on which platform and how people still go through to a website, in the end.

In my opinion, that is going to change even more in the next few months, because these other platforms keep evolving. They’re probably also going to roll out ads at some point. User behaviour is also changing.

What I have already seen, in all the usual tools that we use for keyword research, is that the keywords that they suggest have become more question-like. That’s either because they’re getting their data from AI, or it’s because people have started putting more questions into Google now, where they would historically put in three words.”

Are searchers asking these questions in audio form or written form?

“In written form, but they spell it out as a question. It's very interesting to monitor this, at the moment, and see what data is available. If I exported a list of keyword suggestions three years ago, I would get keywords that are maximum three-word-long phrases. Now, I'm getting a good mix of traditional keyword phrases and also things that look more like a sentence.

It's still not a full sentence; I haven't seen any question marks or anything like that in there yet. However, with the increased usage of these LLMs, where people put in prompts and whole paragraphs, it also changes their search behaviour on Google. Maybe in one or two years, it will all just be questions, and tools like People Also Ask will become the default that we go to.

Again, we don't know for sure that this is happening, but it's the trend I'm seeing. The change in the technology that we can use to perform searches also changes user behaviour. It's these two things that contribute to the search landscape shift: we have more technology available that keeps on evolving, and user behaviour is also changing.”

Are fewer people using short tail searches on Google because they are initiating their discovery phase on another platform, like social media, first?

“I attended a great talk about this last week, at a conference here in London, and some data has confirmed that, if we look at the whole attribution channel, the average touchpoints of a customer have now gone up from 7 to 20.

That makes sense because people see the brand in multiple places. You have several social media platforms, then there's also Reddit and Quora, which seem to be becoming more visible everywhere. Then there's Google, and there are the different LLMs that people can search on.

In this talk, the speaker showed that this is how people find brands now and, in the end, the actual conversion might come through a PPC ad. You don't know all the places where those same users have seen the brand before, which led up to that final decision. It makes our data analysis much more complex.”

How do you close that data gap, as an SEO?

“We need to adjust, depending on what's available to us.

At the moment, what we have available is very little. I see this bucket in Google Analytics that says ‘unassigned traffic’ or ‘direct traffic’ growing and growing over time. That is a lot of data where we just don't know what it actually is. At the moment, the data we can get out of LLMs is also very limited, and if you can get the data, it is incredibly expensive.

There are very smart people out there working on tools that can track these things, but when you look at the price, it makes you think, maybe you don't need that data just yet. These are things that will change over the next year. It has to.

There's already a great guide out there that suggests ways to get your data by setting certain things up in Google Tag Manager, combining things with log files, and so on. At the moment, it seems very complicated to even get to the data, but people are on it. I'm expecting to see a lot of great things come out over the next year that will make it easier.

I have one client where it's a problem to even get the log files because the hosting provider just makes it really, really hard. For all these things, we need to adjust and monitor. We need to look into these things. What do we need? How can we get it? Then, come up with creative ways to actually get there.

At the moment, there's no off-the-shelf solution that provides all the data that you need, with a handy analysis of it. That just doesn't exist.”

For SEO consultants, how is reporting to clients evolving?

“What I see myself doing every month is adjusting my reports. You can’t automate your reports once and then just look at them each month.

I am adjusting charts every month and adding new overviews and new screenshots from several places, just to make sense of the data. With the great decoupling, you see impressions going up and clicks going down, but what does it actually mean?

What I've started tracking, for example, is a subset of pages that always had conversions in the previous quarter. How's traffic doing on these pages? These are our high performers. These are pages we know are converting well. If traffic is going down there, there's an action we need to take.

I’m ignoring all the informational searches, where I'm okay with the traffic going down, because we know that it's AI overviews taking away that traffic.

I see myself constantly adjusting month-on-month, depending on what's available, and I see that trend continuing. I don't know for how long, because as we said before, things keep on changing. Tools are adding new features on all ends. User behaviour is changing. It's really about making sense of the data and focussing on the data that really matters.

One thing that a lot of businesses and website owners should do better is to set up proper conversion tracking. I still see very often, when I take on a new client, they're not even tracking any conversions, or they're just tracking the default things that come with GA4.

If they have a link to a demo request, can we track that? If there's another CTA, can we track that? Can we track whether people have watched this video? It's becoming really important to define what a conversion is for us and then start tracking it.

Defining what conversion means for you comes back to the 20 different touchpoints that customers have these days. Maybe signing up or subscribing to your YouTube channel should count as a conversion now, because that is a brand interaction. That means this person has watched your video and is definitely interested in following up for more – or they signed up to your podcast, email newsletter, or whatever it is.

It also depends on what you do and how long conversion channels usually are in the industry we're talking about. You need to get these things right to at least have that bit of accurate data and better understand what people do on your website. How do they interact with your brand?

One thing that I've seen is that businesses now want to see more. They want to see how much traffic they are getting from ChatGPT, how many conversions, etc., but they’re not necessarily increasing the budget for these things. As SEOs, we need to become really clever about what we actually look at, what we spend our time on, and spend it in the right places.

Reddit, for example, is one thing that is talked about a lot at the moment, and we see it everywhere. It seems to not only come up in Google more and more, but it also seems to feed into results that are coming up in LLMs. However, it takes a lot of time to get active on Reddit and find the right conversations where you should get involved.

I know some people in our industry already have something in the pipeline to come up with better tools to find these conversations that are relevant to your brand, but it again comes down to: does this really matter for us? Yes, Reddit is becoming more important, but is your audience actually on Reddit?

At the moment, it's a really exciting time. It can be a bit scary and intimidating to see what's happening, but it's important that we keep our heads up, take a step back sometimes, and think, ‘What does this all actually mean?’

Do we need to jump to the next new thing immediately, or do we just monitor for a bit, understand what's actually happening here, and find out where our audience actually is and what metrics matter to that particular business, before we jump on to the next thing and try and do everything at once?”

Julia, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“The action you can take right now is to get your conversion tracking right.

Get that right, so you have that data.”

Julia-Carolin Zeng is an SEO Consultant at Charlie on the Move. Find out more over at CharlieontheMove.com.