Check how much traffic comes from commercial and transactional keywords, then look for gaps your competitors are using to generate revenue.
Explain the value of impressions
Impressions mean that people see you. Even if they don’t click right away, visibility creates recognition.
Think about how people search on a fragmented journey. They may not click the first time, but if they see your name repeatedly across different queries and platforms, they are more likely to choose you.
Mark Williams-Cook gave an excellent example of using ChatGPT to find a supplier and then go directly to the website to convert. That’s zero attributed clicks, but the impressions did their job.
7. How do we educate executives who make decisions based on traffic growth and content volume, even when they don’t show the full picture?
Start by questioning the goal, not defending the metric.
When a customer says, “Our competitors publish 50 pages a month, why don’t we?”, ask why they want to copy their competitors because FOMO is not a strategy.
The most effective way to educate leadership is to ensure that objectives become the filter for every decision. What should SEO do for this business: generate leads, create brand awareness, or gain market share in specific areas? Define KPIs, then measure each tactic against it, including competitor activity.
Next, make these changes:
Replace vanity metrics with business results
Stop reporting impressions and traffic in isolation. Show leads, see bookings and pipeline activity with them. When leadership sees the connection between visibility and revenue, traffic becomes a means to an end rather than the end itself.
Reframe your competition’s business
Instead of copying your competitors, identify strategies that align with your goals and the gaps they’ve addressed. Copying keeps you responsive, but finding the gaps and innovating moves you forward.
8. If each LLM request generates a unique response, how should business owners and SEOs monitor AI visibility?
There is no single way to track AI visibility right now, and anyone who tells you otherwise is oversimplifying.
Each request is unique. No two people type the same thing in ChatGPT or Perplexity, which means traditional search volume as a measurement framework doesn’t apply.
What AI visibility tools do instead is aggregate queries with similar intent to show you the types of queries in which your brand appears. It is a directional guide and should be treated as such.
Here’s how to monitor AI visibility holistically:
Track AI search traffic in GA4
First, configure GA4 to view referral traffic from LLMs. Go to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic Acquisition.
It gives you a basic view of how much traffic you’re getting from these tools and whether it’s generating results.
