SEO measurement

As we're approaching the end of 2025, there is no doubt that AI has had a huge impact on SEO, and Ahrefs have released a super interesting study that shows exactly what that looks like now. And it's probably not what you think.

We're gonna start with the negatives, and probably the most obvious, to be honest, top rankings have lost a third of their clicks. This means if you're ranking position 1 on Google, and you were before AI overviews were introduced, you have probably noticed a big drop in traffic.

And that's because more people are finding the information they wanna see. like this.

This is increasing the amount of zero click searches we're seeing, which is when users are searching, they're finding the information they want on Google, and they're not needing to go somewhere else. This also means that people that are clicking from Google are likely to be more motivated.

this is because a lot of the AI overviews answer how-to type searches...

Your rankings are completely irrelevant. I don't know how many more ways I can tell people that your website's keyword rankings are actually not important.

Let's say you're ranking position 1 for a load of keywords, but they don't actually bring you any website traffic. Or maybe they do bring you traffic, but you're getting no conversions from them.

Why would you care about those rankings? Why would you wanna rank for those terms?

Let's say they do bring decent traffic and conversions, but your rankings fluctuate for them quite often. Like you and a couple of competitors, you just flick between being positions 1, and 3.

This is rarely a reflection of your campaign, and a lot more often is to do with the location you're in. Google randomly rolling out another update or one of the millions of other reasons why your rankings might randomly change from one day to the next.

As long as you're seeing an increase in traffic and conversions from organic search...

If you're running an SEO campaign, you're probably tracking keyword rankings, and this makes sense, right? To know how well the SEO campaign is doing, you need to know if you're moving up in the ranks.

However, as someone who's been doing SEO for 16 years, I'm gonna tell you that rank tracking is one of the worst ways to track the performance of an SEO campaign. I'll tell you why it's so unreliable.

One exception to this rule, and then the best way to track the performance of your SEO campaign. So there's two main reasons that rank tracking is unreliable.

One is that you can only realistically track maybe a couple hundred keywords, but there's tens of thousands of search terms someone might use to get to your website. And the second is that you're chasing a moving target.

These keyword rankings change sometimes multiple times per day. They're affected by the location of the searcher and their personalisation.

That's why the only rank tracking that I use consistently is local rank tracking...

you don't care about all traffic. For example, branded traffic.

If someone is searching for your brand by name, you should rank at the top of Google no matter what you're doing on the SEO side. So when you're trying to evaluate the performance of your SEO campaign, you should filter out branded traffic.

Also, it's important to understand that some traffic is just much more valuable than others. Typically, you would rather have one visit to a product or service page than 100 visits to some blog post.

So that's why I evaluate the performance of every search campaign by tracking non branded traffic to our transactional pages. Hey TJ, from the future here.

Right after I recorded that video, Google put out a change that prevents rank trackers from seeing beyond the first 10 results. This is actually a huge problem for rank tracking software, and it makes them significantly less valuable.

So while rank tracking was already overrated, I think it's really in trouble now.

If you're investing any time or money in SEO, you don't need to wait six months to know if it's working. Check these metrics regularly and you will know in the first two to three months if your SEO strategy is working.

Go to performance search results and tick average position. Don't even bother looking at position 1 rankings at this stage.

You're not there yet. Just look for keywords seeing a significant jump in position.

Then check your total impressions. If you see this gap widening, Google is showing your pages to more people in search results.

All you need to do is check these two metrics in Google Search Console.