Webinar: Are Your Rankings Visible? SERP Data, Dominance & Opportunities in 2026

Rank position has always been a proxy, a way of estimating how likely a result is to get clicked. But position doesn't tell you whether your result is actually visible on screen, how much space it takes up, or how far a user has to scroll before they even reach it. Those things matter at least as much as the number.

Tom Capper, who leads the Search Science team at Moz, has been looking at this through a different lens: visual SERP data.

He joined us to share what that data shows, which result types dominate visually, which verticals are most affected, and where the opportunities are that rank tracking alone won't surface. He also looks at how this framing gives you a more honest way to view paid and AI search results alongside organic.

WARNING: This webinar contains some technical difficulties!

You can download Tom's slides here.

Webinar recording

Webinar transcript

Jojo Furnival: Did we just lose? I think that might be my — something wrong with me. One second. We're going to have to put your presentation back on the stage, Tom.

Tom Capper: Yeah, all good.

Jojo Furnival: You're going to have to load it up again, show your screen again. I am going to say, I am literally, literally right by the booster, so this is unacceptable.

Tom Capper: I am on it.

Jojo Furnival: This is Tom Capper, Director of Search Product Strategy at STAT and Moz. I am Jojo Furnival, marketing manager at Sitebulb. If you are joining us for the first time, Sitebulb is a website crawler and auditing tool — the only one on the market to offer a desktop version and a cloud version. That means we can help every SEO. You heard me, every SEO. Find out more and access the free trial at sitebulb.com. This is a reminder that the session is being recorded. I will email the recording out to you probably tonight, because I'm going on annual leave tomorrow. There will be time for Q&A at the end, so please — you must all have questions for Tom. I know I do. Please put them in the Q&A tab next to the chat. You can also upvote other people's questions in there.

Jojo Furnival: Now to our guest, Tom Capper. Where do I begin? He is a very recognisable face in the SEO community, a regular speaker on the conference circuit, and he's known both for his data-driven research and for challenging the SEO status quo. We've caught him hot off the back of MozCon New York, so please give him a warm welcome in the chat. I am going to hand over to Tom now.

Tom Capper: Thank you very much for the lovely introduction. So, yeah — for those asking in the chat, Moz has an office in London that we share with some of our sister companies. And we've recently moved office. So the new one is — I think you might generously say it's a little bit austere at the moment. That will explain to you why it looks like this, and also why it sounds like this. Anyway, let's just say it's a Death Star and crack on. Got a lot to cover today.

Tom Capper: This is what I'm going to cover. I have some fresh data I'm going to share with you. I have some new content that I've been putting together in the last few weeks. But the rough outline is going to look like this. Mainly, the theme for this presentation is the Great Scroll. And when I say the Great Scroll, I don't mean that we are having an impromptu [unclear: possibly "scripture"?] lecture. That would be a little bit cruel. Some people would enjoy that, but probably a minority of the audience are looking forward to an impromptu theology lecture. So what I'm actually talking about is how far down you have to scroll these days to find an organic result. Emma, I'm sorry, but I think you may have clicked the wrong link today. It is what it is. Stay — I think you'll enjoy it.

Tom Capper: Then I'm going to talk about what I think it means for SEO. Both tactically in the short term, and also sort of philosophically, which might be more on Emma's radar. There's an irony here, which is that I'm on this webinar representing STAT, which is Moz's enterprise rank tracking provider — and these days also AI visibility and AI sentiment and all the things that go with that. But we're best known as a rank tracker. And, yeah, I'm here telling you that I don't think rank is enough as a metric anymore. I think that you, and we, and SEOs in general need to go a bit further.

Tom Capper: So, okay, that's maybe not a great start for my longevity of employment, but also for us on this Wednesday afternoon. And I'm going to make it a little bit worse before I make it better. So this is the picture that rank tells us. If we think about our traditional rank tracking data — not including paid; I will talk about paid later, I think that is an important part of this picture — one of the things that I've talked about a lot in the past few years is the percentage of the time that position one goes for traditional organic results. And for a lot of the time I was talking about this — you can see my cursor just about, right? — it was more than 50%. It was, like, 55 to 60% of the time position one, not counting paid, was traditional organic. And then after Google I/O last year, it took a step change, and it took a step change for the worse. And we call that the Great Decoupling. We as an industry call that the Great Decoupling. It's not coming back, in all likelihood.

Tom Capper: What's driving that story? Primarily, it's AI Overviews. So this is the big story of SEO last year, right? AI Overviews, getting more and more common. You all seem to turn up the dial after Google I/O [unclear: possibly "2024 to 2025"?]. So the Great Decoupling is about the SERP. It's about changes on the SERP. It's not about a measurement error in Google Search Console or something like that. It is real. But it's also about a change of the funnel, because suddenly we have to think about what it means to do SEO with a reduced emphasis on clicks — whereas in the past, clicks have been everything. There was a time in the past where your whole funnel could be SEO and your whole funnel could be clicks. Right from top to bottom — you're getting a click on your top-of-funnel page, you're getting a click on a consideration page, you're getting a click on something, and so on and so forth. But the trouble is that right at the top of the funnel — and this has been happening for a long time — the featured snippets appeared in, what, 2013, 2014? Not long after I started my time in SEO. And that's right at the top of the funnel, where the click has been sort of not guaranteed for a long time. Initially, it was just these very critical questions that were no longer driving a click. And if you had a website, as some people did at the time, that was built around the idea of answering these kinds of simple questions, then suddenly your business model was looking a little bit jeopardised.

Tom Capper: And then it started to go further up, and Google started producing widgets. What you've got to remember about a lot of the widgets they were putting out — think about the weather widgets, for example. We all know those very well. Google makes a loss on those, right? It costs Google money to get that data, to present it to you. They don't put any advertisements next to the weather widget. They just provide it for free, and you don't click on anything there. So Google is doing that as a loss leader.

Jojo Furnival: Unfortunately, this is another one of those really, really fun technical issues that we have been experiencing this morning, and I'm just grateful that it's not my end. Although — you didn't come here to listen to me prattle on about nothing in particular. You came here to listen to Tom. So let me just email him to make sure that — no, no, he's disappeared. He's not going to get that, though, is he? Not in time.

Tom Capper: My invitation was used to join this event in another tab. It says —

Jojo Furnival: Tell him you're back. Someone clicked your little link.

Tom Capper: I am back. Someone clicked my link. That's what it said to me. Anyway —

Jojo Furnival: Okay.

Tom Capper: We're back in business. Where was that up to? Oh, yeah. Loss leaders. Could you rustle me up — I — have we now lost Jojo? This is going great. I will attempt to continue. I suspect something weird is happening with the Airmeet backstage links. I don't blame you, Simon, I swear. Okay, we continue.

Tom Capper: Right. So the story we're telling so far, in a very busy fashion — a number of goings and comings — is that even if you rank first, you might not get a click. And that's something that we probably should have been thinking more about for a long time, but we're really having to think about now.

Tom Capper: So the data I'm going to share with you over the next, I guess, twenty minutes or so — this is all just from a customer-facing STAT account. I've tried to make a sort of representative-ish corpus of head terms by using the top terms from 21 different topics in Google Keyword Planner, and then a few modifiers and this kind of thing, to give you a reasonably representative picture across a few verticals. What you'll see as we go through is that this is pretty different vertical to vertical. So that's something you might want to investigate yourself.

Tom Capper: I'm introducing some metrics which — if you've seen me talk recently, you'll have seen me talk about before. But if you haven't seen me talk recently, it might be new to you. I think they're going to become more common in the industry over time, so hopefully they'll become familiar to you. The two metrics are pixel position and pixel height. So, as this is the Sitebulb webinar, I thought we'd go for a Sitebulb theme. I asked, what's the best bulb for a site? And we got this nice AI Overview. But if we were B&Q, then we might be interested in how far down we are beneath this AI Overview. So that would be the pixel position — how far down we are. Then we might also be interested, if we are B&Q, in how tall we are, how large our result is. So that would be the pixel height.

Tom Capper: So we'll start by having a look at desktop. The median number one desktop result is about 1,000 pixels down. You might be sitting there thinking, okay, I don't know what that means, Tom. I need some context. Is that a lot? Is that not a lot? We'll come to that in a second. Hold that thought. And then about 250, 300 pixels further down, we get number two.

Tom Capper: So here's a typical laptop fold. That's the blue line across the middle. I've put that at 800 pixels. We could have a wonderful debate about whether that is the correct number for a typical laptop fold. If you think about it, your laptop is probably these days 1080p, or if it's not, then it'll be DPI-scaled to 1080p. And then you've got the Google title bar at the top, and you've got the Windows thing, or whatever OSX does, across the bottom. So there's about 800 vertical pixels left. And from what I can see, this is now a pretty typical size.

Tom Capper: So what we can take from that is that the typical number one result — more than half of number one results on desktop, or I should say on PC — are below the fold. And then it takes five screens of scrolling to get to what we historically would have called the bottom of the first page. Obviously, the first page is a bit of a nebulous concept these days, because we have continuous scroll — a lot of SERPs. But it's still a lot of screens down to get to, allegedly, one page of traditional organic results.

Tom Capper: If you don't like charts — okay, I can show you this with a visual example. The majority of results, about 60% of results, are worse than the one that I've just put in front of you. So this screenshot is cropped to a typical laptop viewport size, and you can see position one is just — I agree, Patrick, for what it's worth, but I have heard of such people. You see that typical number one is just creeping over the bottom of the default viewport.

Tom Capper: And that's actually an unusually good case these days. Only about 40% of the time do we see something as good — and this isn't great — as good as what you see in front of you. So I did warn you that there would be some doom and gloom, right? But it's going to get better as we go. Well, it'll get worse first, actually, and then it'll get better.

Tom Capper: Okay. So if we're talking about the typical, we could also talk about the best-case scenario, right? In about the best 10% of cases, you do actually get one whole result that's above the fold. Wow. One whole result. And then position two sneaking its way over. It is actually possible that there is room to put about four and a half organic results above the fold. You see this less than 1% of the time — basically never. If you were to go back far enough, you would see that the majority of the time, you'd see five traditional organic results above the fold.

Tom Capper: But if we talk about best case, we can talk about worst case. And there are plenty of cases out there where you go through two whole screens of scrolling just to find position one. That's what this looks like. So about one in five desktop SERPs look worse than this example. This is an example I've used before, because I think it's kind of remarkable. The search term here — this is in the UK — is "compare desks". And if you're Secretlab — so Secretlab is a vendor, an OEM of desks — they're ranking position one with a category page with the title tag "compare desks". So that's kind of a big win, right? Doing great. Their SEO team should pat themselves on the back. Except no, because they're, like — what — 2,000 pixels down just to get to that position one result? It almost, as Simon says in the chat, almost wasn't worth trying in this example. And one in five actually looked worse. One in five desktop searches are worse than this. So this is the kind of situation we find ourselves in, even if you're ranking position one.

Tom Capper: So that was all about desktop, or laptop — kind of the same thing these days. Smartphone is a bit worse. Smartphone results are lower than desktop at every rank, and it's even worse — because if you were to hold up your devices in front of you right now, you'd probably notice that your smartphone is smaller than your laptop. Okay. Still not getting any happier.

Tom Capper: What's interesting is that if I'd given you this information only, what, three months ago in April — before Google I/O, even the day before Google I/O, actually — I'd have told you a slightly less murky story. There's been a march into — just like in 2025 after Google I/O, we saw this big change where AI Overviews became suddenly more common, and we all had a bad time. We've seen something similar this year, where everything has shifted down. I think this is an underreported story in the SEO industry right now. Everything has shifted down after Google I/O this year. And what's actually driving this is that paid results have gotten bigger. Not more common or more numerous, but bigger.

Tom Capper: Same story on smartphone, although a little bit less pronounced, if we were to compare the two.

Tom Capper: "Hope has left the room." That's a good take. But I'll try and build it back. I'll try and explain why I don't think this is actually full despair. This is not "SEO is dead".

Tom Capper: So you've probably been seeing stats like this. This is from last year, or late last year, showing that even after the Great Decoupling, Google's outbound traffic was roughly stable. This is a similar story from [unclear: data provider name?], also using clickstream data. And this is some stats from [unclear: source name?] showing that Google itself is going nowhere. So Google is still there, still dominant, still sending as much outbound traffic as it ever was. And yet we have this sort of murky picture in front of us. So what gives?

Tom Capper: This contradiction is also not necessarily new. This is a blog post which is still live, that my friend and colleague Dr. Pete wrote. And you'll notice that he wrote it in 2013 — just after my 20th birthday, this blog post was written. And at the time, he was looking at a few extreme examples, which I think we would look at now and say are quite typical. They look more like a median SERP now, whereas at the time, they looked like an extreme outlier, and he was very concerned. But my point is, just like I was saying earlier with featured snippets and weather results and this kind of thing, this story has been around for a long time. The SEO industry is suddenly forced to reckon with it, but this isn't actually new.

Tom Capper: I think the pixel metrics I've been showing you are one way of explaining some of these contradictions, and also how we can look at them a bit differently and maybe adopt a different mindset.

Tom Capper: Now there's another elephant in the room, which is AI Mode. Google has always adopted these different use cases, and you now increasingly see search — I don't know if you noticed this yourself — if you write a long-tail query and interact with the AI Overview, you're basically straight into AI Mode. The line between them has become very blurred. That doesn't mean AI Mode is going to replace search for every use case, though. It's just like the weather results. No one was clicking on the stuff beneath that weather widget, right — or probably 1% of sessions or something. This is just like that. There are a certain set of use cases which Google has decided no longer merit a click. And that's kind of what all of this shares. The whole story that I've been telling across this is that fewer organic clicks is a theme that we're having to deal with.

Tom Capper: What I'd like to encourage you to do is to think about other outcomes from a SERP. So let's go on a brief side quest into a story about brand and Google Search. I have long been an advocate — this blog post is from 2019 — I've long been an advocate of impressions as a metric that SEOs sort of take for granted, and we took it for granted for a long time. Because we had better — because we had clicks, and because they had end-to-end attribution. But at the same time, there were whole industries that existed just to drive impressions.

Tom Capper: Top-of-funnel marketing, traditionally, doesn't have to involve a storefront interaction, right? If I put up a billboard, I'm not expecting to immediately get a phone call from the person that saw it. And the team that puts up billboards for your company, or runs TV advertisements, or does traditional PR in newspapers — this team probably has a bigger budget than the SEO team. In a lot of big companies, that'll be the case. And this is kind of the story that they're getting a lot of pushback on, and maybe rightly so — this is kind of the story that Google is trying to tell as well. That maybe you will still get a click, but it's going to arrive further down the funnel, and it's going to be harder to trace the path. Attribution is the big victim here. Not SEO.

Tom Capper: Also, if you want to be old-school about this — for a long time, if I'd said that impressions were good for rankings, I would have been the sort of tinfoil-hat enjoyer. But these days, we know this is true. We know that, indirectly, via NavBoost, Google is saying that if you are a recognised brand that people are used to seeing, you will get promoted in the re-ranking. That's not the kind of build I had in mind, Patrick, but I suppose — so, yes, it probably does rank better for some things because of this.

Tom Capper: I put out this study in 2017 — nine years ago. Again, this is a long story. I put out this study saying that some brand metrics predicted rankings for the most contested ranking spots better than Domain Authority. And this is a bit awkward, because at the time, I wasn't responsible for Domain Authority, whereas I am now. So I was undermining my future self. But what I can say now, in 2026, is that if I rerun the same study, Domain Authority has gotten a bit better. Domain Authority is a better predictor of rankings than it was in 2017 for the most contested terms. And we kind of know that — that's what you've seen with the Helpful Content Update and this kind of thing, where a lot of smaller sites have gotten heavily punished, right? Just for the crime of being a small site. But brand has become a slam dunk. Brand has become an incredibly strong predictor of rankings, right?

Tom Capper: Back to the story about what we actually see in the SERP. Yeah, for some reason, I'm very good at [unclear: possibly "lulling"?] toddlers to sleep, Jojo. Who'd have thought? Simon, can I interest you, perhaps, in some guest posts? Very high DA, for sure. Right. Anyway, this is the example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. On the left, we have a position one result. On the right, we have a position one result. I think we'd agree that these were not made equal. There's a few ways in which they're not equal. One is, obviously, how far down we are on the right. But the other thing is how much more visually striking the result is on the left. If your goal was just to be recognised as a brand, and you were thinking about this from a visual perspective, you've got extra reasons to pick the one on the left. But you might also be looking at this and thinking, hang on — on the left, we've got an informational SERP, and on the right, we've got a commercial SERP. Maybe that's part of the story here. Kind of.

Tom Capper: As a reminder, traditionally in search, we've talked about a funnel that looks something like this. You've got your informational queries, and then you go down the funnel. And then, post-conversion, you might have your navigational queries. So you might be thinking that this explains the story I'm telling about the degradation of position one. Not really.

Tom Capper: Navigational does stand out, and this makes sense, right? For a navigational query, by definition, the user is looking to click on a link. So, yes, position one is higher for navigational queries. Not as high as you might hope, and a big part of the reason for that is that a lot of brands bid on their own brand terms. So that actually pushes down position one for their own brand terms. But the other three stages in the funnel have kind of a similar shape.

Tom Capper: In informational, though, we see AI Overviews dominating. And what you'll see as I go through these is different kinds of SERPs. The story is the same, in that the organic is being pushed further and further down, but the story is different in terms of what is doing that, and what it would take for you, as a brand, to appear above organic if you wanted to. So in informational, we kind of know the story, right? It's AI Overviews. Again, we can talk about [unclear: possibly "sitelinks"?] here. Even for informational now, paid is a surprisingly big chunk of the picture.

Tom Capper: So what this pie chart is showing is a share of the above-the-fold pixels that exist for informational queries in the set that I looked at. You see paid has about a third of the above-the-fold pixels even for informational queries. But if we look at what's in the rest of the space, we've got AI Overviews, Knowledge Graph, images — these are very visual result types. And if we look back and remind ourselves — oh, it says I can't click back. Maybe we won't, in fact, look back and remind ourselves. No, we will.

Tom Capper: We've also got videos coming in here. And if I scroll down further on this SERP, you would also see organic results that had images and videos attached to them. So the picture we have is a very visual SERP for a lot of these informational queries these days, and you might be as well placed to invest in your imagery as your copy, or something like that.

Tom Capper: There's a complicating factor here, which is that, even though I'm saying, okay, AI Overviews have, like, a quarter of the above-the-fold space, and then maybe organic plus images plus some other things combined have a similar share — again, they're not made equal. Because although they might be getting a similar share of the above-the-fold space, they're always appearing in a certain order as well. So we normally see AI Overviews pretty close to the top. It is possible to rank above an AI Overview, but it's not common. You'll also notice that not many AI Overviews actually touch the top of the SERP, even when they are in position one. That's because Google sometimes puts a lot of padding on them. I don't know why that is. That's up to them.

Tom Capper: Featured snippets — they don't have the padding thing. They are pinned right to the top. But featured snippets are pretty rare these days. Something like 2% of SERPs have a featured snippet. But organic — even when organic is above the fold, it's sort of only just. So it's already at a disadvantage here.

Tom Capper: For commercial, it's a different picture, and we have these product-feed-based results that dominate. And, yeah — paid. Paid is a product-feed-based result, in a sense, for a lot of these commercial queries. But this is a pretty stark picture, right? And this is pretty different to if I'd shown you this only a few months ago. So my guess is that Google — because they're putting AI Overviews on so many results — they're effectively demonetising large swaths of search. They're making it up in examples like this.

Tom Capper: So, as I say, a lot of this is not necessarily just about feature placement, but also feature size. It's how big some of these result types are. And shopping and AI Overviews — they can be very large results.

Tom Capper: Which brings me to opportunities. So I said there would be a positive story here, and I still haven't really delivered on that — apart from telling you that maybe you should think about yourself as more of a visual brand channel. Even in organic, it's possible to have pretty big, pretty visual, pretty noticeable results. And what you'll notice is that these types of results are ones that add — effectively — rich snippets. That add more than just your template links. This was always an opportunity to improve your CTR or whatever, but if you're thinking about search in this visual way, then this becomes even more important, and maybe more important than ranking per se. I'll show some examples of that later. But you can see in this case, on the right as well, that this is an organic result which is above the AI Overview that cited it. And that can happen.

Tom Capper: How bad the picture is for organic varies dramatically by vertical, which is why I say you should really look at this with your own keywords and your own data. I really appreciate this might be small on your screens, but you can see home and garden on the left. The median position one on smartphone is, like, three screens of scrolling down, because there are so many of these product features and this kind of thing. Whereas in retail, on the right, organic actually ends up pretty far up.

Tom Capper: If we look at the verticals with the lowest organic visibility — sorry — again, we have this story that, although organic is being pushed down in all these cases, what is pushing organic down varies. So for home and garden, it's popular products, in yellow. For arts and entertainment, it's the Knowledge Graph, in green. For dining and nightlife, it's Local Packs, in orange. So how you appear above your own organic is, I think, a question you should be asking now. But the answer is going to vary a lot depending on your keywords and who you are. And in some of them, it's more stark than others, right? If you're in dining and nightlife, saying, oh no, organic is being pushed down — but what's above it is Local Packs. Okay, great. Local Packs are something you can influence. This is not a disaster for you. But if you're in arts and entertainment, and what's appearing above you is Knowledge Graph, you're saying, oh, that's actually not great. Knowledge Graphs do not represent that much of an opportunity. What is my strategy now, right? Do I need to think of this channel in a different way?

Tom Capper: And what are some of the choices you might make? What if we prioritised by size? What do I mean by that? Some of the biggest features that I just showed you are winnable. Shopping, AI Overviews, popular products — okay, some of these you're going to win with feeds, which might be the paid team's job, but you should probably be taking an interest in that, to be honest, especially with the ecommerce SERPs coming. Feeds are a new sort of area for a lot of SEOs, because they've left it to other teams in the past. But this is ultimately an organic result type.

Tom Capper: As I said earlier, organic can be big. These are two results from the same SERP. I just scrolled further down to get the right screenshot after getting the left one. And even regardless of the order in which you hit these — obviously, the Virgin Experience one on the left is so much more striking than the Red Letter Days one on the right. And, again, if the whole point of rank — the reason we cared about rank — was because we thought it was correlated with the chance of a click, then surely this is correlated with the chance of a click, and even more so if what we're trying to do is get an impression. Because does the one on the right really leave an impression with you at all? And I realise I'm blurring "impression" the metric and "impression" the marketing jargon, but that's kind of the point I'm making.

Tom Capper: Rich snippets are your route to prioritising size with organic. And this data, I will say, is quite volatile in terms of what drives the size of organic results. The bar on the right is fully expanded sitelinks — so that's branded SERPs, basically. So I wouldn't worry too much about that, because you're not going to turn every keyword into a branded SERP. But you can see that you can be more than a third larger in your result type if you, for example, manage to get a video added to your organic result. Or roughly the same with just one-line sitelinks, if there are other related pages on your site. So there's all these things you can think about.

Tom Capper: And you might start to prioritise different things. You might start to focus less on things that are just about gaining more rankings, more keywords — because the old model said that was more clicks — and more about other things.

Tom Capper: I've used this example before, but I really like it, so I'm going to use it again. Does this really count as one? Right? This example on the left, with Brex Flowers. Okay, this is a branded SERP, an extreme example. Your rank tracker tells you, probably, that Brex has one rank on this SERP. But even if Trustpilot was above them, you would rather be Brex, right? The size would be more important than the rank.

Tom Capper: This affects how we should think about paid as well. Here's another example. Imagine you're Royal Caribbean. Which of these is a bigger opportunity? Would you rather gain this position one ranking on the right, or would you rather gain this position two ranking on the left? Obviously, the position two, right? But if you only look at rank, you'd never make that decision.

Tom Capper: So where do we go from here? We should go by impressions. I talked about that. It doesn't have to be a high click — we're in this world where we need to think of ourselves more like these older teams. These billboards that I've been alluding to also don't generate attributable clicks. What you can say about them is that size matters, right? That we care about whether a billboard is big or small if we're buying billboards. I already covered that.

Tom Capper: But there's also a way this applies to how we should think about AI, because GEO is also a channel that is very unlikely to generate a click. If I'm saying that visibility is how we think about SEO, then it's even more true in GEO. That does mean we shouldn't overfocus on citations. Let me show you what I mean. Here is an example of a rather esoteric Google AI Mode query. Now, you can see that there is a site that is cited, and you can see that there is a brand that is mentioned. If you're Audi, you for sure consider this a success, right? Audi is not cited in this query. Even if I were to expand it, they're not one of the cited sites for this query, which means they're not going to get a click. And yet this is pretty much the best possible result for Audi for a query like this. Every single vehicle mentioned is an Audi.

Tom Capper: We shouldn't be going about GEO in a way that is prioritising gaining referral traffic. And I know there's been this story recently — so, you know, a year ago, ChatGPT referral traffic halved. And then, more recently, it doubled. But if you're a mathematical genius, you might be able to — or even if you're not a mathematical genius, you might be able to point out that if something halved and then doubled, and it was very small to start with, it's still very small. And that's kind of where we are with this. So even now, ChatGPT is a low single digit of site traffic. This just isn't a traffic-driving channel. It is not a replacement for the old model of SEO — it's a complement for the new model of SEO.

Tom Capper: Citations are important information, but they are tactical information. This is what should inform your GEO strategy. And this is a bit of a side note, it's not really what I'm talking about today, but the biggest way that GEO is different from SEO tactically is that you're going to primarily do it on other people's websites. And that's something the SEO industry has to grapple with. But citations are important tactical information for that — they're not a KPI, because you're not trying to get clicks. Presence is the metric you would look at instead. Maybe sentiment, although I will say this is complicated.

Tom Capper: So where are we at? You go about signalling your brand — obviously, that's what we've always been doing all along. But in AI, that means you're talking about mentions. About being part of the conversation. In SEO, it might well be the same. I'm not saying that SEO's performance-marketing channel is gone or is dead. I'm saying we probably should have been thinking about it in other ways as well, for longer than we have been. I think share of visibility — you know, this isn't a hard number, but this is a sort of approach you could have to reconcile these two channels, and also how you're going to talk about them with your C-suite, right?

Tom Capper: Wrapping up. And I have sped up a little bit, because we had some — I don't know — surprises at the start. So the SERPs have changed. It's not coming back. You're not going to have your traditional template links — we're certainly not going to have template links above the fold. You care about visibility. You care about presence. These are things you can answer, that you can measure. So you can see your own pixels. If you would like to find out more about this, or to have a go yourself, you can either get in touch with me directly or with one of my colleagues. I would love you to do so. For now, though, we are going to have some Q&A — pending possible technical difficulties.

Jojo Furnival: I don't know what you mean. Everything has gone off without a hitch. Surprises? No. Thank you so much. Thank you for persevering. We got there in the end. I'm so sorry to everybody watching for the [expletive] technical issues. Right. Let's get stuck into some questions. We've got a few, and I have some as well.

Jojo Furnival: Let me show this on stage. This is from the wonderful Laura: "You speak a lot about the SERP UI, which I have been monitoring for fun. But now I find it too cluttered and a bit of an info/pixel overdose for the user. Any ideas on how to clean it up a little?"

Tom Capper: What a nerd.

Jojo Furnival: Yeah, I know, right?

Tom Capper: So the question is about how Google should clean up the SERP. Am I reading that right?

Jojo Furnival: That's kind of how it reads. That's kind of how I understand it. Maybe just — what would you do?

Tom Capper: I've seen Google themselves talk about this. Not super recently, but last year. I was trying to remember who at Google it was — it might have been Gary. Someone at Google was talking about this, and I have noticed in our own data that they have sort of retired or marginalised some of these features. At one point I think we were up to something like 120 features tracked in STAT, and we're now down to about 100 that have meaningful presence. So I think this is something Google is thinking about. And especially — there was a period where you could get, like, an AI Overview, a featured snippet, a knowledge panel, an organic result with FAQs attached — and it was just the same answer presented with four different wordings. It was a bit of a mess. So I think they have taken steps in the right direction. Well, maybe it's the wrong direction from a traditional SEO point of view.

Tom Capper: I think it's interesting with AI Mode that there are far fewer features. So I wonder if we'll see — even though I don't think what AI Mode looks like now is the end state — 1,000 words of text isn't where we're headed for every result type — I wonder if we will see further simplification. My biggest gripe personally is just the word count for a typical answer. Even in the cases where I want an AI Mode answer, I don't necessarily want to read three paragraphs of text to get it, right?

Tom Capper: And I don't know — I'm not the right person to comment. Maybe I should talk to a machine-learning specialist or something like that, in terms of how the models could be pushed towards delivering a more succinct answer. But I think the picture-heavy side as well — the thing where search is looking more and more like a Google Discover feed or Instagram feed or something like this — that's been a trend we've seen over a long time, and my suspicion is it's not going away. Although — maybe I would like it to.

Jojo Furnival: Okay. Alright, cool. Yeah, it's kind of what you said about AI Mode or AI Overviews — it's such a long answer. It's like, bring back the featured snippet, almost.

Tom Capper: Kind of.

Jojo Furnival: At least that was nice and short. Anyway, righty-ho. So Splendid Simon says: "Everything is in a lot of flux at the moment with SERPs. What's the long-term strategy? Sit back and wait, or test to death?" I feel like that depends on how much energy you've got.

Tom Capper: I mean, I don't recommend death. That would be an unfortunate takeaway. But it's always both, right? In SEO, we know there's going to be change. And we have to think about where things are going, which is kind of what I'm pushing towards in this presentation and in this overview — that, clearly, the way we're going is fewer clicks. We're not going to rewind and go back to more clicks; it seems very unlikely. So the role of SEO in your channel mix is changing. And that's kind of what you should be thinking about.

Tom Capper: But at the same time, we're not all the way there yet. And I don't think we'll be all the way there anytime soon. I don't — people are talking about zero-click. Not just zero-click search, but zero-click SEO, as in every search becoming zero-click. I think we're a long way from that. There are still so many reasons that people — and indeed agents, although that's a whole tangent — want to go to websites. So I think you kind of have to optimise for both. You have to think about what the long-term reality is, but you also can't ignore the present day. I've had conversations with people in the last couple of years where they're saying, oh yeah, I've completely abandoned traditional SEO, and I only care about my presence in AI answers. And I think that's leaving a lot on the table, because there's a lot of money you could be making this year, and next year, and the year after, based on traditional SEO. And in any case, that's going to underpin the future in some sense.

Jojo Furnival: Yeah.

Tom Capper: Anyway. So — yeah. I'm happy to answer, but I think it's both. At least I didn't say "it depends".

Jojo Furnival: Yeah, that was the really long version of "it depends". So in that case — and this was the question I was going to ask you, if I had the chance, but Patrick has gotten there before me. Will SEO become only a brand channel?

Tom Capper: No, I don't think so. In the far future, or whatever, it's hard to say. But I think things change gradually. Maybe if we were able to peek into the future and see SEO fifteen years from now, and it turns out that a lot of the organic activity, or the organic performance-marketing activity, is around feeds or something like that, then we might say, oh wow, that barely resembles SEO. Therefore, SEO is only a brand channel. That would be the strongest devil's-advocate argument I can make.

Jojo Furnival: Mhmm.

Tom Capper: But personally, I think even that is far-fetched, and even that is SEO. So, no. I think what's changing is that we have thought about SEO — we, as in SEOs, including me — we've thought about SEO for a long time as overwhelmingly a performance channel. And now it's more of a fifty-fifty kind of thing. And we kind of have to get on board with that.

Jojo Furnival: I go along with that, 100%. Not that anyone cares what I think. Right, let me show this on stage. So this is from Sally: "Do you have any recommendations for tracking pixel position en masse — i.e., across keywords/product groups or categories?"

Tom Capper: And this feels like I paid for this question to be asked — although I didn't, because that's what our tool does. I suppose I should say, for the benefit of transparency, that there are other tools in the market that do similar things. But, yeah, a good rank tracker will give you this data.

Jojo Furnival: Okay, there we go. This is another one from Laura, an interesting one: "I'm curious, in your experience, which SERP feature has the most weight at the moment? Has that changed since worldwide adoption of AI Overviews and AI Mode?"

Tom Capper: "Weight" as in —

Jojo Furnival: I guess, like, priority — like, number one rank, almost.

Tom Capper: I'm taking this to be, sort of, what's the feature that is most pushing around the rest of the SERP, that is both common and big and —

Jojo Furnival: Okay.

Tom Capper: here to stay.

Jojo Furnival: Yeah, that makes sense.

Tom Capper: And if AI Overviews count as a feature, which I think they do, then it is definitely still them. But I do think, at the same time — like I said in the presentation — paid is definitely not a feature, right? And paid results come in various types. But I think these product carousels, or sponsored product carousels, that we have seen for a long time — they are getting more common. They are getting bigger. And I think if you're based in the US, then you've probably been saying this for a couple of years, because this was a big thing in the US. It's only in the last year or so that UK ecommerce SERPs started to look like this, and they're still not as extreme as the American ones. If you put your VPN on and search some ecommerce terms in the US, it's like you're looking at a [unclear: possibly "a fever dream"?] on Amazon, honestly. It's pretty extreme. We're not quite there, but I think it's the direction we're going. So, yes, I think sponsored products is the sort of black sheep, even though it's not really a set feature — or, traditionally, we wouldn't have called it one, because it's paid.

Tom Capper: But besides that — I expected AI Overviews to be replaced with some kind of dynamic, depending-what-you-search, you-go-straight-to-AI-Mode kind of thing at Google I/O. That isn't what happened. Or maybe with Web Guides — Web Guides are pretty cool, and they've been in beta for, like, a year. What happened to those? Did Google sort of get cold feet on this, maybe? So I wish the answer wasn't AI Overviews, but it's AI Overviews.

Jojo Furnival: Okay. Kathy asks: "Is there a strategy that would work for obtaining real estate for multiple SERP types? Can you think of a decent example?"

Tom Capper: Yeah, in the same way that your organic strategy probably applied to multiple SERP types — perhaps with the same pages, or the same content hubs, or whatever it might be. But the biggest simple tactical changes that I could give you — and I know you asked for a strategy, and I'm going to give you tactics instead; I work in SEO, I can't help it. The biggest simple things that would probably be different to what you would do otherwise would be that you would emphasise structured data that is linked to rich results, you would emphasise producing your own imagery and videos, and you would — I hate to say it — probably go and have a chat with the PPC team.

Jojo Furnival: Surely not.

Tom Capper: And these are things that might spread across — they will help you across a lot of different SERP types, if — and I think maybe it should be "if" — your goal is to be more visible and more recognisable on the SERP.

Jojo Furnival: Okay.

Tom Capper: And also in AI results, to be fair.

Jojo Furnival: So that would be your tactical answer. How might an SEO team think about adopting a more visibility-focused mindset?

Tom Capper: I think the SEO team adopting it is, in some ways, the easy part. The hard part is persuading your C-level, when you spent the last fifteen years saying, "Hey, look, all you should care about is clicks. Those other channels don't deliver clicks, and I do." Now you're saying, "Actually, I was wrong all along. And what you're doing is delivering more impressions than the channels that deliver impressions — but that you told them not to care about."

Tom Capper: So I think this is the hard conversation — it is to go and have a chat with your board and recant everything you said before. And how best to approach that is going to vary a lot depending on what your board's like, what your CMO's like, where you are in that picture. Getting the SEO team — and, as I say, it's a balance, it's not like you're throwing the old stuff completely out the window — but getting your SEO team to adopt this is probably easier. There might well be a team in your organisation, depending on the size of your organisation, that is already interested in brand positioning and brand marketing and brand awareness as their main thing. You probably need to get them onside as well, right, if you're going to go up and say that you need a piece of that lunch.

Jojo Furnival: So this sounds like the concept of — I was having a big old chat with Myriam Jessier the other day, and they sort of brought up the concept of technical branding. So I was talking about branding, and Myriam was like, you know, you need to have somebody within the business — a role within the business — that is thinking about branding, but from that AI and technical perspective. Rather than — unlike maybe the brand team, that doesn't care, or doesn't want to get involved with that. So maybe — you know, we love a new term in the SEO world, so maybe "technical branding" is what we're going to talk about now. Yeah, there's some good stuff in the chat. I think Simon said "SEO as webmasters". Emma says —

Tom Capper: I think the exciting thing, I guess, is that for a long time, SEOs have been the people that have ended up owning quite a disparate range of activities, right? If you are, or have worked as, an SEO consultant or a freelancer, or maybe you've just had many jobs — if you think about the organisations in which you've known the SEO team, in how many cases did they own the Google Analytics installation? It's probably like 80%, right? 80% of SEO teams own their Google Analytics installation. Why is that? That's nothing to do with SEO, right? SEOs are just sort of the random owners of outside-the-box technical problems in a lot of organisations. That isn't the definition of SEO, to be clear — I'm not proposing that. But we are quite well placed in terms of the skill set we have built, and the cross-functional basis that we have — with more or less success — tried to build. We are quite well placed to walk in and say, actually, we are the right people to meet this moment. But it definitely overlaps with other parts of your organisation more than, in most cases, you probably have done in the past.

Jojo Furnival: I feel so seen. And Laura said, "Every single time, in my experience, and I don't mind it at all. Love it, actually." So there we go. It's not beating the nerd allegations. I think we are going to call it a day now. Thank you so much, Tom. Thank you, everybody, for joining us and for persisting through the nightmare. Our next webinar is with the equally awesome Jono Alderson. Oh my goodness. And that's in August, so keep your eyes peeled for that. Hope to see you then. Bye.

The speakers

Tom Capper leads the Search Science team at Moz, where he researches the trends and data that inform Moz's products and content. He's been a fixture on the SEO conference circuit for years — BrightonSEO regulars will know him well — and his work consistently leans into quantitative research over received wisdom.