Dark SEO

Search has entered the dark funnel

Three months ago, I told you I was watching two metrics closely: clicks and impressions from organic search.

Since then, clicks haven’t moved much. And in some months, they’ve actually declined.

So this naturally led to me questioning myself + asking, “Did we just waste six months and a significant investment with YOYABA?”

But then I looked at the bigger picture relative to our organic growth strategy:

Demo requests have been climbing
Pipeline from organic search was up significantly
Deal values have been increasing

How could that be possible when clicks are flat?

So I’ve been digging into that, trying to understand the behaviors that are driving this. And what I learned after that reflection has me rethinking EVERYTHING I thought I knew about SEO success.

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The search behavior shift few people are talking about

Earlier this year, Google launched AI Mode more broadly in the US. If you haven’t used it yet, here’s the tl;dr: instead of Google listing out places for you to get your answer from by going to those websites, it now surfaces the answer directly at the top for you without having to leave the results page.

You search for something. Google reads multiple sources and synthesizes an answer on the search results page. No click needed. No website visit required.

Early studies are showing that CTRs in AI Mode are near 0%. (Source: Semrush early data)

Not “lower than traditional search”
Not “declining gradually”
Near zero. This is WILD in the context of legacy SEO.

For marketers who’ve spent the last two decades optimizing for clicks, this is the type of thing that keeps them up at night. It’s why we’re hearing the “SEO is dead” narrative everywhere.

But here’s the thing. Remember when we were talking about Goodhart’s Law a few months ago? “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Legacy SEO metrics went from measures to targets. And they were correlated well enough to outcomes that they worked. Until now.

And this is why we’re seeing the big shake up here. Impressions, clicks, etc. are quickly losing their correlation strength to outcomes with more “untrackable” behavior going on behind the scenes now. And this is exactly what we saw with “zero-click content” and dark social a handful of years ago.

What we’re actually seeing

Since AI Mode launched, here’s what’s happened in my world:

Unbranded clicks (people clicking through from searches like “best ATS software”): more or less stagnant

Unbranded impressions (how many times we’re appearing in search results or AI responses): increasing significantly, with some months seeing triple-digit year-over-year growth

Brand search volume: up 23% from June to September

Organic demo requests: climbing double-digits year-over-year

Pipeline value from search: growing at more than 2x that rate compared to the same period last year”

In September alone, we tracked double-digit deals that were sourced directly from AI-driven channels.

Read that again. Clicks aren’t moving. Traffic is flat. But visibility is skyrocketing + revenue is climbing.

The disconnect is real + it’s forcing us to ask a tough new question: what if clicks don’t matter moving forward in search?

Connecting the invisible dots

Going a level deeper from the above, here’s an example of the journey we’re seeing play out:

1. A user searches for something unbranded like “best ATS for recruitment agencies”

2. Google’s AI Mode surfaces an answer and mentions us as a solution

3. The user does NOT click through, but they remember our name

4. Minutes, hours, days, or weeks later, they search “Loxo” directly or go straight to our website

5. They click the branded result, land on our homepage, and request a demo

The magic happens in step 3. They got value from the AI response. They didn’t need to click to learn about us. But we earned mental real estate.

Sounds a bit like what we discovered a few years ago with dark social + demand gen campaigns where we realized not every ad had to have a CTA to get a demo, not every post had to drive to a landing page.

Back in Part 1, I wrote about how SEO was moving into unmeasurable territory, similar to what happened with zero-click content on social media in the early 2020s. Now we have proof.

Visibility creates brand recall without any click.

Every time we appear in an AI Overview or AI Mode response, we’re getting a brand impression. These impressions compound. They build awareness + eventually they drive action - just not through the traditional “search → click → convert” path.

The person searching remembers us when it’s time to actually evaluate. They search our name directly. They come to our site with intent + they convert at higher rates because they’ve already been introduced to us through that initial unbranded exposure.

This is why brand search volume has become a more prominent leading indicator for us. This is why our pipeline is growing despite flat unbranded clicks.

Rethinking metrics

With this shift in behavior, it’s made me rethink the metrics, KPIs, and goals relative to SEO/AEO.

What I’m putting less weight behind:

• CTR as a primary success metric (or at least, unbranded CTR)

• Click traffic directly from SEO

• Click-to-conversion attribution models

What I’m putting more weight behind:

• AI visibility + citations

• Brand search volume trends

• Brand lift measurement over time

• Self-reported attribution citing things like “web research” or “ChatGPT”

I’ll be honest - putting less weight behind clicks feels weird/wrong. It goes against decades of SEO muscle memory. The new truth I’ve come to realize is that our VERY best SEO work might never generate a click. And that’s ok.

Just like on social, we’re optimizing for memorability - being the name people remember when they have a need. And when that need comes to a head, they come straight to us.

What this means for SEO strategy

So what do we actually do with this information? Here are 5 tactical shifts we’ve started:

1. Measure differently
Stop looking at clicks in isolation as there’s more to the story now. Start tracking AI mentions, AI Overviews appearances, + how often your brand shows up in synthesized responses. Tools like Semrush + peec.ai are building AIO ranking trackers for this exact reason.

2. Optimize for being cited
Structure your content to be quotable and citable. Think about how an AI would summarize your page. Provide clear, authoritative answers that can be extracted and referenced.

3. Use brand search as a leading indicator
Unbranded visibility leads to brand searches in this new era. Brand searches lead to conversions. If you’re seeing brand search volume increase, your SEO is most likely working, even if unbranded clicks are flat. It won’t be a 1:1 correlation as there are other variables at play, but this is where you can always do incrementality testing if you need to “prove” it.

4. Update your reporting
Show stakeholders the full journey. Reporting out solely on traditional SEO metrics like impressions, clicks, CTRs, and conversion rates doesn’t paint the full picture anymore. Zoom out and look at the broader impact to your GTM ecosystem.

5. Don’t panic about declining CTR
This is a “feature” of AI Mode, not a “bug” in your strategy. If impressions are growing + your brand searches are increasing, you’re on the right track. We’re simply extending the journey out longer now.

The YOYABA partnership vindication

Remember back in Part 1 when I walked you through our agency evaluation process and why we chose YOYABA?

This is why.

They saw this shift coming with what was happening already with LLMs + they helped us adapt as soon as this came to Google.

They weren’t optimizing just for clicks + rankings. They were optimizing for visibility AND memorability. They helped us build our content strategy that would make us the answer people remember based on how we’d show up in these new types of results.

The six-month investment has paid off in ways that traditional attribution would completely miss. If I only looked at click-based metrics, I’d think we wasted money. But when I zoom out + look at things like our brand search lift, demo requests, pipeline generated, and revenue won, the ROI is probably an absurd number where YOYABA would probably say they were undercharging us 😂.

This is the value of working with people + agencies who possess growth mindsets.

They understand the marketing world is constantly evolving
They understand that adaptation is where brands win over the long term
They understand that strategies, tactics, and measurement needs to shift with this

Visibility has always mattered more than clicks. We just had the luxury of using clicks as a proxy for visibility. But that luxury is gone now.

Time to take the guiding principles we learned from dark social + apply those over to the world of search.

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See you next Saturday,
Sam

P.S This is part 6 of my SEO series as I share in real-time what I’m learning + what we’re seeing as we continue to push harder into the world of SEO here at Loxo. In case you missed the earlier editions:
Part 1: SEO isn’t dead
Part 2: They told me “no”
Part 3: “Is it working?”
Part 4: The “Alligator Effect”
Part 5: We cut our best keywords