The "Alligator Effect"

No, not talking about a sequel from Ashton Kutcher

Since Google rolled out AI Overviews, something interesting has been happening on the SEO side of things.

Brands are seeing their impressions hold steady (or even grow), but clicks? Yeah that former strong positive correlation has definitely weakened. It used to be dependable to the point where you could calculate something like “for every 1000 impressions, we’ll get 30 clicks, and for every 30 clicks, we’ll get 1 conversion.”

Now? I couldn’t even pretend to give you a formula. The gap is significantly widening between impressions and clicks. For some, clicks are still growing, just not at the same pace as impressions. For others, clicks are actually declining.

And that’s what gives us the name + topic of today’s newsletter: “The Alligator Effect” as the performance chart for this literally lookslike an alligator's mouth opening wider and wider.

This is part 4 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: They told me “no”
Part 2: SEO isn’t dead
Part 3: “Is it working?”

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Sponsor: HockeyStack

Your CEO just slacked you: "We have our board meeting in 2 days. Send me a slide with what's working + anything they need to know."

Did your palms get sweaty reading that?
Or is this an easy ask because you can easily get to this info already?

I'm neurotic about forecasting + tracking performance. I have reports upon reports and dashboards upon dashboards.

So when Emir over at HockeyStack asked me what my perfect dashboard would look like, I immediately started geeking out. And when they sent this dashboard mock-up back to me, I was in nerd heaven 🙌

July just wrapped up. And it's also never too late to add some solid reports or views to your dashboard, so hopefully this provides some inspiration to any of you who are looking to level up your dashboarding game.

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What does “the alligator effect” mean for SEO?

Between Feb + March of this year, AI overviews DOUBLED in the US. More specific to us in SaaS, a study from TripleDart saw LLM traffic shoot up from ~15% in Q1 2025 to 47% in April 2025.

TripleDart study

But here's the thing - that traffic spike doesn't mean what you'd expect it to mean.

Since AI overviews have rolled out, overall clicks have dropped nearly 60%, but search impressions have jumped by about 20%. Hence, “alligator effect”.

For us in B2B SaaS, it’s exaggerated even more as AI overviews are showing up nearly 70% of the time. So if these overviews are showing up even more in our world, that means the “traditional SEO metrics” of clicks and conversions from SEO articles are probably impacted even more than the datapoints shared above.

When we see signals like this, we have a choice:

We can continue to do things the way we always have
OR
We can adapt and get comfortable being uncomfortable navigating this new world of search behavior

We’re going with the latter.

The new playbook

Rank high. Get traffic. Convert users.

That’s been the textbook SEO play since the late 2000s. It worked. It was repeatable. It was dependable.

Or at least it was until this wild world of AI came in and shook things up.

The new playbook?

Get mentioned. Build awareness and credibility. Make the mental “shortlist”.

(Sounds a bit like the journey we went on in the early 2020s with demand generation, doesn’t it 😉)

Many of us know how this movie plays out when it’s adopted + implemented, so that’s why I love that this is the direction that our SEO agency, YOYABA, has been pushing us in. They’re the yin to our yang as we have the paid demand gen side down + now they’re bringing that same philosophy to our SEO/GEO side.

How do we know what’s good/bad?

That’s the big question that many are asking right now. If the traditional SEO playbook is out the window now, how do we know if our efforts are working?

Impressions?
Traffic?
UTMs?
Self-reported attribution?
Something else?

The bad news? It’s not as simple as the SEO 1.0 metrics of “page rank, organic traffic, lead source = organic”.

The good news? There are things we can look at to answer this.

I’m by no means an expert here (and this is why I love our weekly chats with Oliver and Gvido at YOYABA), so after working through our definition of success (business growth), here’s what we’ve landed on:

• Nonbranded impressions (are we showing up more for the queries we’re focused on?)

• Nonbranded clicks (are we getting more traffic from these queries, even if it’s not at the same growth rate as impressions?)

• Branded impressions (are we getting mentioned more often in AI overviews and LLMs?)

• Branded clicks (same as with Nonbranded clicks, are we getting more traffic from these queries, even if it’s not at the same growth rate as impressions?)

• Total handraisers (barring other variables, are we seeing a growth in handraisers from our efforts to improve how we show up online?)

  • ^^ THIS IS A BIG ONE. This is the one that has the strongest parallel to what we’ve learned from the shift from lead gen to demand gen over the past 5 years. If we show up successfully in the right places, establish credibility with these users, and build trust with them, we’ll make the mental “short list” so when they do come into market, they come straight to us.

  • We can validate + gather these insights through self-reported attribution, through discovery call questions, and through market surveys.

  • Or, when applied through the lens of our entire GTM ecosystem, not individual channels, you’ll get responses like this from prospects when they finally raise their hand 🤗

    

• Total qualified opportunities (as we bring in more handraisers, this number should increase along with it)

• Conversion rate from handraiser > qualified opportunity (this is the quality control variable that will tell us if the efforts we’re putting in are bringing in more of the right people, or more of the wrong people…)

In conclusion

I'll be honest with you - this transition isn't going to be smooth sailing for everyone.

If you're used to the instant gratification of seeing a blog post rank on page one and watching the leads roll in, this new world is going to feel...hard. More ambiguous. Fewer direct datapoints to confirm if “it’s working.” Harder to tie a neat little bow around for leadership + the board.

But here's what I keep coming back to: the companies that figure this out early are going to have a huge competitive advantage. While everyone else is still trying to force the old playbook, you'll be building the kind of brand authority that AI systems actually want to cite. You’ll be building the organic version of your already humming demand generation program.

If you're a B2B marketer reading this, you have two choices:

1. Keep running the old playbook, watch your organic traffic slowly bleed out as AI overviews take over more queries, and try to fix a now-irrelevant problem

2. Start building for the world we're heading into – where being the obvious choice, where making the mental “first list” matters more than being the top result

The shift from lead gen to demand gen taught us that playing for attention is different than playing for conversion. This AI shift is teaching us the same lesson all over again, just in a different channel.

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Book quote of the week

“Every blessing ignored becomes a curse…You are forcing me to look at wealth and at horizons I have never known. Now that I have seen them, and now tha tI see how immense my possibilities are, I’m going to feel worse than I did before you arrived. Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don’t want to do so.”
- The Alchemist, by Paolo Coelho

Side note: anyone here on Goodreads? Joined two weeks ago after a friend pulled me on + always looking for good recs on what to read. Find me on there + send me a friend request :) @Sam Kuehnle

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See you next Saturday,
Sam