Kevin Indig

@kevin-indig.bsky.social

Www.growth-memo.com

it's so critical to understand the role of clicks in SEO. spoiler: we've always overestimated them! useful as a leading indicator for conversions, but they set false expectations. example: many teams struggle to show the impact of tofu content, in part because it attracts lots of noisy clicks.

Something @kevin-indig.bsky.social broke down in a post yesterday, and brands still miss: You’re not competing for rankings anymore. You compete to be 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗲𝗻𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 to be included in the training data. Think of it like indexability, but for LLMs. Relevance isn’t enough.

I've been having lots of different fun discussions around AI the last few weeks, but there's one that we simply have to shed more light on. In order to appear in AI, you can't build fancy headless websites. AI simply does not execute JavaScript when crawling your site. 1/2

While we fixate on AI's disruption of search, two landmark antitrust cases against Google are quietly approaching judgment day 👨‍⚖️ The stakes? Nothing less than the fundamental architecture of online customer acquisition.

Bild

AI Chatbots lean heavily on search results, but traditional SEO metrics barely move the needle for AI Visibility! 🤔I analyzed 7,000+ citations across 1,600 URLs to decode what makes content perform in AI Chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews (all details in today's Growth Memo).

Here's a perspective on AI disrupting search: what if Google is doing to challengers like ChatGPT what Meta has done to challengers like Snapchat or TikTok, which is to simply copy their leading features to disrupt themselves?

The net impact of AI Overviews on the open web is as positive as Trump's tariffs on the US economy. Spoiler: not very positive. 📉 Google just launched AI Mode, an AI Overview on steroids, in beta. The data shows a gaping trade deficit in traffic that AI Mode threatens to rip wide open.

Bild

🔍 Here's what most people miss about the Chegg story Google's AI Overviews only played a relatively small part in Chegg's traffic decline. What I found interesting in my analysis (just published in today's Growth Memo):

Bild

I'm diving deep into the Chegg traffic drop and lawsuit. Sharing more details in monday's memo, but here is where I am so far: 1/ Chegg's brand search volume and user engagement has been dropping before AI came on the scene. AI has likely accelerated the decline, but the product was shaky before.