Your SEO feels different than it did a few years ago. It feels increasingly less reliable, and harder to attribute. Your gut is probably feeling that something has shifted? It’s correct.
The model most of the industry has been selling for the past decade was always a simplification. Rank on Google, get the click, get the customer. It worked well enough when Google sat at the centre of almost every buying decision, which it did for a long time. Google was the gatekeeper. Win Google, win the customer. That relationship was real and foundational, and the strategy built around it made sense.
But that gatekeeper role has fragmented in the last 12 months, and then again in the last 6 months. That’s what nobody’s explaining clearly in their pitch deck because it takes away the easy sell when the real answer these days is to build a strategy for now, and then iterate like hell as the backend of everything continues to shift around.
Where do the SEO decisions get made then?
Before a customer hits your website, they’ve been somewhere else. Usually several places. We already knew that, its customer journey and Marketing 101. However, there are a multitude of subtle shifts that happen along that pathway now that we have to plan for.
They searched and found a result, but now they’ve clicked away when they didn’t find what they needed fast enough. They watched a YouTube video comparing two approaches to their problem, but instead of now Googling what they want next, they continue to research across other platforms. They asked an AI tool whether it knew anything about businesses like yours, and got back five names, probably including your competitors. They read a thread on Reddit from 18 months ago where someone in their industry talked about working with a business like yours, for better or worse. They checked your Google reviews when they couldn’t remember the name of that other company someone mentioned at a networking event.
By the time they hit your site, the decision is often already half made. They’re arriving to confirm something, not to be persuaded. (Which means that fundamentally what your site is built around should also now be different….just what you wanted to hear right?)
Most traditional SEO spend is focused on that last step. Getting you in front of people at the point they’re confirming, not at the points they’re deciding. The earlier steps in that journey, the ones happening on platforms nobody’s been optimising for, are where a lot of ground is being lost.
Why are agencies still selling the same thing?
Rank and traffic are easy to measure. They make good reports. You can point at a graph and say “we moved you from position seven to position three for this keyword, here’s the traffic increase.” That’s a satisfying story for a client meeting.
The stuff that influences how you show up in an AI recommendation, or whether a Reddit thread is helping or hurting you, or whether your Google review volume is compelling enough to make someone choose you over the business ranking below you with twice as many reviews, is harder to attribute to a specific campaign spend. That makes it easier to deprioritise and harder to sell. The incentive structure of agencies hasn’t caught up with where customer decisions are being made.
Tbh, a lot of agencies are pitching this shift as “now you need to be on every platform,” which is great news for their retainer fees.
The more useful frame is that these channels all feed each other, and being in the right ones has a compounding effect.
How does this all stack up?
What people say about you on Reddit influences what AI tools recommend when someone searches your category. Your volume and recency of Google reviews affects your click-through rate even when you’re ranking first. Your video content teaches search engines how to read your authority on a topic. A piece of content that earns a citation from a credible source creates a backlink that lifts your domain authority, brings more organic readers, and builds the kind of brand recognition that feeds back into those AI recommendations.
None of those things happen in a single channel. It’s an interconnected ecosystem now. A business that understands that and builds presence in a few of the right places creates a loop that gets harder to catch over time. A business focused entirely on their Google ranking is optimising for one part of a journey that’s already moved on.
That’s where a lot of businesses are losing ground right now. Someone else answered their customer’s question first, in a place they weren’t paying attention to.
What should I be looking at to better understand my own SEO ecosystem?
Which parts of this matter for your business depends on where your customers are deciding. This probably isn’t what you want to hear, because most small businesses we speak to have no real idea where their customers spend their time or how to figure that out beyond vague stabs in the dark, but it actually reinforces some pretty fundamental old gems from marketing in terms of making sure you spend the time and effort to learn these answers.
A few questions worth sitting with:
- Where does someone go when they’ve heard of you but aren’t sure yet? If you asked your last ten clients to describe how they went from “heard of this business” to “ready to get in touch,” would they mention a Google result, or something else?
- Where is your category being discussed? If there’s a Facebook group, industry forum, or Reddit community where your target customers talk shop, what would they find if they searched your business name there?
- What do AI tools say about you? Ask ChatGPT or Gemini what they know about businesses in your category in your city. See who they mention. If you’re not one of them, that’s worth knowing.
For some businesses, the answer is still mostly Google. For others, they’re losing customers to YouTube tutorials they’re not making, or review platforms they’ve been sitting on for years because nobody framed it as an SEO issue, or AI summaries listing five competitors and somehow not them.
More complex than it used to be? Yes. If someone’s telling you it’s simple, they’re oversimplifying to close a deal.
The businesses getting it right are specific about where their customers decide. They build presence there, in a way that compounds.
You noticed the game changed before anyone explained it to you. That’s the hard part done. From here it’s figuring out what that means for your business specifically.