Google says 53% of mobile visits are likely to be abandoned when a page takes longer than three seconds to load. Yet when demand is high enough, people will stay in online queues for hours.

The latest example came from the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum, where visitors were warned that waits could reach nine hours.

That’s 32,400 seconds, or 10,800 times longer than Google’s three-second benchmark.

So, why will people abandon one digital experience almost immediately, but remain in another for most of the day?

The longest waits in our analysis

We reviewed reported waiting times linked to 25 high-demand ticket releases across music, sport, history, theatre and popular culture.

The Bayeux Tapestry had the third-longest reported wait among the events we analysed.

Its reported wait exceeded those linked to Taylor Swift, BTS, Adele, Beyoncé and the FIFA World Cup.

Not bad for an object created almost 1,000 years ago.

These aren’t necessarily the longest online queues ever recorded. They’re the longest reported waits among the 25 releases included in our analysis.

Why do people stay?

People haven’t suddenly become more patient. High-demand releases create a strong mix of value, urgency and scarcity.

The opportunity feels rare

People are more willing to wait when they believe they may not get another chance.

That applies to reunion tours, major finals and limited exhibitions. By the time tickets go on sale, many customers have already decided that missing out matters more than the inconvenience of waiting.

The value is clear

Fans already know why they want to see a particular artist. Supporters understand why a major sporting event matters. Visitors recognise the importance of an exhibition such as the Bayeux Tapestry.

The clearer the value, the more motivated people are to complete the booking.

The scarcity is genuine

Limited tickets and fixed dates give people a clear reason to remain in the queue.

Scarcity works best when it’s real and clearly explained. Vague “selling fast” messages may create pressure, but they can also damage trust.

The queue explains what’s happening

A slow webpage may leave users wondering whether the site is broken.

A well-designed queue tells people that their place is being held, how long they may need to wait and what happens next.

When delays can’t be avoided, clear communication can make the experience feel more reliable.

What can marketers learn?

The lesson isn’t to make people wait.

Most brands can’t expect customers to tolerate hours of inconvenience. Instead, high-demand launches show how much a strong proposition can change someone’s tolerance for friction.

Marketers should focus on three things:

• Build demand before asking people to convert
• Prepare websites for peak campaign traffic
• Communicate clearly when delays happen

A sell-out doesn’t automatically mean the customer experience was good. Strong demand can hide abandoned visits, failed payments and frustrated customers.

The best launches combine a compelling offer with a digital experience that makes it easy for people to act.

Methodology

Koozai reviewed reported waiting times linked to 25 high-demand ticket releases.

Events were ranked using the longest waits found in media coverage, organiser information or documented customer accounts.

The findings aren’t an exhaustive ranking of every online ticket queue. Google’s three-second figure relates to mobile page-loading behaviour and is used as an illustrative comparison.

The post Why People Wait Hours for High Demand Tickets Online appeared first on Koozai.com

Indexation sits between your website existing and your website being eligible to appear in search. It is one of those areas where SEOs can quickly fall into technical rabbit holes, but at its core, it is fairly simple: Google needs to find your page, understand it, store it, and then decide whether it is useful enough to show for relevant searches. So, let’s unpack what indexation means, how crawling, indexing and ranking are different, why some pages are crawled but not indexed, and why not every single page on your website should be indexed.

What is indexation?

Indexation is the process of a search engine storing information about a page so it can be considered for search results. A simple way to think about it is to imagine Google’s index as a huge library. Crawling is Google discovering that a book exists. Indexing is Google reading enough of that book to understand what it is about and adding it to the library system. Ranking is Google deciding whether that book is the best recommendation when someone asks a particular question.

If your page is not indexed, Google may know the URL exists, but it has not stored it in a way that allows it to appear in search results. That is why indexation is so important. It is the stage where a page moves from simply existing online to becoming eligible to appear when someone searches for something relevant. That does not mean the page is guaranteed to rank, it just means it can be considered.

Crawling, indexing and ranking: what is the difference?

Crawling, indexing and ranking often get grouped together, but they are not the same thing. This is where a lot of confusion starts, especially when Google Search Console says a page has been crawled but it still is not appearing in search (This is one of many reasons why your technical SEO may have a thousand yard stare). To make sense of indexation properly, it helps to understand each stage and what Google is doing at each point.

Crawling

Crawling is when search engines discover and visit URLs. Googlebot follows links, reads sitemaps, revisits known pages and looks for new or updated content. At this stage, Google is essentially trying to understand what pages are available and whether it can access them. A page can be discovered through internal links, external links, XML sitemaps, redirects, previously known URLs and other sources Google has found over time.

Once Google discovers a URL, it may crawl it. This means it requests the page, checks what comes back from the server, and tries to understand what content or information is available. However, crawling does not automatically mean indexing. This is one of the most common misunderstandings in SEO, just because Google has crawled a page, it doesn’t mean Google has decided that page deserves a place in the index. It is a bit like someone walking into a shop, having a look around, and then leaving without buying anything. Yes, they visited. But that does not mean the visit led to the outcome you wanted.

Indexing

We then move to step two, which is indexing. At this stage Google tries to understand the page. It looks at the content, title tag, headings, images, videos, canonical tags, structured data, internal links, duplicate signals and other information to work out what the page is about and whether it should be stored in the index. This is where quality, clarity and uniqueness start to matter.

If a page is thin, duplicated, blocked, canonicalised elsewhere, low value, confusing, or simply not useful enough compared with other pages Google already knows about, it may not be indexed. Again, not every crawled page gets indexed. That is not always a bad thing either. In some cases, it is exactly what you want!

Ranking

Ranking is the next stage. Once a page is indexed, Google can consider it for relevant search queries. Ranking is where Google decides whether that page should appear, and where it should appear, based on how useful, relevant and trustworthy it appears for a particular search. This means an indexed page can still get no clicks, no impressions and no visibility.

Indexing is not the same as ranking. It simply means the page is eligible to appear. You still need the page to match search intent, be useful, be technically accessible, have decent internal links, compete with what is already ranking and actually deserve to appear. In simple terms, crawled means Google has visited the page, indexed means Google has stored and understood the page, and ranking means Google is showing the page for relevant searches. You need all three, but each one solves a different problem.

Why does indexation matter?

Indexation matters because pages that are not indexed cannot generate organic search traffic from Google. That sounds obvious, but it is easy to overlook. You might have a product page with strong commercial value, a service page targeting an important keyword, or a blog post designed to answer a high-intent query. If that page is not indexed, it does not matter how good it is. It is invisible in search.

Indexation issues can affect organic visibility, traffic, leads, revenue, product discoverability, content performance and how search engines understand your site. For small sites, one or two indexation issues might not seem like much. For larger websites, especially ecommerce, property, recruitment, healthcare, finance or multi-location sites, indexation can quickly become a much bigger problem. A few messy filters, duplicate parameter URLs or low-value tag pages can suddenly turn into thousands of URLs being crawled, discovered or excluded. That is when indexation stops being a simple SEO check and starts becoming a site quality and crawl efficiency issue.

Why some pages are crawled but not indexed

This is where people tend to panic, and it’s caused many SEO’s to scratch their heads. You open Google Search Console, go into the Page Indexing report, and there it is: “Crawled – currently not indexed.” This means Google has crawled the page but has not indexed it. That does not always mean something is technically broken, but it does mean Google has chosen not to include that page in the index at that point There are a few common reasons this can happen. In some cases, it may be a technical issue, in others it may be a content quality issue, a duplication issue, a canonical issue, or simply a sign that the page is not giving Google enough reason to store it in the index. The possibilities are (unfortunately) endless!

The page is too thin

If a page has very little useful content, Google may decide it is not worth indexing. This often happens with empty category pages, very short blog posts, product pages with barely any description, location pages with copied text and only the town name changed, auto-generated pages, or filter pages with no unique value.

Thin content is not just about word count. A short page can be useful, and a long page can still be completely useless. The real question is whether the page gives users enough information to justify its existence. If the answer is “not really”, indexation may be a struggle.

The page is too similar to another page

Google does not need ten versions of the same thing. If you have multiple URLs with near-identical content, Google may choose one version to index and ignore the others. This is common on ecommerce websites where filters, sorting options, tracking parameters and product variants create lots of duplicate or near-duplicate URLs.

For example:

/mens-trainers/
/mens-trainers/?sort=price-low
/mens-trainers/?colour=black
/mens-trainers/?utm_source=email
/mens-trainers/page/2/

Some of those URLs may be useful for users, but that does not mean they all need to be indexed. If Google sees a lot of duplication, it may simply decide another URL is the better version.

The canonical points somewhere else

A canonical tag tells search engines which version of a page you prefer to be treated as the main version. If Page A has a canonical tag pointing to Page B, you are essentially saying, “Google, please treat Page B as the main one.” That can be useful for managing duplication, but it can also cause confusion if implemented badly.

If you are wondering why a page is not indexed, check whether the canonical tag points to itself or another URL. Then check what Google has selected as the canonical in Search Console. Sometimes you suggest one thing with your canonical tag, but Google decides another URL looks like the stronger or more appropriate version.

The page has a noindex tag

A noindex tag tells search engines not to index the page. This is useful when used intentionally, but painful when added by accident. Common accidental noindex issues include staging sites pushed live with noindex still in place, blog categories or tags noindexed by a plugin, product pages noindexed due to template rules, development settings left on after launch, or CMS-level SEO settings applying wider than expected.

If a page should be indexed, make sure it does not have a noindex tag in the HTML or HTTP header. This is one of those checks that sounds basic, but it has caught out plenty of websites. Nobody is above the accidental noindex.

The page is blocked from crawling

If a page is blocked in robots.txt, Google may not be able to crawl it properly. This is different from noindex. Robots.txt controls crawling, while noindex controls indexing. If you block Google from crawling a page, Google may not be able to see the page content or the noindex tag on the page.

That can create messy situations where Google knows a URL exists but cannot properly evaluate it. So, if you want a page removed from the index, do not just block it in robots.txt and hope for the best. Use the right method for the job.

The page is not internally linked well

Internal links help search engines discover pages and understand their importance. If a page exists but is buried deep in the site, only linked from an old sitemap, or not linked from any meaningful page, Google may see it as low priority. This is especially common with orphan pages, old campaign landing pages, blog posts not linked from category hubs, product pages hidden behind filters, or service pages missing from navigation and supporting content.

If a page matters, link to it like it matters. Internal linking is one of the few SEO levers you fully control, so do not make Google work harder than it needs to. Go get those links!

The page has quality issues

Sometimes the technical setup is fine, but the page still does not get indexed because it is not strong enough. That can include poor or duplicated content, weak search intent alignment, no clear purpose, too much boilerplate content, lack of useful information, poor page experience, confusing structure or weak trust signals.

This is where SEOs need to avoid treating indexation as purely technical. Yes, check the tags, canonicals, robots.txt and status codes. But also ask the uncomfortable question: is this page actually worth indexing? Because sometimes the answer is no, and Google has simply noticed before you have.

Why not every page should be indexed

This is the bit that often gets missed. A healthy website does not need every single URL indexed. In fact, trying to force every page into the index can make your website weaker, not stronger. Some pages exist for users, functionality or tracking, but do not need to appear in search results. That includes things like basket pages, checkout pages, internal search results, login pages, thank you pages, filter combinations with no search value, duplicate parameter URLs, thin tag pages, admin or account pages, staging URLs and PPC landing pages not built for organic search.

Indexation should be intentional. You want Google spending time on the pages that matter: your key services, products, categories, guides, resources and commercially useful content. If your site is full of low-value indexed pages, it can dilute quality signals and make it harder for search engines to understand what your important pages are. Think of it like inviting people to a meeting. You do not need everyone there. You need the right people there. Otherwise, suddenly there are 43 people on a call, nobody knows who owns the action, and someone is still screen sharing from the previous agenda item. Your index should be focused.

How to check indexation in Google Search Console

Google Search Console is usually the best starting point for checking indexation issues. There are two main areas to use: the Page Indexing report and the URL Inspection tool. The Page Indexing report is useful for spotting wider patterns across the site, while the URL Inspection tool is better when you want to look into one specific URL.

Used together, they can help you understand whether a page is indexed, whether Google has crawled it, whether indexing is being blocked, what canonical Google has selected, and whether there are wider issues affecting groups of URLs.

Page Indexing report

The Page Indexing report gives you an overview of which pages are indexed and which are not. You can use it to identify issues such as Crawled – currently not indexed, Discovered – currently not indexed, Duplicate without user-selected canonical, Alternate page with proper canonical tag, Excluded by noindex tag, Blocked by robots.txt, Not found 404, server errors and redirect issues.

The important thing here is not to panic when you see excluded URLs. Some exclusions are perfectly fine. For example, if checkout pages, account pages or duplicate parameter URLs are not indexed, that is usually expected. If important service pages, product pages or articles are excluded, that is where you need to investigate. The trick is to separate “this is a problem” from “this is Google doing exactly what we wanted”.

URL Inspection tool

The URL Inspection tool lets you check a specific URL. This is useful when you want to understand what Google knows about an individual page. You can check whether the URL is indexed, when it was last crawled, whether crawling is allowed, whether indexing is allowed, what canonical Google selected, whether the page is in a sitemap, whether Google could fetch the page and whether there are enhancement issues.

This is especially useful when a client or stakeholder asks, “Why is this page not on Google?” Instead of guessing, you can inspect the URL and look at the actual signals. That said, remember that “URL is on Google” does not mean the page is ranking well. It means the page is eligible to appear. Ranking is still a separate battle.

How to use crawl data to check indexation issues

Search Console tells you what Google is reporting. Crawl data tells you what your website is actually doing. Tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb and other crawlers help you check the technical setup at scale. This is where you can start spotting patterns that are harder to see one URL at a time.

A crawl can help you review status codes, indexability, canonical tags, noindex tags, robots.txt blocks, internal links, orphan URLs, sitemap URLs, duplicate titles, duplicate content, thin pages, redirect chains, pagination, parameter URLs and JavaScript-rendered content. The real value comes from comparing crawl data with GSC data.

For example, if GSC says a page is excluded by noindex, your crawl should confirm where that noindex is coming from. If GSC says Google selected a different canonical, your crawl can show whether your canonical signals are consistent. If GSC shows lots of discovered but not indexed URLs, your crawl can help identify whether they are internally linked, included in sitemaps or buried deep in the site. If important pages are not indexed, your crawl can show whether they are technically indexable in the first place. This is where SEO becomes less about staring at one report and more about joining the dots.

A simple indexation investigation process

If you are checking why a page is not indexed, start simple. The first question should always be whether the page should be indexed in the first place. Before trying to force a page into the index, you need to understand whether it actually deserves to be there. If the page has no organic purpose, no unique value and no reason to appear in search, then keeping it out of the index may be the right outcome.

If it is commercially important, useful and technically clean, then it is worth investigating properly. A simple checklist would be: does it return a 200 status code, is it blocked in robots.txt, does it have a noindex tag, does the canonical point to itself, is it included in the XML sitemap, is it internally linked from relevant pages, is the content unique and useful, does it match a clear search intent, is Google selecting a different canonical, has Google crawled it recently, and are similar pages being indexed?

Common indexation mistakes

Indexation issues often come from small decisions that scale badly. These mistakes are not always dramatic on their own, but when they happen across lots of pages, templates or URL types, they can create much bigger indexation problems. That is why it is important to look for patterns rather than only checking one URL at a time.

Adding every URL to the sitemap

Your XML sitemap should include the URLs you want search engines to crawl and index. It should not be a dumping ground for every URL your CMS can find. If your sitemap includes redirected URLs, noindexed URLs, canonicalised URLs, 404s, filtered URLs and low-value pages, you are sending mixed signals.

A clean sitemap should mainly contain indexable, canonical, important URLs. Basically, do not hand Google a map where half the roads lead to a wall.

Noindexing pages that should rank

This happens more often than people like to admit. A page gets noindexed during development, testing or migration, then everyone forgets about it. Weeks later, someone asks why traffic has dropped. Cue panic, Slack messages, and someone asking whether anything has changed recently, even though yes, obviously, lots of things have changed recently.

Always check noindex tags during launches, migrations and template changes. It is a simple check, but it can prevent a lot of unnecessary confusion.

Blocking important pages in robots.txt

Robots.txt is powerful, but it is also very easy to misuse. Blocking low-value crawl paths can be useful, but blocking important sections of the site can stop search engines from accessing content they need.

This is especially risky during migrations or redesigns, when staging rules accidentally end up on the live site. If an important page is not being crawled, robots.txt should be one of your first checks.

Ignoring internal linking

If a page matters, it should not be an orphan. Important pages need clear internal links from relevant areas of the site. That might include navigation, category pages, hub pages, related blog posts, breadcrumbs or contextual links.

Internal links help users move through the site, but they also help search engines understand which pages are important and how topics connect. If your key page is only linked from a forgotten blog post from 2019, do not be shocked when Google treats it like a forgotten blog post from 2019.

Creating too many low-value pages

This is a big one for larger sites. More pages does not automatically mean more traffic. Creating hundreds or thousands of pages with little unique value can cause indexation problems, especially when those pages are repetitive, thin or generated at scale.

Examples include location pages with near-identical copy, filter pages targeting tiny variations, tag pages with no useful content, AI-generated pages with no real editorial value, and product variant pages with duplicated descriptions. The goal is not to create as many URLs as possible. The goal is to create useful pages that serve a purpose. Very boring. Very effective.

Submitting URLs again and again

Requesting indexing in GSC can be useful for a small number of important URLs, especially after updates. But repeatedly submitting the same URL is not a strategy. If a page has underlying quality, duplication or technical issues, pressing “request indexing” like it owes you money will not fix the problem.

Find the issue, fix the issue, and then request indexing if needed. Otherwise, you are just asking Google to look at the same unresolved problem again.

So what about AI?

Well it wouldn’t be normal to talk about 2026 SEO without mentioning AI, would it?

AI search is slightly different from traditional search, but it still relies on many of the same foundations and principles. AI systems need to discover, access, understand and retrieve information before they can use it in an answer. Depending on the platform, this may happen through traditional search indexes, AI-specific crawlers, or real-time retrieval when a user asks a question. For example, Google’s AI experiences are still closely tied to Google Search, which means your important pages still need to be crawlable, indexable, useful, well structured and clearly linked from relevant areas of the site.

The important thing to remember is that being indexed in Google and being used in an AI-generated answer are not exactly the same thing. A page might be indexed and ranking, but still not be selected as a source in an AI response. Equally, some AI tools may retrieve information from the web in ways that do not perfectly mirror traditional rankings. This is why the basics still matter: your content needs to be accessible, easy to understand, clearly structured and genuinely useful.

For AI visibility, the goal is not to create strange content written purely for our algorithmic overlords, it is to make your key information easy for both users and machines to find, interpret and trust. Using clear headings, strong internal links, visible on-page content, helpful summaries, specific answers, schema where appropriate and clean technical foundations all help. AI may change how answers are presented, but it has not removed the need for good technical SEO, strong content and a clean, machine friendly website.

So what’s the key takeaway?

Indexation is not just a technical SEO checkbox. It is the bridge between your website existing and your website being eligible to appear in search. Crawling means Google has found and visited a page. Indexing means Google has understood and stored it. Ranking means Google has decided it is relevant enough to show for a search (that’s the part your stakeholders will care about).

The mistake is assuming those three things happen automatically, when in reality each stage depends on a mixture of technical accessibility, content quality, internal linking, duplication signals and overall page value. Some pages will be crawled but not indexed. Some pages should not be indexed at all. Some pages are technically indexable but not good enough to earn visibility. Others are blocked, canonicalised, duplicated, orphaned or accidentally noindexed because websites, much like marketing teams, are held together by processes, plugins and mild panic.

The best approach is to be intentional. Know which pages matter. Make sure they are crawlable, indexable, internally linked, useful and included in your sitemap. At the same time, keep low-value pages out of the index where appropriate. A clean, focused index helps search engines understand your website properly. More importantly, it helps your important pages stand a better chance of being found by the people actually looking for them. And that is the whole point of SEO.

The post SEO Unpacked: What Is Indexation And Why Does It Matter? appeared first on Koozai.com

It gives journalists additional context, demonstrates genuine expertise and helps turn a collection of facts or data into a meaningful story.

Yet many expert quotes do little more than repeat the headline.

They confirm what the journalist has already been told, describe an obvious trend as “increasingly popular” or add a vague sentence about why businesses should pay attention.

The quote might sound credible, but it does not actually say anything.

From a digital PR perspective, this is a missed opportunity. A strong expert quote should not simply decorate a press release. It should make the story more useful, provide a journalist with a new angle and establish why the person or brand commenting deserves to be part of the conversation.

What does a generic expert quote look like?

Generic expert quotes often sound professional at first glance. The problem is that they could have been attributed to almost anyone.

They tend to include statements such as: “This trend is becoming increasingly popular, and we expect more people to take advantage of it in the future.” or “These findings demonstrate how important it is for businesses to stay aware of changing consumer behaviour.”

Neither quote is necessarily incorrect. However, neither adds information that could not already be inferred from the story and it doesn’t give the journalist anything of value to add to their story. A strong relationship with a journalist may help your expert quote be seen, but it won’t make weak commentary worth using. In digital PR, success isn’t just about who you know. It’s about how you approach the story and the value you can add.

If a press release reveals that searches for a particular product have increased, a quote confirming that the product has become more popular is simply repeating the finding.

Journalists do not need an expert to describe the data back to them. They need the expert to interpret it.

A quote should move the story forward

Before including any expert commentary, ask one simple question:

What does this quote add that is not already contained elsewhere in the press release?

A useful quote should give the journalist at least one additional reason to include it in their coverage.

It might explain:

• Why the trend is happening
• What has recently changed
• What people commonly misunderstand
• What the data does not immediately reveal
• What is likely to happen next
• What action readers should take
• What risks or opportunities are being overlooked

This is the difference between commenting on a story and contributing to it.

For example, imagine a campaign showing an increase in searches for last-minute holidays.

A generic quote might say: “Last-minute holidays are becoming increasingly popular as more people look for flexible and affordable ways to travel.”

A more useful expert quote could say: “The increase in last-minute searches is not necessarily being driven by spontaneous travellers. Many holidaymakers are delaying bookings because they are uncertain about prices, flight disruption and household spending. That means travel brands may need to provide greater reassurance around flexibility and cancellation policies, rather than relying solely on late discounts.”

The second quote explains the possible motivation behind the behaviour, challenges an easy assumption and gives businesses something practical to consider.

It earns its place in the story.

Explain why something is happening

Data can tell us what is happening, but it does not always tell us why.

This is where genuine expertise becomes valuable.

An expert may be able to connect a trend to changing regulations, seasonal behaviour, economic pressure, new technology or shifts within a particular industry.

Rather than saying: “More businesses are investing in cybersecurity.”

An expert could explain: “Cybersecurity investment is increasing partly because businesses are becoming more dependent on external platforms, cloud services and third-party suppliers. This creates a wider network of potential vulnerabilities, meaning organisations are no longer only responsible for securing their own internal systems.”

The improved version provides context that strengthens the story and makes the expert’s knowledge visible.

Challenge what people are getting wrong

Some of the strongest expert commentary questions the obvious interpretation of a story.

Journalists are often interested in the gap between public perception and professional reality. If your expert can highlight a misconception, the quote immediately becomes more distinctive.

This might involve explaining why:

• A popular solution does not address the real problem
• A commonly quoted statistic is being misinterpreted
• Consumers are focusing on the wrong risk
• An industry trend is more complicated than it first appears
• Conventional advice no longer reflects current behaviour

For example: “Although many businesses assume a technical SEO audit is a one-off project, websites are constantly changing. New templates, plugins, redirects and content can introduce fresh issues, so technical performance needs to be monitored rather than treated as a completed task.”

This does more than confirm that technical SEO is important. It corrects a misunderstanding and explains why the misconception matters.

Show what has changed

Words such as “growing,” “changing” and “evolving” regularly appear in expert quotes without any explanation of what the change actually involves.

A better quote identifies the specific shift.

Has customer behaviour changed? Has a new platform affected the market? Are people making decisions differently? Has a previously effective tactic become less reliable?

Specificity creates authority.

If we compare “The digital PR landscape is constantly evolving” with “digital PR campaigns are increasingly expected to do more than generate links. Brands are also looking at how expert mentions, third-party coverage and consistent subject knowledge can support their visibility across traditional search, AI-generated answers and wider online research.”

The second version tells the reader what the evolution looks like and why it matters.

Tell the reader what happens next

Predictions can strengthen expert commentary, provided they are grounded in experience rather than vague speculation.

Phrases such as “this trend will continue” rarely add much. Instead, the expert should explain what the trend could lead to.

A useful forward-looking quote might address:

• How businesses will need to adapt
• Which groups are likely to be affected
• What the next stage of the trend could look like
• What could slow or reverse the change
• Which consequences have not yet received much attention

This gives the journalist a future-facing angle and may make the commentary relevant beyond the immediate campaign.

Give people something practical to do

Expert commentary can also turn awareness into action.

If a press release identifies a risk, problem or behavioural change, the quote can explain what readers should do with that information.

However, this advice needs to be specific.

“Businesses should review their strategy” is not particularly useful. What should they review? What should they look for? What is the first step?

A stronger quote might say: “Businesses should begin by identifying which pages generate the most revenue or enquiries before prioritising technical fixes. Resolving every issue in a crawl is not always realistic, so teams need to focus first on problems affecting their most commercially important areas.”

This advice demonstrates expertise because it shows how the expert approaches the issue in practice.

Expert quotes should sound like experts

It might sound obvious, but an expert quote should contain something that only an informed person could confidently say.

That does not mean filling it with technical language. In fact, the strongest commentary often makes a complicated subject easier to understand.

The aim is not to make the expert sound clever. It is to make their knowledge useful.

To achieve this, avoid quotes that:

• Could apply to almost any industry
• Repeat the campaign headline
• Simply describe a statistic
• Rely on vague predictions
• Include promotional claims about the business
• Contain so much jargon that the meaning is lost
• Try to cover several unrelated points at once

A quote should also sound natural when read aloud. If it feels like a paragraph from a corporate report, a journalist is less likely to use it unchanged.

The value goes beyond the press release

Strong expert commentary is not only useful for earning media coverage.

It can also help build a consistent association between a brand and the subjects it wants to be known for.

When an expert regularly provides informed commentary on a defined group of topics, they begin to create a recognisable area of authority. Journalists know what they can approach that person about. Potential customers can see evidence of their knowledge. The brand develops a clearer and more credible voice.

This can also support the organisation’s wider SEO and content strategy.

Expert commentary should reinforce the same core topics covered across the brand’s website, thought leadership, guides, case studies and media activity. Each quote becomes another opportunity to demonstrate experience and subject knowledge.

This does not mean inserting keywords unnaturally or forcing a product mention into every comment. It means being intentional about the areas in which the brand wants to develop genuine authority.

An expert in financial technology, for example, will build a stronger position by consistently contributing detailed insights on payment security, fraud prevention and consumer trust than by commenting superficially on every technology story.

Treat your experts as positioning assets

Experts should not be brought into a campaign at the final stage simply because the press release needs a quote.

Their knowledge should help shape the story from the beginning.

They may be able to identify:

• A more interesting interpretation of the data
• A caveat that needs to be included
• An emerging issue the campaign has overlooked
• A stronger angle for a particular publication
• A practical recommendation for the reader
• A claim that does not reflect how the industry actually works

Involving experts earlier can improve both the accuracy and originality of the campaign.

It also allows the PR team to build a bank of useful commentary that can be adapted for reactive media opportunities, interviews, articles and future campaigns.

A simple framework for stronger expert quotes

Before approving a quote, check whether it answers at least one of these questions:

• Why is this happening?
• What are people getting wrong?
• What has changed?
• What does the data not tell us?
• What is likely to happen next?
• What should the reader do now?
• Why is this expert particularly qualified to comment?

It does not need to answer all seven. Trying to include too much can make the quote unwieldy.

One clear, useful insight is far more valuable than several sentences of generic commentary.

Make every quote earn its place

Expert commentary should not be included simply because press releases are expected to contain a quote.

It should deepen the story.

A strong quote helps the journalist understand the significance of the information, gives the reader something they would not have known otherwise and demonstrates the expert’s authority without relying on promotional language.

The next time an expert says that a trend is “becoming increasingly popular,” ask them what is driving that popularity, what people are overlooking and what it means in practice.

That is where the real story usually begins.

The post How to Write Expert Quotes Journalists Will Actually Use appeared first on Koozai.com

AI search has changed how people find brands online. Your customers are no longer only typing keywords into Google and scrolling through blue links. They’re asking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for answers, options and recommendations. That means your brand needs to be visible in more places than traditional search results.

What is AI Search Optimisation?

AI Search Optimisation is the process of helping your brand appear in AI-generated answers.

That includes tools such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot.

Some people call this Generative Engine Optimisation, GEO, Answer Engine Optimisation, AEO, or LLM optimisation.

The names can get a bit alphabet-soupy, but the aim is simple.

When someone asks an AI tool about your products, services or sector, your brand has a better chance of being mentioned, cited or recommended.

Why AI search matters for brands

AI tools are now shaping buying decisions.

People use them to compare suppliers, shortlist agencies, ask for trusted brands and get quick answers before they visit a website.

That means search visibility is no longer only about rankings.

You need to be understood, trusted and referenced across the web.

Good AI search work helps your brand show up where your customers are asking questions.

AI search success needs SEO, content marketing and digital PR

This is the bit many agency lists miss.

Being found in AI search does not come from one tactic.

It usually needs three teams working together:

• SEO, to make sure your website is technically sound and easy for search engines and AI systems to understand.
• Content marketing, to answer real customer questions clearly, accurately and usefully.
• Digital PR, to build authority through trusted mentions, links and third-party coverage.

If those teams work in silos, the strategy can become patchy.

The SEO team may spot demand, the content team may create useful answers, and the PR team may earn authority, but the full benefit comes when everyone joins the dots.

At Koozai, our SEO, content marketing and digital PR specialists work together day in, day out.

That matters because AI visibility depends on connected signals, not one lonely blog post hoping for the best.

You can see more about our joined-up approach on our AI Marketing Agency service page.

What to look for in an AI Search Optimisation agency

1. A clear explanation of what they actually do

A good agency should explain AI search in plain English.

They should be able to tell you what they’ll do, why it matters and how it supports your business goals.

If the pitch is stuffed with acronyms but light on practical steps, that’s not a great sign.

2. Strong SEO foundations

AI search still relies heavily on the wider web.

That means technical SEO, crawlability, site structure, internal linking, schema markup and helpful content still matter.

Schema markup means structured code that helps search engines understand your content.

No need to panic, it’s less scary than it sounds.

3. Content that answers real questions

AI tools favour clear, useful information.

Your agency should understand how to create content that answers customer questions directly.

That might include comparison guides, FAQs, service pages, thought leadership, product explainers and sector-specific advice.

The best content feels useful to people first.

AI systems are more likely to pick up clear answers when humans find them helpful too.

4. Digital PR and authority building

AI tools often draw confidence from repeated, trusted mentions across the web.

That’s where digital PR comes in.

Coverage, citations, expert commentary and quality backlinks can all help strengthen your brand’s authority.

Your agency should understand how PR activity supports search visibility, not treat it as a separate nice-to-have.

5. Joined-up teams

Ask how the SEO, content and PR teams work together.

Do they share insights?

Do they plan campaigns together?

Do they report against shared business goals?

If the answer is vague, the delivery may be vague too.

6. Useful reporting

AI search measurement is still developing, but your agency should have a sensible approach.

They should be able to track a mix of visibility, traffic and business impact.

Useful measures include:

• Brand mentions in AI-generated answers
• AI referral traffic
• Visibility across target prompts
• Organic search performance
• Conversions and leads
• Content coverage across key topics
• Links, citations and trusted mentions

For more detail, these Koozai guides are useful next reads:

• How To Prove The Business Value Of AI Search
• The AI Search Readiness Audit
• Why Your AI Search Prompt Library Is Letting You Down And How To Fix It
• How To Measure AI Search Performance

Questions to ask before hiring an AI Search Optimisation agency

• How do you improve visibility in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews?
• How do your SEO, content and digital PR teams work together?
• How do you decide which prompts and topics to target?
• How do you measure AI search visibility?
• How do you connect AI visibility to leads and revenue?
• Can you audit our current AI search presence?
• What will you need from our internal team?
• How will this work support our wider SEO strategy?

AI Search Optimisation agencies worth researching

This is not a ranking.

The right agency depends on your goals, budget, sector and internal team setup.

These agencies are worth researching if you’re looking for AI search, GEO or broader organic visibility support.

Koozai

Koozai is a UK digital marketing agency helping brands become more visible across traditional search, AI search and wider online discovery.

Our AI search approach brings together SEO, content marketing and digital PR, with teams working together rather than passing work between silos.

That means technical fixes, content strategy and authority building all point in the same direction.

Visit Koozai’s AI Marketing Agency page

The SEO Works

The SEO Works offers GEO services focused on helping brands appear in AI tools and large language models.

They’re worth researching if you want an agency with a strong search background and a dedicated GEO service offering.

Visit The SEO Works

Passion Digital

Passion Digital offers AI search and GEO services, including work across content structure, schema and strategic mentions.

They’re worth reviewing if you’re comparing agencies with a stated AI search service.

Visit Passion Digital

POLARIS

POLARIS positions itself around GEO, AI search and SEO support.

They may be a good agency to research if you want a search-focused partner with AI visibility services.

Visit POLARIS

Bird Marketing

Bird Marketing offers Generative Engine Optimisation services alongside wider SEO and digital marketing support.

They’re worth considering if you’re comparing agencies with international reach and AI search services.

Visit Bird Marketing

Exposure Ninja

Exposure Ninja offers GEO services as part of its wider digital marketing offer.

They’re worth researching if you want an agency that combines AI search with broader SEO, content and digital activity.

Visit Exposure Ninja

Buried

Buried is an organic search agency offering GEO and SEO services.

They’re worth reviewing if you want a specialist organic search partner with a focus on AI-driven search visibility.

Visit Buried

SUSO Digital

SUSO Digital offers AI SEO services alongside technical SEO, content and authority building.

They’re worth researching if technical search expertise is a key part of your brief.

Visit SUSO Digital

Quirky Digital

Quirky Digital offers GEO services that connect traditional SEO with AI search visibility.

They’re worth reviewing if you want a search agency with a stated focus on both SEO and GEO.

Visit Quirky Digital

Red flags to watch for

AI search is moving quickly, so it’s sensible to be cautious.

Be wary of agencies that:

• Guarantee specific placements in ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews
• Talk only about prompts and ignore SEO fundamentals
• Create content without understanding your customers
• Treat digital PR as separate from search visibility
• Cannot explain how they measure progress
• Use lots of jargon but offer few practical details

No agency can control exactly what an AI tool says.

A good agency can improve the signals that make your brand easier to understand, trust and reference.

How Koozai can help

Koozai helps brands become visible wherever their customers are searching.

That includes traditional Google results, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and social search platforms.

Our team brings SEO, content marketing and digital PR together, so your strategy works as one joined-up programme.

We can help with:

• AI search visibility audits
• Prompt and topic research
• Technical SEO improvements
• Content strategy and creation
• Digital PR and authority building
• Measurement and reporting
• Ongoing AI search optimisation

See how Koozai can help with AI search visibility

Final thoughts

Choosing an AI Search Optimisation agency is not about finding the team with the newest acronym.

It’s about finding a partner that understands how search, content and authority work together.

AI tools need clear, trusted information to draw from.

Your customers need helpful answers.

Your business needs visibility that supports real commercial goals.

When those three things line up, AI search starts to feel less like a mystery and more like a practical part of your marketing strategy.

And thankfully, no crystal ball required.

The post How To Choose An AI Search Optimisation Agency appeared first on Koozai.com

Google has been talking openly about a new era for AI-powered search. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has started looking closely at how AI search uses publisher and brand content. And adoption data out of the UK shows businesses are past the “should we try this” stage and into full rollout.

At Koozai, we think there are three shifts marketers and product teams need to get ahead of before the summer slowdown, because the work to prepare for them won’t wait for September.

1. The First Click Isn’t What It Used To Be

The traditional search journey – type a query, scan ten blue links, click through, land on a website, is being squeezed by AI search experiences that hand the customer a single synthesised answer instead.

That’s a genuine problem for brands that have spent years optimising the click-through, not the explanation. If an AI tool is now doing the summarising on your behalf, the obvious question is: how confident are you that it’s getting your story right?

A few things worth checking now:

• Would an AI engine accurately describe what you sell, who it’s for, and why someone should pick you over a competitor?
• Is your pricing, delivery, returns and availability information clear, current and easy to find? Not just on your site, but anywhere it’s referenced?
• Are your product pages, FAQs, structured data and reviews doing enough heavy lifting to be understood by a machine, not just a human reader?

This isn’t a new SEO trick. It’s just a shift: your product content now has two audiences; the person, and the system summarising you to that person.

Worth doing this month: Pick one priority customer journey and audit it purely from an “AI readability” angle. Look at product descriptions, FAQs, schema markup, review structure, and policy pages as a single connected information set, not separate jobs for separate teams.

2. Agentic Commerce Is Quietly Becoming Real Infrastructure

“Agentic commerce” can sound like a buzzword, but the substance behind it is moving fast. AI agents are increasingly able to compare products, interpret reviews and policies, check availability, and act on a customer’s behalf; sometimes right through to completing a purchase.

Google has already announced new standards and tools aimed at retailers for exactly this kind of agent-driven shopping, including machine-readable commerce data designed for systems talking to systems, not just people browsing a page.

That changes what a product page is actually for. It still needs to persuade a human; imagery, storytelling, social proof all still matter. But an agent acting on a customer’s behalf cares about a different set of signals entirely: complete and accurate product data, clear delivery and returns information, structured and credible reviews, and a clear way to confirm that a transaction is properly authorised.

That last point is the tricky one. A lot of existing fraud and bot-detection systems are built to block exactly the kind of automated, non-human behaviour that a legitimate shopping agent might display. The question retailers need to start answering isn’t just “is this a real person?” – it’s “is this agent authorised to act for a real person, right now, in this context?” That touches identity, payments, fraud prevention and customer service all at once, which means it can’t sit with just one team.

Worth doing this month: Walk your commerce journey as if a machine were the customer. Where would it need clean, structured information? Where might it hit a wall? Where would proving identity or permission become the bottleneck?

3. Trust Is Turning Into an Actual Product Feature

As AI gets embedded deeper into customer journeys, trust stops being a brand values slide and starts being something customers actively test. Can they tell when they’re talking to AI rather than a person? Do they understand what it can and can’t do? Can they get to a human when they need one? Do they know where an answer came from, and how their data is being used?

Regulation is catching up here too. The EU AI Act brings transparency obligations into effect from August 2026, including requirements around making sure people know when they’re dealing with certain AI systems. Even businesses outside the EU’s direct reach should read the direction of travel: customers will expect more openness, and regulators will expect more accountability.

The good news is that building trust into an AI experience is mostly about good, honest design rather than legal box-ticking. A chatbot that’s upfront about what it can’t help with. A recommendation engine that explains its reasoning. A checkout flow that doesn’t bury the important terms. A support journey with a real, easy way out when automation isn’t cutting it.

Worth doing this month: Pick one AI-enabled touchpoint in your customer journey and make it more honest; clearer labelling, a better fallback to a human, or a plainer explanation of what the tool is actually doing.

A Practical Pre-Summer Checklist

Before the summer break, it’s worth getting these on the table:

• Audit one important customer journey for AI search readiness: could an AI engine describe it accurately and fairly?
• Treat product data as part of the customer experience, not back-office admin. Completeness and structure now influence conversion.
• Map where AI agents might touch your systems: discovery, comparison, checkout, support and returns all deserve a look.
• Design trust in deliberately; labelling, fallback options, and honest limitations shouldn’t be afterthoughts.
• Get the right people in the room early. This cuts across marketing, product, tech and legal, no single team owns it.

The Bigger Picture

None of this is really about AI getting cleverer. It’s about AI getting closer to the customer. Closer to how people search, compare, decide and buy. That means the customer journey isn’t just the screens you design anymore. It’s the data, systems and trust signals sitting underneath them too.

The brands that come out ahead won’t necessarily be the ones with the flashiest AI demo. They’ll be the ones that machines can understand correctly, that customers genuinely trust, and that teams can run responsibly day to day.

If you’d like help auditing how AI-ready your customer journey actually is, that’s exactly the kind of thing the team at Koozai can dig into with you.

The post Why AI Search and Agentic Commerce Should Be on Every Marketing Team’s Radar This Summer appeared first on Koozai.com

Some of that comes down to outdated advice that’s never been revisited. Some comes from genuine confusion between SEO disciplines. And some of it is just down to “technical SEO” being used as a catch-all term for anything that sounds complicated.

Across both in-house and agency settings, the same five misconceptions come up again and again, from business owners, marketing teams, and occasionally from other SEOs. These misconceptions are exactly why we built our technical SEO services around real audits and data, not assumptions.

Here they are, along with why they’ve stuck around for so long.

1. Technical SEO is a one-off job

This is the one we see most, and it’s also the most costly. Many businesses treat a technical SEO audit as something you do once, fix, and then forget about. But websites change constantly. New pages get published, plugins get updated, developers push releases, and content management systems quietly alter how pages render. Each change can introduce a new technical issue.

Why it sticks: a single audit is easy to scope and price. It has a clear start and end point. Ongoing monitoring doesn’t sound as exciting, so it’s a harder sell.

Sites that treat technical SEO as continuous maintenance, rather than a project with a finish line, avoid the slow build-up of indexing issues, broken structured data and crawl problems that pile up over months.

Worth doing: build a simple monthly check into your reporting, even if it only covers crawl errors, indexing status and Core Web Vitals. Catching small issues early is far cheaper than fixing a backlog later.

2. If Google can find your site, it must be indexed properly

Crawling and indexing get treated as the same thing. They’re not. A page can be crawled by Google and still never make it into the index, or it can sit in a strange in-between state such as “Discovered, currently not indexed” or “Crawled, currently not indexed.”

Why it sticks: Search Console terminology is genuinely confusing, even for experienced SEOs. Most business leaders never look at this data at all. They assume a sitemap and a clean robots.txt file mean the job is done.

In reality, thin content, duplicate pages, weak internal linking and crawl budget all affect whether a page that’s been found ever earns a place in the index.

3. More pages means better SEO

This one has its roots in genuinely good advice from years ago, when broad content coverage and a wide spread of keywords were rewarded fairly reliably. Somewhere along the way, the nuance got lost, and it became “more pages, more rankings” in a lot of people’s minds. The result is bloated sites full of thin, near-duplicate pages built to target slight keyword variations.

Why it sticks: it feels intuitive. Surely more content means more chances to rank? Search engines have got much better at spotting low-value pages and either ignoring them or treating them as a signal that drags down how the wider site is perceived.

A smaller number of genuinely useful, well-structured pages will usually outperform a sprawling site full of filler.

Worth doing: before adding a new page, check whether an existing one could simply be expanded or updated instead. Consolidation often beats creation.

4. Site speed is just about Core Web Vitals scores

Core Web Vitals get a lot of attention, and rightly so, but hitting a good score in a testing tool isn’t the end goal. Plenty of sites pass their Core Web Vitals checks comfortably while still delivering a slow, frustrating experience for real users on real devices and real connections.

Why it sticks: Core Web Vitals scores are easy to measure and easy to put in a report. Real-world performance, tested across different devices, locations and network conditions, is messier and harder to summarise neatly.

The scores are a useful proxy, not the whole picture. A site can be technically compliant and still lose visitors to slow-loading images, unoptimised third-party scripts, or clunky JavaScript rendering that a lab test doesn’t fully capture.

5. Structured data guarantees rich results

Adding schema markup is often presented as a straightforward way to win rich results in search, whether that’s review stars, FAQ accordions or product pricing. Structured data tells search engines what your content is about. It doesn’t force them to display it in any particular way.

Why it sticks: the link between structured data and rich results used to feel more direct, and plenty of guides still frame it as a guarantee rather than an opportunity.

Search engines have become more selective about which rich results they show, when, and for whom, often based on content quality, page authority and even device type. Structured data still matters, not least because it helps search engines and AI tools understand and trust your content, but it’s an input into a decision, not a switch you can flip on demand.

Why these myths matter

None of these misconceptions are wildly outlandish on their own. Most have a grain of truth somewhere in their history, which is exactly why they’ve proven so hard to shift. Acting on outdated or oversimplified assumptions can lead to wasted budget, missed opportunities, and sometimes real damage to a site’s visibility.

If there’s one thread running through all five, it’s this: technical SEO rewards ongoing attention, not a quick fix. Whether that means treating audits as continuous, understanding the gap between crawling and indexing, or recognising that structured data is a conversation with search engines rather than a command, the businesses that get this right are the ones asking better questions, not settling for easy answers.

No one likes a guessing game. If you’d rather have a clear picture of what’s actually happening on your site, get in touch with us at Koozai to find out how we can help you with your digital marketing.

The post Common Misconceptions About Technical SEO (And Why They Persist) appeared first on Koozai.com

The answer is that observed AI referral traffic is the floor of AI’s commercial contribution, not the ceiling. And if you’re only reporting that number, you’re systematically understating the impact.

This post is about how to build a more complete, credible picture, one that accounts for the AI influence you can see and the influence you can’t, without making claims you can’t support.

The Four Confidence Layers

When you’re reporting on what AI search is actually doing for your business, don’t try to squeeze everything into one number. Instead, think of it as four separate buckets, each with a different level of reliability:

What you can see directly: This is traffic that arrives on your site from an AI platform and gets recorded in your analytics. Someone clicks a link in ChatGPT, lands on your site, you can see it. Solid data, but it only tells part of the story, plenty of people see your brand in an AI answer and never click, they just go and search for you later.

Clues from your own data: This is where you look for signs that AI is influencing people even when you can’t prove it directly. Things like: are more people searching for Koozai by name than usual? Is traffic growing to specific pages without any campaign pushing people there? Are more people ticking “AI assistant” when you ask how they found you on your contact form? None of these definitively prove AI drove it, but together they paint a picture.

What external tools tell you: Tools like Similarweb can estimate how much AI traffic you and your competitors are getting across the web. It’s not your own data so it’s less reliable, but it’s the only way to see how you’re doing compared to others, and to understand which types of questions are sending people to your pages in the first place.

Your best educated guess: This is where you take everything above and work out a rough commercial number for planning purposes. Something like: “We think AI influenced roughly 30% of our branded search growth this quarter. Based on how that traffic normally converts, that’s probably worth somewhere between £X and £Y in pipeline.” Be upfront that it’s an estimate with assumptions behind it; never present it as hard revenue or it’ll fall apart the moment someone asks how you got there.

Each layer answers a different question. Keep them separate in your reporting, label the confidence, and never present a modelled estimate as proof.

Setting Up GA4 to Catch What It Can

First, check whether you already have an AI channel in GA4

Go to Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic Acquisition, and set the primary dimension to Session default channel group. If you’ve had AI traffic since May 2026, you should see an AI Assistant row appearing automatically. If it’s there, that’s your starting point.
But don’t rely on it alone. The built-in channel misses Perplexity entirely, and a significant chunk of AI-driven visits still land in Direct or Referral because the referrer information gets lost along the way. To catch more of it, you need to set up a custom channel group as well.

Setting up a custom AI channel group

Go to Admin, then Data display, then Channel groups. Create a new group, add a channel called something like “AI Search”, and set it to capture traffic from the main platforms by their domain names: chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com, and any others showing up in your referral data. One thing to get right: custom channel groups apply from the date you create them and do not backfill historical data, so set this up as soon as possible. Also make sure your AI channel sits above the general Referral channel in the list  as GA4 assigns traffic to the first matching rule it finds, so if Referral comes first, your AI traffic gets absorbed into it before the AI rule fires.

What about Google’s own AI features?

This is still a blind spot in GA4. Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode doesn’t appear as a separate source, Google’s own AI surfaces stay invisible in GA4 because Google doesn’t separately attribute them. The new Search Console reports help here, because they’ll show you impressions inside those features even if GA4 can’t track the clicks cleanly. Use both together.

Even with all of this set up properly, you’re still only seeing part of the picture. The sessions you can track directly are the floor of AI’s contribution, plenty of people see you in an AI answer, don’t click, and come back later through branded search or direct. That’s why the proxy signals covered earlier in this post matter just as much as the traffic data itself.

The Survey Question Worth Adding Today

There’s one proxy signal that’s disproportionately useful relative to how easy it is to set up: a single survey question in your signup or post-purchase flow.

Something like: “Before signing up, did you come across us in an AI assistant or AI search experience, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, or Google’s AI features?”

Yes / No / Not sure. Optional. One question, no follow-up.

The insight this gives you is significant. Users who arrive via branded search but answer “yes” are the invisible AI influence; they wouldn’t have searched for you without seeing you in an AI answer first. Users who arrive via direct traffic and answer “yes” are the mobile-to-AI copy-paste cohort that GA4 is entirely blind to.

A rising “yes” rate among branded and direct visitors is one of the strongest first-party signals you have that AI is driving real commercial impact beyond what your analytics can see.

How to Report This to Leadership

Nobody’s asking you to prove AI search is responsible for every new lead. The goal is simply to put together an honest monthly picture that helps you make better decisions about where to invest time and budget.

Here’s an example of what that could look like in practice for a digital marketing agency:

What GA4 is showing us directly

450 sessions arrived from AI platforms this month. Those visitors spent significantly longer on the site than our average organic visitor and were more likely to look at our case studies and service pages. Small number, but decent quality.

What our own data suggests

Searches for our agency name are up noticeably compared to the same period last quarter, without any paid activity or PR push that would explain it. Traffic to our SEO and digital PR service pages has also grown, despite us not running any campaigns pointing specifically at them. That pattern is consistent with people seeing us mentioned somewhere and then coming to check us out. AI answers are the most likely explanation.

What third-party tools are showing

Tools like Similarweb suggest the actual number of AI-influenced visits is probably higher than the 450 GA4 is recording, because a lot of AI-driven traffic loses its referrer data before it hits your analytics. On the competitive side, a rival agency appears to be getting a larger share of AI-referred traffic in our category, which tells us there’s ground to make up.

Our planning estimate

Taking the branded search growth above our normal baseline, and applying a conservative assumption that around a quarter of it is linked to AI influence, cross-checked against the number of new enquiries who told us they found us via an AI tool, we’d estimate AI search contributed somewhere in the region of £8,000 to £14,000 of influenced pipeline this quarter. The assumptions behind that are documented separately.

That last figure is a planning number, not something to drop into a client report as proof. The minute you present an estimate as hard revenue, someone will ask exactly how you got there and if the answer involves assumptions, you’ve undermined everything else on the page. Keep it clearly labelled as an estimate, show the working, and it becomes a genuinely useful tool for deciding whether to invest more in this area.

Three Patterns to Watch For

As you build up data across these layers, a few common patterns tend to emerge:

• Scenario 1: Hidden success. AI referral sessions are flat, but branded search is up significantly, direct traffic is growing, and your survey “yes” rate is rising. Reading: the visibility is working. Users are seeing you in AI answers and coming through other channels. Don’t cut investment because the observed channel looks quiet.
• Scenario 2: Traffic without fit. AI referral sessions are up, but conversion rate from AI traffic is below your organic benchmark. Reading: you’re getting cited for prompts that don’t match your most relevant pages. Check the prompts driving AI traffic and update the landing pages they’re pointing to.
• Scenario 3: Clean case. AI sessions up, branded search up, AI-assisted conversions visible, survey signal rising, competitive AI share growing. Reading: multiple independent signals all pointing in the same direction. Scale investment, expand prompt coverage, keep validating.

Pulling It All Together

If you’ve followed this series from the start, you’ll now have a framework that covers the full picture:

• Presence tells you whether and how you appear in AI search
• Readiness tells you why your visibility looks the way it does
• Business Impact tells you whether that visibility is creating commercial value

Running these three layers together turns what could be three disconnected audits into a single, connected diagnosis. You’ll know which lever to pull next; whether that’s fixing a technical access issue, building corroboration in key third-party sources, improving how you’re described on comparison pages, or simply reporting the impact you’re already generating more clearly.

AI search measurement isn’t about more dashboards. It’s about connecting what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what it’s worth, and being willing to act on what that tells you.

This series draws on frameworks developed by SEO consultant Aleyda Solis, including her 3-layer AI search measurement model and AI search prompt library guide. We’d recommend reading her original work for the full technical detail.

The post How to Prove the Business Value of AI Search appeared first on Koozai.com

There’s a pattern we see with brands doing AI search measurement to start with. They find that they appear reasonably well for broad, top-of-funnel prompts, “what are the best tools for X?” but disappear almost entirely when a user asks something like “is [Brand] better than [Competitor] for [specific use case]?”

That’s a signal you should be paying attention to, and a readiness audit is how you work out what’s causing it.

Readiness Is Not the Same as Visibility

A common mistake is thinking that if you sort out your technical setup and create more content, your AI search visibility will improve. Sometimes that’s true. Often it isn’t.

AI search readiness is about whether the structural conditions exist for your brand to be surfaced, recommended, and accurately represented. There are ten characteristics that tend to separate brands that consistently appear in AI answers from those that don’t. We’ve drawn these from Aleyda Solis’s excellent work on AI search optimisation:

1. Accessible: Can the relevant pages be reached and rendered by AI systems? Basic, but often broken in ways that aren’t obvious.
2. Extractable: Can AI systems pull out your key answers, positioning, and differentiators from your pages cleanly? Good content that’s poorly structured won’t get summarised well.
3. Useful: Does your content genuinely answer the question better than what’s already in the AI’s answer? Adequate isn’t enough.
4. Fresh: Are your facts, pricing, and dates current? Stale content is a credibility problem with AI systems as much as with readers.
5. Differentiated: Is your positioning specific and ownable, or does it sound like every other brand in your category?
6. Recognisable: Are your brand name, category, products, and key facts explicit and machine-readable on your pages and across the web?
7. Consistent: Do those facts match across your site, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, review platforms, and press coverage? Inconsistency breeds misrepresentation.
8. Corroborated: Do independent third-party sources back up your positioning and claims?
9. Credible: Do those third-party sources carry actual weight? Getting mentioned on low-authority sites won’t move the needle the way coverage in respected publications will.
10. Transactable: Is information like pricing, plans, and feature comparisons clear enough that an AI system could actually help someone decide which option fits them?

Start From Your Visibility Gaps, Not a Blank Audit

The readiness audit becomes genuinely useful when you don’t try to audit everything at once. Instead, start from what your presence data has already surfaced.

Different visibility patterns point to different readiness gaps. For example:

• If you’re appearing but not getting cited links, the issue is likely Extractable or Accessible
• If your recommendation rate is low, look at Corroborated, Credible, and Differentiated first
• If you’re being misdescribed, the problem is almost certainly Recognisable or Consistent
• If you’re invisible at the commercial end of the funnel, Transactable, Corroborated, and Useful are the places to start

This is the direct link between Presence measurement (what we covered in the first post) and Readiness work. The visibility gaps you find in Layer 1 become the hypotheses you test in Layer 2. That’s what makes the whole framework function as a diagnostic rather than a disconnected set of reports.

A Practical Example

Take a regional removals company. Their presence data shows they appear consistently for broad prompts like “best removals companies in the UK.” But search for “best removals company for a long-distance move with piano storage in the Midlands” and they vanish.

The instinct from their side is to write more location pages. The readiness audit says otherwise.

The relevant service pages exist and are technically accessible. The issue is Extractable and Differentiated: specialist services like piano handling and long-term storage are mentioned in passing rather than clearly structured, and there’s no third-party corroboration; no trade association listings, no specialist directory coverage, no reviews that mention those specific services by name.

AI systems answering constrained, high-intent prompts like that one are drawing on sources that clearly and consistently associate a brand with those specifics. This company isn’t in those sources.

The fix isn’t a new batch of content. It’s restructuring existing service pages so the key details are easy to extract, and earning visibility in the directories and review platforms that AI systems already cite for specialist removal queries. Targeted, specific and a lot more useful than another round of generic blog posts.

Prioritising What to Fix

Once you’ve mapped your readiness gaps to likely causes, prioritise using a simple logic: likely impact on the visibility gap multiplied by commercial importance, divided by the effort required.

Some fixes are straightforward and should happen quickly; an outdated pricing page causing you to disappear from “cheapest option” queries, for instance. Others, like building meaningful analyst coverage or earning reviews on key comparison platforms, take longer but carry more weight. Both matter; they just sit in different parts of the roadmap.

The point isn’t to fix everything at once. It’s to fix the right things in the right order.

In our final post, we’ll look at the part that makes leadership pay attention: connecting AI visibility to actual business outcomes, without overclaiming or misrepresenting what the data shows.

The post The AI Search Readiness Audit appeared first on Koozai.com

To kick things off, we spoke with Erin Simmons, Managing Director at Women in Tech SEO. Erin works across the WTS community, which brings together people of marginalised genders working in SEO and marketing.

It felt like the perfect place to start. Community, trust and real human connection are all high on the agenda for marketers, especially as teams face more tools, channels and choices than ever.

In our conversation, Erin shared their thoughts on what the industry needs to remember, why Canva has become a go-to tool, and why scaling back can sometimes be the smarter growth move.

The Interview

For each Koozai Couch, we ask the same five questions to get a quick but useful snapshot of what people across digital marketing are seeing, using and rethinking.

Here’s what Erin had to say.

1. What’s one thing the industry is getting completely wrong right now?

I wouldn’t say there’s something our industry is getting wrong. I would say our industry is under an unprecedented amount of choice: where to invest, what to do, and who to do it with.

When new, shiny things show up, we get excited. That excitement can make it hard to see the forest for the trees. We get too zoomed in, priorities shift quickly, and we can end up leaving some basics and foundations by the wayside.

Things like real connection, delighting our audiences, trust and brand are a few that come to mind as of late.

2. What tool or resource has genuinely changed how you work lately?

Canva. They make it ridiculously easy to create standout creative.

Being able to showcase our members’ knowledge and stories visually really helps expand our reach and our ability to amplify them.

3. What’s a take you’ve changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

Scaling and growth doesn’t always mean doing more of the things that are working. Sometimes it means cutting back and trying something new.

We scaled from three to five conferences from 2024 to 2025. Then in 2026, we went back to three.

Our conferences are 70% of our revenue. It’s a risk to scale back. But we truly believed that investing more of our time in our digital community would pay off on our revenue line eventually, even if we couldn’t directly tie it.

And it did. Giving our time and energy to supporting our members doesn’t directly fund the business. But our members sharing about our business, sharing our partnership opportunities with their network, and their support in general does lead back to that.

4. What are you reading, watching or listening to that others in digital should know about?

Anything I can get my hands on about trust.

Rachel Botsman is an excellent trust expert. Read her books and listen to podcasts she’s been on.

5. Where do you think digital marketing is heading in the next 12 months?

I think we’re tipping back to connecting, in 1:1 and small group formats where people can have genuine, helpful conversations.

Expect to see word of mouth affect your visibility and business outcomes more than ever.

Thank you, Erin!

A huge thank you to Erin for joining us for the first ever Koozai Couch. Their answers are a useful reminder that while tools, formats and channels keep changing, the strongest marketing still comes back to trust, connection and understanding the people you’re trying to reach.

Follow Koozai for more interviews, digital marketing insights and practical ideas from people shaping the industry. Or register to get our newsletter here.

Would you like to feature on the Koozai Couch? Get in touch with us and tell us what your comments would be. We’d love to hear from you.

The post Koozai Couch: Interview with Erin Simmons appeared first on Koozai.com

It isn’t.

If your prompt library over-represents generic discovery queries, ignores different product lines, skips local competitors, or only tracks branded searches, your dashboard can look thorough while pointing you in entirely the wrong direction.

A genuinely useful prompt library is a structured sample of the AI-assisted journeys that matter most to your business. Not every possible question. Not a keyword list stretched into sentence form. A representative set of how your customers actually think, compare, and decide, with all the context they bring to it.

What Makes a Prompt Library Representative?

The starting point isn’t writing prompts. It’s defining what the library needs to represent.

That means mapping your business across five dimensions before you write a single prompt:

• Customer journey stage: Are you measuring discovery, evaluation, comparison, validation, or transaction? Each stage produces different AI outputs and different insights.
• Product or service line: A multi-product business needs separate prompt groups per offering. The topics, competitors, and decision criteria can be completely different.
• Audience or persona: A freelancer and an enterprise buyer ask different questions, use different language, and need different proof before they commit.
• Market and language: Local competitors, local sources, local regulations, and local trust signals can all change what an AI platform surfaces. Translating your UK prompts into French doesn’t make them representative for France.
• Business priority: Not all of the above carry equal commercial weight right now. The library should reflect where you actually need to improve visibility.

The Bit Most Prompt Libraries Miss: Buyer Constraints

Real AI search prompts aren’t clean and generic. They’re shaped by context. Budget. Team size. Industry. Tools the person already uses. Compliance requirements. Urgency.

“Best project management software” and “best project management software for a 20-person marketing agency that needs client approval workflows and Slack integration” are very different prompts. The second one is far more likely to resemble how your actual buyer phrases their question and it’ll produce much more useful data.

Building constraints into your prompts means you’re measuring AI visibility in the decision contexts that actually matter, not a sanitised version of your market that doesn’t quite exist.

How Many Prompts Do You Actually Need?

Quite a few businesses build prompt libraries that are either far too small to be meaningful or so large they can’t be maintained or acted on. A sensible starting point depends on business complexity:

• Single product, limited audience: 30-60 prompts
• Multi-product or strong persona segmentation: 100-250 prompts
• Enterprise, multi-country, multi-brand: 250+ prompts, organised by market, product line, and journey stage

But size isn’t the point. A smaller, well-structured library beats a large, random one every time. The goal is pattern recognition, not volume.

Where to Get Your Prompts From

Don’t start from your own assumptions about how customers ask questions. Pull from sources that reflect real behaviour:

• Non-branded search demand data
• Long-tail queries from Google Search Console that are underperforming on clicks
• Sales call notes and CRM records
• Support tickets and live chat logs
• Reviews and community language (Reddit, industry Slack groups, forums)
• People Also Ask data

The language your customers use when they’re frustrated, comparing options, or looking for reassurance is far more useful than your internal description of what you do.

Keep Platform Results Separate

One final thing that often gets overlooked: don’t blend results across platforms.

Your brand might be recommended in ChatGPT, absent from Perplexity, and misdescribed in Google’s AI Mode. If you average those into a single “AI visibility score,” you’ve hidden the specific insight that would actually tell you what to fix.

Track each platform separately. Report them separately. The differences are where the useful information lives.

Next up, we’ll look at how to use your prompt library findings to diagnose what’s actually holding your AI visibility back and how to prioritise the fixes that will have the biggest commercial impact.

The post Why Your AI Search Prompt Library Is Letting You Down (And How to Fix It) appeared first on Koozai.com

Traditional SEO gave us something fairly predictable: a ranked list of links, click data, and a measurement model centred almost entirely on Google. AI search is a different beast. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google’s AI Overviews; these platforms synthesise answers, vary outputs between sessions, and can influence a purchase decision without ever generating a click.

A potential customer could ask an AI assistant which PR tool is best for their agency, read the answer, form a clear preference, and then type your competitor’s name directly into Google. The AI platform drove that decision. Your analytics doesn’t capture this.

So the old model of measuring what’s measurable and calling it done is no longer enough on its own.

The good news: there’s a smarter way to approach this.

Three Layers That Actually Tell You What’s Going On

SEO consultant Aleyda Solis has developed a practical framework for AI search measurement that is genuinely useful. It breaks performance down into three connected layers, each answering a different question.

Layer 1: Presence – Are you actually showing up?

This is the starting point. Before you can fix anything, you need to know whether your brand is appearing in the AI answers that matter, and how it’s being represented when it does.

Presence measurement isn’t just about whether your name comes up. It covers:

• Which platforms you appear on
• Whether you’re being recommended or just listed
• Whether those mentions include a clickable link
• Whether you’re winning when AI compares you to competitors
• Whether you’re being described accurately

If an AI assistant is describing your business incorrectly to thousands of people every week, that’s a commercial problem, even if your rankings look fine.

Layer 2: Readiness – Are you structurally set up to be found?

Readiness is the diagnostic layer. It explains why your visibility looks the way it does.

If you’re appearing but not getting links, that could point to how your content is structured. If your recommendation rate is low, it might be a differentiation or trust issue. If you’re being described incorrectly, entity consistency across the web is likely the culprit.

The point of Readiness work is to stop throwing generic optimisation at a problem you haven’t diagnosed properly. Different visibility gaps have different root causes. This layer helps you find the right lever.

Layer 3: Business Impact – Is any of this actually working?

This is where measurement gets honest. AI referral traffic is a useful signal, but it’s the floor, not the ceiling, of AI’s contribution to your business.

A large proportion of AI-influenced conversions never show up as AI referral sessions. Users see your brand in an AI answer, don’t click, and then search for you directly or type in your URL. That conversion gets attributed to branded organic or direct traffic. The AI influence is invisible unless you’re measuring for it.

Business Impact measurement combines observed data (actual AI referral sessions), proxy signals (branded search trends, direct traffic lifts, survey data), and modelled estimates to give a more complete picture. None of these individually tells the whole story. Together, they get you much closer to the truth.

Why This Matters More Than Another Dashboard

The value of this three-layer approach isn’t the metrics themselves, it’s how they connect.

Presence tells you what’s happening. Readiness tells you why. Business Impact tells you whether it matters commercially. When you run these in sequence, each one hands a hypothesis to the next. That’s what turns a reporting exercise into something you can actually act on.

We’ll be going deeper on each layer over the next few posts in this series. But if you want to get started now, the first step is simple: stop treating AI visibility as a binary. Your brand either showing up or not isn’t the question. How it shows up, where, and with what effect, that’s where the real work is.

In the next post, we’ll look at how to build a prompt library that actually represents how your customers use AI and why most businesses are getting this badly wrong.

The post How to Measure AI Search Performance appeared first on Koozai.com

If you’re an SEO, a digital marketer or just generally interested in what on earth “SEO Gurus” mean when they throw out ‘agentic’ in every other sentence, SEO Unpacked is your guide to navigating the world of SEO.

In this first edition, we’re tackling search intent, and yes, we’re aware that every company, tool, person and dog has their own terms for each type of user intent, but we’re sticking to what we think are the clearest definitions.

What is search intent?

Search intent defines why a user is searching and at Koozai typically place intent under these four categories:

• Commercial
• Informational
• Navigational
• Transactional

Now you may see different terms used across the industry by different companies and tools. For example, some like to use “do, know, how, website” but regardless of how you word it, they all roughly mean the same thing. It’s very important that regardless of how you name the intents, you make sure your team and clients are informed on each, otherwise they’ll just be as confused as AIO, GEO and AEO experts being asked to explain their differences.

Why search intent matters

SEO isn’t just about simply picking out keywords with the most search volume anymore and saying “let’s pick that one”. Search engines want to return results that satisfy the user’s query. That means Google is not just looking at whether a page includes the right keywords. It is also trying to understand whether the page answers the query in the right way. Asan SEO, you need to pick the keywords with the right intent, so users not only find your page but actually stay long enough to interact.

For example, someone searching for “what is technical SEO” is probably looking for a clear explanation or beginner-friendly guide. They are unlikely to want a service page selling technical SEO and outreach.

Someone searching for “technical SEO agency”, however, is much closer to needing a provider. In that case, a commercial service page is much more likely to match the intent which means keywords relevant to commercial intent would be of more benefit not just to your SEO campaign but to the most important factor to your success: the user.

Keyword research as a whole can become a bit of a rabbit hole that quickly takes over your life when you begin to understand that intent is far deeper than just “Do they want information or do they want to buy”. One term can branch out into multiple variations, all with different intents so it’s important not to just take a tool’s word for it. Do your research too. The SERPs never lie…they’re just extremely fickle.

Anyway, less lamenting on the changing nature of search engines and more about search intent. Let’s go over what each intent means alongside a few examples. Who doesn’t love an example?

Informational intent

Informational searches happen when someone wants to learn something maybe because they’ve never heard of it before, maybe they’re checking up on a recent event people are talking about or maybe they’re just sick of overcomplicated SEO jargon and want to finally read a straightforward explanation for once.

Informational searches can take many different formats, but in our experience, a good place to start is with searches that often include words such as:

• what is
• how to
• why does
• guide
• meaning
• examples
• tips

An example would be:

“What is search intent?”

Simple right? The user is not necessarily ready to buy anything, they are looking for an explanation. For this type of query, a blog post, educational resource or a semi-sarcastic guide poking fun at the SEO industry would be a great fit.

Commercial intent

Commercial searches happen when someone is researching options before making a decision. Commercial intent sits very closely to transactional intent, with a slight difference being that the user is typically looking for information alongside the product or service they want.

These searches often include words such as:

• best
• top
• comparison
• reviews
• vs
• alternatives

An example would be:

“best SEO agency for small businesses”

The user may be ready to buy, but they are comparing options and looking for key information on why they should go with one agency over the other. This type of intent often suits comparison guides, list-style articles, product roundups or detailed category content.

Think of your website like a car dealership. The user has come to you with full intent to purchase, but they’re just not quite sure yet on what they want and equally, should they buy it. It’s your job to now sell your product or service to them.

Transactional intent

Transactional searches happen when someone is ready to take action. It’s payday and their 11pm shopping doomscroll is in full effect. They could be buying a product, requesting a quote, booking a consultation, downloading something or signing up, so you want to ensure that you are targeting keywords that match these actions.

A few examples include words such as:

• buy
• quote
• pricing
• book
• near me
• services
• agency

An example would be:

“SEO agency for ecommerce websites” or “size 9 red Adidas Sambas”

This type of query is more likely to serve a direct or related need and is best suited to a service page, product page, category page or landing page with a clear conversion path. SEOs can sometimes get too wrapped up in the infinite possibilities of keyword variations and related topics, so don’t be afraid to try and rank for the actual service or product you’re trying to promote.

Navigational intent

Navigational searches happen when someone is looking for a specific website, brand, product or page.

Examples include:

• “Koozai SEO services”
• “Google Search Console”
• “Sitebulb pricing”

In these cases, the user already knows where they want to go. We would call these types of terms ‘brand’ terms as the user is directly mentioning the company or brand that they want to see, assuming it’s your company or client’s company to begin with. Now, there’s a bit of a caveat here when it comes to brand mentions. Instead of throwing a small essay at you, I’ve split these out below.

If the brand is your or your client’s company

If for example you work for Adidas, and Adidas is either your client or your employer, this is essentially your own brand or a ‘brand term’ which SEO’s don’t typically focus on too much as the ‘real’ competition is usually ‘non-brand’ terms that don’t specifically name a brand and hold much more search demand. Your job as an SEO at this point is to simply ensure that the content matches the correct intent. For example, for ‘Adidas shoes’ you want to ensure your product pages are properly optimised for this term.

SEO is a competitive game, so if you’re not optimised and ranking for your own brand, somebody else will, especially for larger brands with products sold by others such as Adidas.

If the brand isn’t your company

If the brand is simply a product or a service that you or your client provides, such as a footwear store that sells Adidas shoes, then your goal is to treat this as a ‘non-brand’ term and again, optimise your site so that only product pages rank for this term as users looking to buy Adidas shoes won’t stay very long on an article comparing Adidas to Converse.

Why search intent affects page type

Now that you know what search intent is and how it can be influenced by brand and non-brand situations, one of the biggest mistakes in SEO is trying to rank the wrong type of page for the wrong intent. We’ve touched upon this a little, but we don’t want you leaving without a thorough explanation.

An example of a search intent conflict is if the search results for a keyword are mostly guides and blog posts,  but you’re trying to rank a sales-heavy service page. Google is already showing that users expect educational content. Not only are you trying to get the wrong audience to your page, but you’re asking Google to rank that page when its results suggest users probably are not looking for it. Imagine going to a charity shop and asking the owner if they could refer their customers to your casino. It just doesn’t work.

Likewise, if the results are mostly product pages or service pages, a long informational blog post may not be the best fit.

Before creating or optimising a page, look at what is already ranking. It’s easy to get caught up in these multi-step AI backed, API filled ‘free’ keyword research courses on LinkedIn but nothing beats going to the source and simply looking on a search engine’s results page. Search something related to the audience you’re trying to attract and review the results then ask yourself:

• Are the top results blog posts, service pages, category pages or product pages?
• Are they short and direct, or long and detailed?
• Are they educational, commercial or transactional?
• What questions do they answer?
• What format does Google seem to prefer?
• Is there an AI summary at the top?
• Are there a lot of snippets?
• What are the snippets?
• Are they mostly products or forum results?

This does not mean you should copy what is ranking, but it does help you understand what users are likely expecting, and more importantly, what Google is serving to this audience. Is there key product information being served in the AI overview that you don’t cover? Does the ‘people also ask’ contain questions that you haven’t answered? These are great snippets of content opportunities.

Search intent and keyword targeting

Search intent should also shape how you choose and group keywords. Two keywords might look similar, but if the intent is different, they may need separate pages or dedicated content.

For example:

“what is internal linking” is informational.
“internal linking strategy” may be more practical and strategic.
“technical SEO agency” is commercial or transactional.

Trying to target all of these on one page could make the page unclear. A better approach is to map keywords to the most appropriate page based on what the user is trying to do and more importantly, how much depth the user is looking for.

For example you may have a page selling a large red hoodie, so you will naturally target “large red hoodie” which falls under both commercial and transactional. Those users may also want to know if the hoodie is machine washable so they may search “machine washable hoodie” or “are hoodies machine washable”.

Now, this user is very unlikely to be looking for a four page long article on if your hoodie is machine washable or not, and so creating an article simply because it’s informational would create a lot of wasted work for no reward. Instead, you can blend commercial and informational terms together to strengthen a page.

In this case, we’d build product description content that primarily targets commercially related terms in order to rank for product related searches such as “large red hoodie” and “size large red hoodie”. We’d then use informational keywords to build out helpful content such as ‘specifications’ ‘product details’ ‘washing instructions’ and supporting FAQs. This ultimately benefits the user by matching their intent and following up with helpful information, but it also helps your general organic performance as you’re feeding additional information to search engines and AI tools which helps them rank you and match you up with those users.

If that isn’t enough bang for your buck, we’ve also included some additional examples below of how to format content related to search intent:

• A “what is” query may need a clear definition, simple explanation and examples.
• A “how to” query may need a step-by-step guide.
• A “best” query may need comparisons, pros and cons, and decision-making support.
• A service-led query may need proof, trust signals, case studies, FAQs and a clear call to action.

With the above knowledge, you now know how to combine related intents to support a page and ensure it performs stronger organically. This is especially important on larger websites where there are multiple pages covering products and similar topics. Without clear intent mapping, pages can start competing with each other or send mixed signals about which page should rank or you could end up creating yourself an infinite backlog of new pages to create, trying to match every individual’s unique intent.

Common search intent mistakes

We’ve all made mistakes, it’s part of the learning process. One common mistake, especially for newer SEOs, is choosing keywords based only on search volume. High-volume keywords can look attractive, but they are not always the most valuable. If the intent is too broad or too early in the buying journey, the traffic may not convert. If you’ve spotted a term with over 20,000 searches per month, the likelihood is that hundreds of others have spotted it too, making it far more difficult to compete for.

Another mistake is trying to make one page do too much. A page that tries to be a beginner guide, comparison article and sales page all at once can become unclear. Remember, SEO is done best when approaching it from the customer’s perspective. What would you expect to see on a page? Would a guide help you make a decision process or would it confuse you more? Asking yourself these questions not only helps you make an informed decision, but it also helps you make your case to stakeholders.

A third mistake is ignoring the client’s commercial goals. Sometimes the best SEO opportunity is not the keyword with the biggest search volume. It may be a lower-volume keyword that better matches a priority service, profitable product or high-quality lead. A business can sometimes live and breathe on one or two hero products, marketing teams may set goals to support a new product or a business may just have a great reputation for a very specific product or service.

These are the realities of SEO, and so while the SEO playbook may say you should go after those big opportunity terms, ultimately you’ll benefit the most from aligning with what makes the business the most money. This is not to say that you can’t make a case if you strongly believe there are bigger opportunities elsewhere, but in our experience SEO is a team game and it always works best when performed alongside other teams.

So what on earth does this mean?

Search intent is about understanding the reason behind the search as much as understanding how many people search it. For SEOs, it helps bridge the gap between keyword research and useful content. It tells you what type of page to create, what information to include, how to structure the content and what action the user may want to take next.

It’s extremely easy to get stuck following SEO principles and focusing only on what Google might like. Ultimately, it falls down to what the customer likes and what they want to see.

The key takeaway is simple: do not just ask, “What keyword are we targeting?” Ask, “What does the user actually want, what would I expect to see if I was in their place and does this page give it to them?”

Google is adapting daily, gone are the days of just matching keywords with what users are searching and calling the job done. Google and AI tools are prioritising their core purpose, and that is serving content that the user actually finds helpful. That is what makes search intent so important, and ensuring it’s a key factor behind your SEO.

The post SEO Unpacked: What Is Search Intent? appeared first on Koozai.com