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After all, working in digital marketing can sometimes feel like stepping into a haunted house. One minute, everything’s running smoothly. The next, an approval has mysteriously disappeared, a website has developed a mind of its own or a seemingly simple request has turned into something much bigger.

Sound familiar?

This Halloween, we’re introducing nine fictional marketing monsters inspired by the kinds of challenges people working across the industry might recognise.

From disappearing approvals and complicated websites to outdated SEO tactics and unexpected launches, there’s something lurking around every corner.

But don’t worry. We’re not just here to give you a fright.

We’ve also included some practical tips to help keep these marketing nightmares at bay.

So, without further ado, turn on the lights, grab a brew and step inside Koozai’s Marketing Hall of Horrors.

Please note: The characters and scenarios are fictional and represent broad marketing situations. They are not intended to depict any individual client, colleague or organisation.

1. The Ghost: The Disappearing Approval

“Last seen: three weeks ago. Last message: ‘Any updates?'”

Everything’s ready.

The content’s written. The designs are approved internally. The campaign is ready to launch.

There’s just one thing missing.

The final sign-off.

Days pass. Then weeks. Emails disappear into the abyss, and the approval seems to have vanished without a trace.

Then, just when you’ve almost given up hope, a message appears:

“Hi! Just checking when this is going live?”

And just like that, The Ghost is back.

Of course, delayed approvals aren’t always anyone’s fault. People are busy, priorities change and sometimes decisions take longer than expected. But when communication goes quiet, even the best-planned marketing activity can lose momentum.

How to survive The Ghost

Agree on approval processes before work begins. Make sure everyone knows who’s responsible for signing things off, when feedback is needed and what happens if deadlines change.

A clear timeline and regular communication can make all the difference.

The lesson: Even brilliant marketing needs timely decisions to keep moving.

2. Frankenstein’s Website: The Monster Nobody Dares Update

“IT’S ALIVE! Nobody knows how.”

It started as a perfectly normal website.

Then someone added a plugin.

Then another.

A new developer came along, followed by another agency, a few integrations and a collection of updates that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Fast-forward a few years, and the website has become something of a mystery.

Nobody’s entirely sure how everything fits together.

And the question everyone fears?

“Should we update WordPress?”

Silence.

Frankenstein’s Website might still be alive, but keeping it that way feels increasingly complicated.

Websites naturally develop over time, particularly as businesses grow and their needs change. The problems tend to arise when maintenance, documentation and testing don’t keep pace.

How to survive Frankenstein’s Website

Regular website maintenance is essential. Keep plugins and software updated, remove unnecessary components and make sure changes are properly tested.

It’s also worth documenting important integrations and ensuring there’s clear ownership of website maintenance.

Before major updates, make sure you’ve got reliable backups and an appropriate testing process in place.

The lesson: A well-maintained website is much less frightening than one held together by guesswork.

3. The Keyword Mummy: The SEO Tactic That Won’t Stay Buried

“Could we squeeze that keyword in one more time?”

Some things belong in the past.

Unfortunately, The Keyword Mummy hasn’t quite got the message.

This ancient marketing monster still believes the secret to SEO success is using the same keyword as many times as possible.

In the heading? Obviously.

In every paragraph? Naturally.

Three times in the same sentence? Even better.

The result is content that reads less like something written for humans and more like an attempt to summon Google’s attention.

Keywords are still an important part of SEO, but repeating them unnecessarily doesn’t make content more useful.

Search engines have become much better at understanding context, relevance and the meaning behind a search.

How to survive The Keyword Mummy

Start with what your audience actually wants to know.

Understand search intent, answer questions clearly and use relevant keywords where they fit naturally.

Well-structured, helpful content is much more valuable than awkwardly repeating the same phrase.

The lesson: Good SEO isn’t about how many times you can use a keyword. It’s about creating content that deserves to be found.

4. The Scope Vampire: The Request That Keeps Growing

“Just one tiny amendment…”

It begins innocently enough.

Could we change a heading?

Of course.

Could we add another section?

No problem.

Actually, could we update the design, add a new landing page and rethink the entire campaign?

Ah.

Meet The Scope Vampire.

This particular marketing monster has an extraordinary ability to turn a small request into something considerably larger.

And before you know it, a quick amendment has become an entirely new project.

There’s nothing wrong with ideas developing or requirements changing. In fact, being flexible is an important part of good marketing.

The challenge comes when the time, budget and resources needed to deliver those changes aren’t considered alongside them.

How to survive The Scope Vampire

Start with a clear brief that outlines the objectives, deliverables and responsibilities.

If new requirements emerge, review how they’ll affect timings, priorities and costs before agreeing on the next steps.

Good communication makes it easier to accommodate changes without putting the wider project at risk.

The lesson: Flexibility is valuable, but clear scope helps everyone know what they’re working towards.

5. The Vanity Metrics Zombie: Hungry for Impressions

“Impressions. Impressions. IMPRESSIONS.”

The latest marketing report is ready.

Leads are improving.

Conversions are looking healthy.

The campaign is helping deliver the results it was designed to achieve.

But something has caught The Vanity Metrics Zombie’s attention.

“Why have impressions dropped by 3%?”

Suddenly, everything else is forgotten.

This monster has an endless appetite for numbers that look impressive on a dashboard, even when they don’t tell the full story.

Of course, impressions, reach and traffic all have their place in marketing reporting.

But without context, they can become distractions rather than useful measures of success.

How to survive The Vanity Metrics Zombie

Before launching a campaign, agree on what success actually looks like.

Choose KPIs that reflect the objectives, whether that’s increasing brand awareness, generating enquiries, improving conversions or driving revenue.

Then use supporting metrics to explain performance rather than treating every individual fluctuation as a problem.

The lesson: The biggest number on a report isn’t always the most important one.

6. The Website Launch Jump Scare: Surprise! We’re Live!

“Surprise! We’ve launched the new website!”

It’s an exciting day.

The new website looks brilliant.

The design is fresh, the content’s in place and everyone’s ready to celebrate.

Then someone asks a question.

“Have we checked the redirects?”

Another question follows.

“What about the metadata and existing URLs?”

And finally…

“Did anyone tell SEO we were launching?”

Cue the dramatic music.

The Website Launch Jump Scare is one marketing nightmare that’s much easier to prevent than to deal with afterwards.

A website migration involves much more than changing the appearance of a site.

Existing URLs, redirects, internal links, technical SEO settings and content all need careful consideration to help protect search visibility.

How to survive The Website Launch Jump Scare

Bring SEO into the website planning process from the beginning.

Before launch, prepare a migration checklist covering important areas such as URL mapping, redirects, metadata, internal links, indexation and technical checks.

Testing before launch and monitoring performance afterwards can help identify and resolve issues quickly.

The lesson: A successful website launch needs more than great design. SEO should be part of the plan from day one.

7. The Algorithm Witch: Google’s Latest Curse

“Google has cursed us. I just know it.”

Traffic’s dipped.

A keyword has moved down a few positions.

Something looks different in the latest performance report.

There’s only one possible explanation.

Google has placed a curse on the website.

At least, that’s what The Algorithm Witch would have you believe.

Armed with a crystal ball and a growing collection of theories, this monster is convinced every change in search performance must be the result of an algorithm update.

The reality is usually a little less supernatural.

Search rankings and traffic can fluctuate for a whole range of reasons, including competition, seasonality, technical issues, changes in search behaviour and algorithm updates.

How to survive The Algorithm Witch

Start by looking at the data.

Check when changes occurred, which pages or keywords have been affected and whether there are any wider patterns.

Look at Search Console, analytics data and relevant technical information before deciding what action is needed.

Sometimes there’s a clear issue to resolve. Other times, a small fluctuation doesn’t require an immediate response.

The lesson: Good SEO decisions come from investigation, not crystal balls.

8. The Conversion Killer: Just One More Pop-Up

“What if we added another pop-up?”

You’ve landed on a website.

Before you can read the first paragraph, you’re asked to subscribe to a newsletter.

You close the pop-up.

A special offer appears.

You close that too.

Then comes a form, a chatbot and another request for your email address.

All you wanted was to find out what time the shop closes.

Unfortunately, The Conversion Killer has other ideas.

Pop-ups, forms and calls to action can all be useful tools when they’re used appropriately.

But when visitors are constantly interrupted or faced with too many competing messages, it can make the experience frustrating.

And a frustrating user experience isn’t exactly an encouragement to convert.

How to survive The Conversion Killer

Look at your website from the visitor’s perspective.

Is it easy to find important information? Are the next steps clear? Are forms asking for more information than necessary?

Review how pop-ups and calls to action work across different devices, particularly mobile.

Use conversion data and user behaviour insights to identify areas that could be improved.

The lesson: Make it easy for people to do what they came to your website to do.

9. The Feedback Poltergeist: Back to Version One

“Can we go back to version one?”

Version one looks promising.

Just a couple of tweaks needed.

Then comes version two.

And version three.

By version four, several new ideas have emerged.

Version five introduces an entirely different direction.

And by version seven?

“Actually, looking back, I think the first version was better.”

Meet The Feedback Poltergeist.

It’s a familiar challenge in any creative process where different people bring different opinions, ideas and priorities to the table.

Feedback is essential for producing good work, but when comments arrive separately or decisions aren’t clearly owned, the process can become more complicated than it needs to be.

How to survive The Feedback Poltergeist

Agree on the objectives and expectations before work begins.

Where possible, bring feedback together into one clear set of comments rather than sending multiple rounds of conflicting instructions.

Make sure there’s an agreed decision-maker and encourage feedback that explains what needs changing and why.

The lesson: Good feedback helps creative work improve. Clear feedback helps everyone get there faster.

How to Keep Your Marketing Monsters at Bay

So there we have it. Nine marketing nightmares, ranging from vanishing approvals to mysterious ranking changes and websites that nobody quite dares touch.

While our Halloween monsters are fictional, the lessons behind them are worth remembering.

Good marketing rarely depends on one clever trick or a magic formula.

More often, success comes down to getting the fundamentals right:

• Clear communication: Make sure everyone understands responsibilities, approvals and expectations.
• Good planning: Agree on objectives, project scope and key milestones before work begins.
• Regular maintenance: Keep websites healthy, secure and technically sound.
• Meaningful measurement: Focus on results that support business goals, not just impressive-looking numbers.
• A positive user experience: Make it easy for people to find information and take action.
• Evidence-based decisions: Use data and research to understand problems before deciding how to solve them.

None of these might sound particularly spooky, but they can save a surprising amount of trouble.

And that’s something worth celebrating.

Need a Hand Keeping the Marketing Nightmares Away?

Whether you’re looking to improve your SEO, get more from your content, make your website work harder or review your wider digital marketing strategy, Koozai can help.

Our team works across SEO, Paid Search, Paid Social, Digital PR and Content Marketing to help businesses get more from their digital activity.

Get in touch with Koozai to talk through your marketing goals.

And before you go, we’d love to know…

Which Marketing Hall of Horrors character did you recognise most?

Let us know on LinkedIn or Instagram, and feel free to share your own anonymous marketing horror stories.

Just leave the real names out of it. Some things are better left buried.

Happy Halloween from the Koozai team! 🎃

The post Koozai’s Marketing Hall of Horrors: 9 Marketing Nightmares and How to Avoid Them appeared first on Koozai.com

So, we decided to crunch the numbers.

We analysed Google search data across 15 major UK cities to find out where people are searching most for help appealing parking fines.

And the results might surprise you as Manchester tops the rankings when population is taken into account, followed closely by Southampton and Newcastle. Meanwhile, London, despite generating the most searches overall, comes in tenth.

These are the cities searching the most for appealing parking

In the top spot is Manchester, with an estimated 52.7 monthly parking appeal-related searches per 100,000 residents, according to our analysis where we used Google Keyword Planner data to help us.

Southampton follows closely with 50.1 searches per 100,000 residents, while Newcastle completes the top three with 49.9.

The results reveal a striking difference between cities, with Manchester recording more than twice the population-adjusted search interest of Leeds, which ranks last among the 15 locations studied.

And while London dominates the overall figures, its population-adjusted search rate is considerably lower than those of several smaller cities.

Which UK Cities Search Most for Help Appealing Parking Fines?

Source: Koozai analysis of Google Keyword Planner data covering October 2025 to September 2026. Rankings are based on 16 parking appeal-related search terms across 15 selected UK cities, adjusted using mid-2025 population estimates. Figures are rounded estimates and close rankings should be interpreted cautiously.

Manchester Records Almost Twice Birmingham’s Search Interest per Resident

One of the biggest contrasts uncovered by the research is between Manchester and Birmingham.

Both cities generate an estimated 310 parking appeal-related searches each month across the keywords analysed.

But after adjusting for population, Manchester records 52.7 monthly searches per 100,000 residents, compared with Birmingham’s 26.3.

That means Manchester’s population-adjusted search rate is approximately double Birmingham’s, despite the two cities recording identical overall search volumes.

Manchester also sits well ahead of neighbouring Liverpool, which records 31.5 monthly searches per 100,000 residents.

The difference makes Greater Manchester and the North West an especially interesting region for understanding how people look for advice about parking charges.

Southampton Ranks Second Despite Having Far Fewer Searches Than London

Southampton emerges as one of the standout locations in Koozai’s research.

The Hampshire city records just 130 estimated parking appeal-related searches each month, compared with London’s 2,970.

However, once population is considered, Southampton rises to second place, recording 50.1 monthly searches per 100,000 residents.

That’s approximately 54% higher than London’s population-adjusted rate.

The finding highlights how smaller cities can have disproportionately high levels of search interest, even when their total search numbers are relatively modest.

For Southampton, the result puts the city ahead of Manchester’s larger regional neighbours, as well as Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff and both major Scottish cities included in the study.

Newcastle Takes Third Place, Ahead of Glasgow, Liverpool and Leeds

Newcastle is another strong performer in the population-adjusted rankings.

With 160 estimated monthly searches and a rate of 49.9 per 100,000 residents, the city takes third place.

Newcastle’s search rate is approximately 59% higher than Liverpool’s and more than double that of Leeds.

The result is particularly interesting given that Newcastle generates fewer searches overall than several cities it outranks.

Once again, the figures demonstrate how population can completely change the picture when comparing local search behaviour.

London Generates the Most Parking Appeal Searches but Doesn’t Top the Rankings

London is comfortably the largest source of parking appeal-related search demand among the cities studied, so there’s no surprise there.

Across the selected keywords, the capital generates approximately 2,970 searches every month, compared with 310 each for Manchester and Birmingham.

Yet London’s much larger population puts its search rate at 32.6 per 100,000 residents.

That leaves the capital in tenth place, behind Manchester, Southampton, Newcastle, Coventry, Cardiff, Nottingham, Bristol, Leicester and Edinburgh.

London’s position shows why the biggest search volume doesn’t necessarily mean the highest relative level of interest.

What Are People Searching for When They Want to Challenge a Parking Fine?

We didn’t just stop at locations either, Koozai wanted to know what phrases are actually searching for, so we examined national search demand to identify what people use when looking for help with their parking appeals.

The findings show substantial interest in challenging penalty charge notices, appealing parking tickets and understanding the options available when disputing a charge.

The UK’s Most Popular Parking Appeal Searches

Source: Google Keyword Planner, UK average monthly search estimates, October 2025 to September 2026. Related phrases may be grouped as close variants, so individual figures should not be treated as entirely separate search audiences.

The single most searched phrase in the national analysis is “challenge PCN”, with approximately 2,400 searches per month. Other popular searches include “appeal parking ticket”, with 1,900 monthly searches, and “parking charge notice appeal”, with 1,600.

The findings highlight demand for practical information about challenging parking charges, particularly around the different terms and procedures used for parking enforcement.

What About Drivers Who Paid for Parking but Still Got a Ticket?

Receiving a parking ticket after paying for a space is a particularly frustrating situation, and one that prompted Koozai to investigate whether people were specifically searching for help with payment-related disputes.

The research examined phrases including “paid for parking but got a ticket” and “parking ticket wrong registration”.

These searches returned relatively low estimated national volumes, with approximately 10 searches per month for each of those two phrases in Google Keyword Planner.

That doesn’t mean payment disputes are rare. Someone who has paid for parking but still received a charge might simply search for “appeal parking ticket” rather than describe the circumstances in full.

However, the available data cannot establish how many searches involve drivers who had already paid, or whether the parking charges they received were justified.

What it does show is that people across the UK are actively looking for information about challenging parking tickets, with noticeable differences between the cities studied.

What Does This Research Tell Us About Parking Fine Appeals?

The findings reveal clear differences in where people search for help challenging parking charges.

Manchester, Southampton and Newcastle record the highest population-adjusted search interest among the 15 cities analysed, while London dominates the overall search volumes.

These results don’t necessarily mean that drivers in the highest-ranking cities receive more parking fines, or that local parking enforcement is less fair.

Instead, they reveal where demand for online advice about parking appeals appears strongest.

And with searches covering everything from challenging a PCN to disputing a private parking charge, the data highlights the importance of clear, accessible information for motorists trying to understand their options.

How Koozai Conducted the Research

Koozai analysed Google Ads Keyword Planner data for October 2025 to September 2026, examining estimated average monthly search volumes across 15 selected UK cities.

The research included Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Coventry, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield and Southampton.

A consistent set of 16 keywords directly associated with appealing, challenging, disputing or contesting parking tickets was used to calculate the core rankings.

Estimated monthly volumes were combined for each city and divided by the city’s mid-2025 population, then multiplied by 100,000.

Population estimates were sourced from the Office for National Statistics and National Records of Scotland. Local authority populations were used for the cities studied, with Greater London used for London.

Google Keyword Planner search volumes are rounded estimates and may group similar search terms together. The figures represent search demand rather than unique individuals or actual parking tickets. Geographic search targeting may not exactly match local authority boundaries.

Because of these limitations, the rankings should be interpreted as an indicative comparison of online search interest, particularly where cities have similar scores.

The research covers 15 selected cities, rather than every UK city, and does not measure the number of parking tickets issued, the fairness of charges or appeal success rates.

About Koozai

Koozai is a UK digital marketing agency specialising in SEO, digital PR, paid media, content marketing and search strategy.

Through original search data research, Koozai explores consumer behaviour, regional trends and the questions people are asking online.

Research conducted by Koozai in October 2026 and is therefore subject to change. 

The post The UK Cities Searching Most for Help Appealing Parking Fines appeared first on Koozai.com

This time, we spoke with Leonardo Chinchilla, Professor at the University of Costa Rica, and he shared about the risks of mass automation, why the human side of writing matters more in an AI-heavy market, and why digital marketing may need to take a few steps backwards to move forwards.

Leonardo is a writer, educator and digital marketing professional with experience in digital PR, persuasive communication and audience-focused writing. As a published fiction author and independent blogger, he combines creative storytelling with the strategic use of language to engage different audiences.

He currently teaches composition and rhetoric at the University of Costa Rica, with a particular focus on creating compelling, well-structured narratives. His work also connects academic thinking with the practical use of technologies such as AI in marketing.

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 Leonardo had to say.

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

Mass automation.

It seems to me that, in the process of adapting to the market, we’ve automated so many things that we’re starting to lose our grip on what makes a business feel genuine: the human touch.

Automated systems can work brilliantly for digital natives, but they can also leave behind older generations and people with additional accessibility needs.

There’s still a real need for humanity in our processes, whether that’s customer service, placing an order or simply giving someone confidence that a brand is legitimate rather than a scam.

We need to make sure that efficiency doesn’t come at the expense of being inclusive, accessible and human.

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

Adobe Express.

I find it much more user-friendly than Canva, but the biggest game changer for me has been its scheduling and integration features.

I’ve linked my LinkedIn and Instagram accounts, so I can plan a whole content strategy from one application.

It also lets you customise the messaging for each platform, which means I can tweak content as needed rather than simply publishing exactly the same thing everywhere.

Having the planning, creation and scheduling parts of the process together has made managing content much easier.

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

The idea that AI will replace us and our creativity.

I deal with AI-generated writing every day and, when it comes to copy, I still find human writing far more compelling than anything produced by AI, regardless of how specific my instructions are to tools such as Claude or ChatGPT.

I think our increased exposure to AI-generated content has also made people less interested in writing that feels machine-produced and more interested in identifying the human behind the narrative.

For that reason, the copy that sells can be full of texture. Different rhythms and punctuation, flashes of personality and sparks of metaphorical or creative writing can all help the person behind the words come through.

AI won’t replace us as long as we keep nourishing our own writing rather than allowing it to be moulded by AI.

That also means continuing to read work written by people. If we want to produce distinctly human writing, we need to keep exposing ourselves to it.

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

I’m currently re-reading Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari.

It’s one of those books you can read more than once and still come away with a new understanding each time.

For me, it raises meaningful questions about the ethics of implementing AI in our lives and, consequently, in digital marketing.

The book looks far into the future, but some of the questions it raises now feel remarkably close to our present.

For anyone thinking about how technology could influence people, behaviour and society, it gives you plenty to consider.

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

Digital marketing is going forwards by taking a few steps backwards.

It’s time for us to adapt to smarter consumers.

If people lose interest in reading a description once they believe it was produced by AI, perhaps because of its sales-focused and overly optimistic tone, we’ll need to approach our writing with an increasingly sharp and educated human eye.

The same applies to images. If audiences are becoming tired of AI-generated imagery because there’s so much of it, we’ll need to find ways to bring human elements back in and give the message room to cut through the noise.

We used to fight the noise created by competitors with strong reputations. Now, we also have to fight some of the noise we’re creating ourselves through the speed and volume of AI-assisted content.

That means we need to write as sharply as ever.

That’s our next challenge.

Thank you, Leo!

A huge thank you to Leonardo for joining us on the Koozai Couch.

His answers highlight a challenge that marketers are likely to keep coming back to: technology can make our work faster and more efficient, but efficiency alone doesn’t make communication effective.

As AI makes it easier to produce more content, standing out could increasingly depend on the things that are harder to automate. Personality, judgement, creativity and genuine human understanding all have a part to play.

For marketers, the answer may not be to reject AI. It may simply be to make sure the technology supports the human behind the work rather than drowning them out.

Catch up on previous Koozai Couch interviews

Want to hear more perspectives from across digital marketing?

Catch up with Sean Barber, SEO Manager at Macmillan Cancer Support and host of Search with Sean, or read our interview with Erin Simmons, Managing Director at Women in Tech SEO.

Keep an eye on the Koozai blog for more Koozai Couch interviews, practical digital marketing insights and opinions from people working across the industry.

The post Koozai Couch: Interview with Leonardo Chinchilla appeared first on Koozai.com

Customer behaviour is constantly changing and can differ throughout the year. Your paid strategy should also be changing depending on how your customers behave, meaning you shouldn’t be relying on the same functions January through to December.

Demand tends to change based on weather, holidays, financial pressures, buying cycles and other seasonal factors. Each and ever factor can change your customer behaviour on how they shop or use your services. A campaign that performs well in the summer most likely needs a different approach in the winter. Adapting to seasonality is key in maximising your returns, and it’s not as easy as turning campaigns on and off.

Start by understanding when demand actually changes

If you have been running PPC campaigns for a while, you’re probably aware of seasonality already. You’re more than likely already aware of your peak seasons. For those who don’t or even if you already do, it’s still worth it to regularly check historical performance to identify patterns in the usual metrics such as impressions, clicks, conversions, CPA and conversion rates.

It’s best to compare this against your actual sales or qualified leads to understand your peak periods.

During the year, search volume can rise and fall but it doesn’t necessarily mean the searches are less valuable. Just because you’re out of peak, doesn’t mean that you can’t obtain value. Identify your peak, shoulder and quite periods and build your strategy around that.

Adapt your budget to demand

The most effective approach is to adjust how much you spend per month on your campaigns. You don’t have to apply and spend the same amount every month as this can lead to high costs on certain periods.

During periods of high demand, additional budget can help capture more valuable searches but during quieter months, taking action, identifying how your customers behave, and reducing spend can help you save spend for the peak period to maximise your return. However, avoid automatically cutting budgets just because you’ve entered a traditionally quieter period. Check the data, and adjust depending on what you can see.

Consider how competition changes too

Something to take into consideration is that it’s not only your customers behaviour that changes throughout the year. It’s also worth looking at competitors too. Their strategies might change throughout the year so it’s worth keeping an eye on what they’re doing too. Have they changed their ad copy? What about their images and videos? Are they increasing their bids/spending more than usual?

The more you are in your peak period, the more advertisers entering auctions can push CPCs up. This can mean paying more for the same keywords you have been targeting. This is one of the key points to note. It’s worth looking at the data to see if you’re beginning to spend more in your peak periods, and adjust bids and make ad copy as relevant as possible to capture the right traffic.

On the other hand, quieter periods can lead to more opportunities as competitors could reduce spend and bids giving you the prospect to appear ahead of them.

Seasonality should therefore be considered from both a demand and competition perspective.

Change your messaging with the season

Your ad copy is as important as the budget you place in your campaigns, which means the ad copy needs to reflect what matters to your customers at particular points in the year. Rather than running the exact same headlines and descriptions for 12 months, have a think about introducing seasonally relevant benefits. For example, artificial grass is more likely to be bought in spring and summer. By changing the ad copy to reflect pain points such as having a muddy garden in the winter, you can alleviate those issues and engage with your audience via the right ad copy and change the ad copy to mud-free, low-maintenance gardens throughout wet weather.

The product hasn’t changed, but the customer’s motivation might have.

Don’t react too quickly to short-term changes

Sometimes it’s easy to get bogged down on data and make quick decision based on what you’ve seen over the last week. One poor week doesn’t indicate a seasonal decline so it’s best to look at long term data and compare it with previous years if you can. Weather, competitor activity, holidays and even unusually strong previous periods can distort comparisons.

Measure seasonality beyond CPL

A higher CPL during a particular season isn’t necessarily bad if those leads are more likely to become customers.

One metric to keep in mind is your CPL. Sometimes this can be a decent indicator of seasonality and customer behaviour. A higher CPL doesn’t mean bad leads. It’s best to compare:

• Cost per lead
• Conversion rate
• Qualified lead rate
• Cost per qualified lead
• Lead-to-sale rate
• Cost per acquisition
• Revenue

This gives you a much better understanding of which seasons are genuinely most valuable.

To understand this further, read through our blog on CPL and leads.
The Cheapest Lead Isn’t Always the Best Lead

Adapt to your customers, not the calendar

Seasonality strategies doesn’t just mean to spend more in summer and less in winter. It’s about understanding your audience, how they search, why they search and finding what they’re looking for. It’s about altering your strategy via ad copy, images, bid adjustments etc. The strongest strategies adapt to their customers throughout the year.

Seasonality shouldn’t tell you when to stop advertising. It should tell you when, where and how your PPC strategy needs to change.

The post How Seasonality Should Change Your PPC Strategy appeared first on Koozai.com

What has changed is how people find and evaluate information about your business. They might discover your brand through Google, see your expertise referenced by an industry publication, encounter your product in an AI-generated answer, read a discussion on Reddit or see your research quoted by a journalist.

The information may originate on your website, but the interaction can happen somewhere else.

Your website remains the foundation. It’s where you control the information you publish, demonstrate your expertise, explain your products and services, and give customers somewhere to take action.

But your search presence now extends well beyond your own domain.

AI search is growing, but Google isn’t going anywhere

It would be easy to look at the growth of AI search and assume people are abandoning Google.

The data doesn’t support that.

Research from Wix, using Similarweb data, found that AI search platforms received 27.4 billion visits globally in Q1 2026, compared with 250.8 billion visits to Google. AI search visits increased 42.8% year on year, compared with 2.4% growth for Google.

AI search accounted for 9.2% of search traffic compared with Google in Q1 2026, up from 7.8% in Q1 2025. Average monthly AI search users also increased from 851 million in Q4 2025 to 904 million in Q1 2026.

The more useful conclusion isn’t that AI is replacing Google.

It’s that search is expanding.

People can use Google for one task, ChatGPT for another, and a specialist publication, social platform or community for something else. They don’t need to choose one search behaviour and abandon the others.

There is an important limitation to the Wix research. Its definition of AI search covers dedicated platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot and Grok. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode aren’t separated from Google’s traditional search data in the analysis.

So these figures shouldn’t be treated as a complete measurement of every form of AI-powered search.

They do show that AI search is now large enough and growing quickly enough to deserve attention.

What’s actually changing?

Traditional search has generally worked like this:

Query – search results – website – action

AI search can introduce another route:

Question – AI-generated answer – sources – website or action

A search engine can return several documents and leave the user to assess them.

An AI system can synthesise information from multiple sources before presenting an answer.

The user may still visit the underlying websites. They may also get enough information from the answer itself to continue their research elsewhere.

That creates a gap between visibility and traffic.

A brand can be visible without receiving a click. If someone sees your business while researching a service, discovers your expertise through a cited source or encounters your research while comparing options, you’ve entered the consideration process.

The challenge is understanding which of those interactions actually matter commercially.

Your website is still the source

The rise of AI search doesn’t change the fundamental role of your website.

If you want your business to be associated with a particular subject, product, service or area of expertise, your website is one of the places where you control that information.

You can publish:

• Original research and data
• Expert commentary
• Product and service information
• Case studies
• First-hand experience
• Detailed guides
• Pricing and commercial information
• Evidence supporting your claims
• Information that helps customers make decisions

That content gives search engines something to discover. It also gives other people something to reference.

Google’s guidance on AI features and your website continues to point back to established Search fundamentals. Pages need to be crawlable, indexable and eligible to appear in Search, while content should be useful and created for people. Google also states that there are no additional technical requirements specifically for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode.

So while the search experience is changing, the foundations haven’t disappeared.

Technical SEO still matters. Useful content still matters. Clear information about your business still matters.

Your search presence is bigger than your domain

The bigger change is what happens after you publish that information. Imagine a business publishes original research on its website. A journalist uses the findings in an article. An industry publication quotes one of the company’s experts. Someone discusses the research on Reddit. Another website references the data.

An AI platform encounters those sources when answering a related question.

The original information still lives on the website, but its reach isn’t confined to the website.

Your search presence now extends across the wider web.

Wix’s research into on-page factors for AI visibility supports this broader view. Its analysis found correlations between AI visibility and factors beyond a website itself, including digital PR, social media, Wikipedia and forums such as Reddit.

That doesn’t prove that a mention on one of these platforms causes a site to appear in AI results. It does show why AI visibility shouldn’t be treated as purely an on-page SEO problem.

Digital PR is part of the search strategy

This is where digital PR becomes particularly important.

Digital PR is often measured through coverage and links, but its role can be broader.

If your business publishes original research and a respected industry publication references it, someone else has independently chosen to talk about your expertise. That creates another source of information about your brand.

Your website can say:

• We are experts in this subject

A third-party article can provide another piece of evidence:

• This business has been referenced for its expertise in this subject.

Those are different signals.

That doesn’t mean every mention is valuable. Relevance and credibility matter. A meaningful reference in a publication your target audience trusts is very different from a brand name appearing on an unrelated website.

It also doesn’t mean digital PR replaces SEO.

The two activities can support each other.

A strong piece of original research can:

1. Provide useful information on your website.
2. Give search engines something substantial to discover.
3. Give journalists and publishers something worth covering.
4. Create opportunities for expert commentary.
5. Generate relevant third-party mentions and links.
6. Add to the wider body of information available about your brand.

The strongest campaigns don’t create content simply to fill a blog.

They create something other people have a reason to reference.

Your website helps establish what your brand is known for

Your business also needs to be clear and consistent about who you are, what you do and the subjects you have genuine expertise in.

That information can come from your website, but it can be reinforced through credible third-party coverage.

For example, if your website demonstrates expertise in technical SEO, your experts contribute commentary to relevant publications, and your original research is referenced by industry sources, those different pieces of information reinforce the same association.

Search engines and AI systems aren’t only matching individual keywords. They’re also trying to understand businesses, people, topics and the relationships between them.

That doesn’t mean publishing the same information everywhere or trying to manufacture mentions.

It means making sure the information that exists about your business is accurate, consistent and supported by evidence.

Your website establishes that information. Digital PR and other third-party activity can help reinforce it.

Your website becomes more important as intent increases

There is another reason the website isn’t going away.

The more complex the decision, the more information a customer needs before taking action.

Someone searching:

“What is technical SEO?” may not need to visit your website.

Someone asking:

“Which technical SEO agency should we appoint?” needs considerably more information.

They may want to see:

• Services
• Case studies
• Expertise
• Team information
• Client experience
• Credentials
• Reviews
• Commercial information
• Contact details

An AI-generated answer can help someone discover and shortlist a business.

It can’t replace every reason someone needs to visit that business’s website.

The website remains the place where a customer can validate the decision and take action.

AI search changes what visibility means

Traditional SEO has made us comfortable with a fairly simple model:

Impressions – clicks – website sessions – conversions

Those metrics still matter.

But AI search can create another path.

Someone might ask an AI platform for recommendations and see your brand mentioned. They might never click the citation, then search for your brand separately or return later through direct traffic.

That interaction may be valuable, but it won’t necessarily appear as an AI referral session in your analytics.

There’s also a difference between a mention and a citation.

A brand can be mentioned in an AI response without receiving a link. A citation provides a source that the user can follow.

Both contribute to visibility, but they shouldn’t be treated as interchangeable measures.

There isn’t yet a single standard metric for AI visibility, either. Different tools can measure mentions, citations, prompts, sources or share of answers in different ways.

For now, AI visibility is better treated as a collection of signals rather than a single definitive KPI.

Don’t abandon SEO. Don’t chase AI visibility either.

The growth of AI search creates two tempting reactions.

The first is to assume traditional SEO no longer matters.

The second is to start producing content specifically for AI platforms without considering whether that content is useful to customers.

Neither is particularly helpful.

Wix’s research found that traditional organic search traffic was the strongest predictor of AI visibility within its dataset. Sites with at least 50 organic search visits per month were 8.2 times more likely to be discovered than sites with minimal or no organic search traffic.

That isn’t evidence that organic traffic directly causes AI visibility, but it does reinforce an important point:

Strong SEO foundations and AI visibility aren’t opposing strategies.

The same work also found correlations between AI visibility and factors such as internal linking, structured formatting, metadata and consistent publishing.

So don’t throw away the foundations while chasing the latest AI tactic.

What should businesses do now?

1. Make your website worth referencing

Don’t focus solely on producing more content.

Create information that adds something.

Original data, expert analysis, useful research and genuine first-hand experience give people a reason to reference your website.

If the content could have been produced by any business in your sector, ask whether it does enough to establish why your business should be the source.

 2. Keep your technical SEO foundations strong

Make sure important content can be crawled, indexed and understood.

Review:

• Internal linking
• Indexation
• Structured data
• Page accessibility
• Content rendering
• Site architecture
• Important commercial pages

3. Give digital PR something to work with

If you want coverage, create something worth covering.

That could be:

• Original research
• Proprietary data
• Industry analysis
• Expert commentary
• Consumer research
• New tools
• Useful datasets
• Strongly evidenced insights

A press release about how brilliant your business is isn’t likely to create the same value as information a journalist actually wants to use.

4. Look beyond links

When evaluating digital PR, ask more than:

How many links did we get?

Consider:

• Which publications mentioned us?
• Was the coverage relevant?
• Were our experts quoted?
• Was our research referenced?
• Did it reach the right audience?
• Did branded search behaviour change?
• Did referral traffic increase?
• Are we appearing for relevant AI queries?

Links remain useful, but they’re only one outcome.

5. Build expertise around the subjects that matter commercially

If you want to be associated with a particular topic, your website, PR activity and wider presence should support that association.

That means being consistent about:

• The subjects you publish about
• The expertise you demonstrate
• The evidence you provide
• The people representing your business
• The publications and communities where your expertise appears

You don’t need to be everywhere.

You need to be credible in the places that matter.

6. Measure the whole picture

Google is already expanding how it reports search performance.

In September 2026, Google announced Search Console reporting for web multimodal search, including searches involving Google Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads and “Search this image”.

That’s another indication that search behaviour is becoming harder to capture through one traditional traffic metric.

Your reporting doesn’t need to become enormous.

Instead, think about three areas.

Owned visibility

• Organic impressions
• Rankings
• Organic clicks
• Organic traffic
• Conversions
• Revenue

Earned visibility

• Digital PR coverage
• Relevant brand mentions
• Expert commentary
• Research citations
• Industry publication coverage
• Relevant links
• Referral traffic

AI visibility

• Brand mentions
• Citations
• Share of visibility
• Competitor comparisons
• AI referral traffic
• The topics and questions for which your brand appears

Then connect those measures to commercial outcomes.

If you’re tracking AI mentions but can’t explain why they matter to the business, you’ve probably got a measurement problem rather than an AI search problem.

So, is your website becoming less important?

No.

Search is becoming bigger than your website.

Your website remains the foundation because it’s where you can publish and control the information you want associated with your brand.

SEO helps make that information discoverable.

Digital PR helps get your expertise referenced elsewhere.

Search engines and AI platforms can then surface information from across that wider ecosystem.

The job for marketers is therefore broader than getting someone from Google to your website. You need to build a search presence that supports discovery, consideration and conversion wherever those interactions happen.

Your website still matters.

The opportunity is to stop treating it as the entire search strategy.

The post Is Your Website Becoming Less Important in Search? appeared first on Koozai.com

CPL is one of the most reported metrics when judging campaign performance. It’s easy to understand and it gives you a good idea on how your campaign is running as well as the costs of your conversions. Running multiple campaigns with different strategies, audiences, and creatives could give you entirely different CPLs, and it’s tempting to assume that a campaign with a cheaper CPL is performing better when in reality this only tells you the cost of leads but not the real value.

Not all leads are created equal

Receiving a lead from someone submitting a form on your website doesn’t automatically indicate they’re a good prospect. Leads can come from people outside your target market, or for services you don’t offer indicating low-intent prospects. Your CPL might be on the low side, but if you’re seeing irrelevant leads, then is the cheap CPL really worth it? Generating fewer but more relevant leads can be much more valuable to the business, and paying more can sometimes lead to better results overall.

A simple example: £20 leads vs £50 leads

With a £2,000 spend, you might be looking to maximise volume of leads, and at the beginning of your campaigns, you might have used specific settings to achieve as many leads as possible. Ideally, you’ve figured out a stable CPL for your business but is it really telling you the quality?

Campaign A generates 100 leads at £20 each = £2,000 spend.
Campaign B generates 40 leads at £50 each = £2,000 spend.

At first glance, Campaign A looks significantly better, but if Campaign A produces 2 customers while Campaign B produces 8, the picture completely changes. The real question becomes cost per customer (conversion), rather than simply cost per lead. Of course, the next step is identifying the quality of these leads.

Lead quality should sit alongside lead volume

When running campaigns to obtain leads, it’s best not to optimise to generate the maximum number of leads as possible as this can point to increases in costs as accounts won’t have any defined guardrails to improve performance.

Consider whether your campaigns are reaching the types of customers the business actually wants to convert. Look at the keywords you’re targeting and ensure the search terms are correct. Negate any irrelevant traffic from the campaigns or accounts so you’re not spending on traffic that will never convert in the first place. If you’re already seeing cheaper CPLs, you’re most likely already doing this but it’s always worth looking at the search terms on the regular to see if the traffic that’s coming through is 100% accurate and relevant.

Other elements to focus on include revising your locations and making sure you’re targeting the right areas. We come across many accounts that target the UK as a whole, and although that’s fine, we would always recommend breaking the UK down by counties and then once you have enough data, you can then adjust and optimise bids based on locations. You might find that specific areas bring in better leads, so why not adjust location bids and increase your potential return.

Meta Optimisations

One of the ways to both decrease CPLs and increase volume is by using Meta’s Instant Forms instead of driving potential customers to your website. Instant Forms is a brilliant way to obtain new leads, with the option of connecting the form directly to a spreadsheet or your CRM.

The reason why Instant Forms are better comes down to a couple of different factors. People scrolling on social media don’t usually like to leave the platform to a website, so by using Instant Forms, you’re already alleviating that element. Instant Forms are also heavily customisable, meaning you can include every form field from your site into the form and you can apply more fields/questions to further qualify your audience.

Connecting the Instant Form to your CRM means you can carry on seamlessly without interruption. It’s worth noting that integrating it with a spreadsheet is also an easy way to see your new leads, but this is more of a manual process so it’s worth connecting to your CRM where possible.

Cheap leads don’t pay the bills, customers do

CPL is a useful metric but it should never be viewed in isolation. There are multiple factors to consider and focusing on obtaining a better quality of leads should always take priority. Whether it’s by looking at bidding strategies, adjusting location or ad scheduling bids, using instant forms and further qualifying your audiences, all of these should put you in the right steps to obtaining higher quality leads.

Ultimately, businesses should judge paid advertising on the quality and commercial value of the customers it generates rather than the CPL values that appear on platforms.

The next time your CPL falls, don’t just ask how much you’re saving. Ask whether those leads are actually turning into business.

The post The Cheapest Lead Isn’t Always the Best Lead appeared first on Koozai.com

A Koozai study in collaboration with SISTRIX

Where do UK travellers actually want to fly and which journeys have us reaching for the metaphorical sofa cushions in search of a cheaper fare?

Koozai, in collaboration with SISTRIX, analysed 3,720 UK Google flight-search keywords to uncover where people want to fly, which routes generate the most demand and where travellers are most actively hunting for cheaper fares.

We compared general flight searches with searches specifically containing “cheap flights”, revealing some striking differences between popularity and price-led search behaviour.

We also analysed SISTRIX search visibility across the same generic flight keyword set to see which airlines, comparison sites and booking platforms are most prominent when people search.

The findings show there isn’t one single UK flight market. Search behaviour changes considerably depending on where people are travelling from, where they’re going and whether finding a lower fare is part of the search itself.

The UK’s most searched flight routes

London dominates the highest-volume individual routes, although the destinations themselves are varied.

London to Paris is the most searched route in the dataset, generating an average 9,710 Google searches per month across the tracked generic flight queries.

Amsterdam follows at 8,370, while London to Porto attracts 7,450 searches.

Long-haul travel also makes an appearance near the top. London to Los Angeles generates 5,830 monthly searches, placing it ahead of London to Lisbon, Barcelona, Dubai and New York.

The most searched flight routes

London’s presence is hardly surprising. What becomes much more interesting is what happens when we stop letting the capital hog the microphone.

Paris is the UK’s most searched destination

Aggregating the tracked routes by destination puts Paris firmly at the top, with 31,880 average monthly searches.

Amsterdam follows with 29,190, while Dublin generates 22,520.

There’s then a sizeable drop to Barcelona at 15,870.

The 20 destinations attracting the most flight-search demand

European city breaks dominate, but beach destinations sit comfortably alongside them, while New York, Dubai and Los Angeles bring long-haul routes into the top 20.

London isn’t the whole story

London generates 136,020 monthly searches across the generic routes tracked, followed by Manchester at 64,670.

Edinburgh produces 33,790, Bristol 27,510, Glasgow 24,280 and Birmingham 20,050.

But comparing raw totals alone risks missing the interesting bit.

Different parts of the UK search for markedly different destinations.

The most searched destination from major UK departure points

That regional variation gives a rather different picture from a simple national league table.

Amsterdam has particularly strong regional appeal

Paris may win nationally, but Amsterdam repeatedly takes first place outside some of the UK’s biggest departure markets.

It is the most searched destination in the dataset from Bristol, Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff, Southampton, Norwich and London City.

Norwich is particularly striking.

Searches from Norwich to Amsterdam reach 1,070 per month, making Amsterdam by far the largest destination in the Norwich data.

Bristol also narrowly prefers Amsterdam to Paris: Amsterdam receives 2,510 monthly searches compared with 2,300 for Paris and 2,160 for Dublin.

Glasgow follows the same pattern, with Amsterdam at 2,050, Alicante at 1,650 and Paris at 1,640.

Belfast searches for Malaga above anywhere else

Belfast produces one of the clearest departures from the national pattern.

Malaga is its most searched destination, attracting 900 monthly searches.

Paris comes next at 870, followed by Amsterdam at 730.

That makes Belfast one of the departure markets where a sunshine destination beats both of the UK’s two most searched destinations overall.

A similar effect appears elsewhere.

Alicante is the leading destination from Aberdeen, while Tenerife leads from Prestwick and Malaga from Leeds Bradford.

Long-haul demand is substantial

European destinations dominate the upper reaches of the data, but long-haul demand is far from insignificant.

London to Los Angeles attracts 5,830 monthly searches, making it the fifth-largest individual route across the entire generic dataset.

London to Dubai generates 4,560, while London to New York receives 4,230.

Across all tracked UK origins, New York attracts 6,980 searches, Dubai 6,940 and Los Angeles 6,360.

Long-haul destinations therefore sit alongside some of Europe’s biggest city-break and holiday markets rather than occupying a completely separate tier of search demand.

Where Brits hunt for cheap flights

General flight demand tells us where people want to go.

The separate SISTRIX cheap-flight dataset lets us ask another question: where are travellers most explicitly looking for a bargain?

Across the 3,720 tracked cheap-flight keywords, the downloaded SISTRIX data records 19,900 average monthly searches.

Amsterdam attracts the greatest combined cheap-flight search demand, followed by Dubai and Dublin.

Destinations attracting the most “cheap flights” searches

This ranking is noticeably different from the general-flight table.

Paris falls from first place for overall flight demand to sixth for explicit cheap-flight searches.

Dubai, meanwhile, rises from 15th for overall destination demand to second for cheap-flight searches.

That difference is precisely why looking at price-led searches separately matters.

London to Dubai is the UK’s biggest cheap-flight route

At individual route level, London to Dubai generates more explicit cheap-flight demand than any other route in the dataset, at 590 average monthly searches.

London to Ibiza follows at 360.

The most searched cheap-flight routes

Again, the cheap-flight table isn’t simply a miniature version of the general demand ranking.

Price-led search behaviour has its own geography.

The routes where bargain hunting over-indexes

Raw cheap-flight volume still favours large departure markets, so Koozai also compared cheap-flight demand with general search demand for the same route.

We call this cheap-search intensity.

It isn’t a percentage of passengers shopping on price, nor does it tell us what people eventually booked. Instead, it compares the monthly search volume attached to the tracked “cheap flights” formulations with the volume attached to the corresponding generic flight formulations.

To avoid tiny routes producing spectacular-looking percentages from very small numbers, the comparison below includes only routes generating at least 500 generic searches per month.

Routes with the highest cheap-search intensity

London to Warsaw stands out most clearly among established routes.

Its 210 monthly cheap-flight searches are equivalent to 38.2% of the volume attached to its 550 generic searches.

Manchester to Mumbai follows at 31.5%, London to Delhi at 30.8% and London to Ibiza at 28.8%.

That contrasts sharply with some of Britain’s biggest routes.

Manchester to Paris, for example, attracts 5,860 generic searches but only 130 cheap-flight searches, which is around 2.2% on the same measure.

London to Barcelona receives 5,100 generic searches and 110 cheap-flight searches, equivalent to around 2.2%.

Popularity and explicit bargain hunting are emphatically not the same thing.

Ibiza punches well above its weight for cheap-flight searches

Ibiza provides one of the clearest examples.

Across all origins, Ibiza generates 3,560 generic flight searches but 560 cheap-flight searches.

London alone accounts for 360 of those price-led searches against 1,250 generic searches.

That gives London to Ibiza a cheap-search intensity of 28.8%, considerably above many of the routes with greater overall demand.

Dubai shows a different version of the same phenomenon.

Dubai receives 6,940 generic searches across the dataset and 880 cheap-flight searches. London to Dubai alone accounts for 590 of those cheap-flight searches.

Dubai therefore combines substantial overall demand with unusually substantial explicit interest in cheaper fares.

Some destinations appear particularly price-sensitive

Looking at destinations rather than individual routes reveals another pattern.

Among destinations generating at least 1,000 generic searches, some produce much more cheap-flight search demand relative to their general popularity than others.

Delhi receives 1,320 generic searches and 390 cheap-flight searches across the tracked origins — equivalent to 29.5% on our cheap-search-intensity measure.

Warsaw records 1,030 generic searches and 250 cheap-flight searches, equivalent to 24.3%.

Corfu reaches 22.5%, Turkey 16.1%, Ibiza 15.4%, Mumbai 15.3% and Larnaca 14.9%.

By contrast, some of the destinations with enormous overall demand generate comparatively little explicit “cheap” search demand.

That doesn’t mean travellers don’t care about price when booking those routes. It simply means they are less likely to include the word “cheap” in the search formulations tracked by this study.

Birmingham travellers show relatively high price-led search activity

Departure markets differ too.

London naturally generates the largest absolute cheap-flight volume, with 5,770 monthly searches across the tracked routes.

Manchester follows at 2,970, Birmingham at 1,630, Glasgow at 1,300 and Bristol at 1,220.

But comparing those numbers with general flight demand changes the picture.

Birmingham’s 1,630 cheap-flight searches are equivalent to around 8.1% of its 20,050 generic searches.

For London, the equivalent comparison is 4.2%; Manchester 4.6%; Glasgow 5.4%; Bristol 4.4%; Edinburgh 3.2%; and Newcastle 4.2%.

Again, this is a comparison of search-volume datasets rather than a claim about the proportion of travellers motivated by price, but it does suggest that explicit cheap-flight language is more prominent within Birmingham’s tracked search mix.

Who dominates Google’s flight search results?

Where people want to travel is only part of the commercial picture.

SISTRIX also measured which domains have the greatest organic search visibility across the generic flight keyword list.

And one brand is rather difficult to miss.

Skyscanner has a SISTRIX Project Visibility Index of 620.52 across the tracked flight-search list.

That’s around 2.5 times the visibility of Ryanair, the second-highest domain at 249.47.

The most visible domains for the tracked flight searches

The striking point isn’t simply Skyscanner’s lead.

It’s the mixture of businesses underneath it.

Airlines such as Ryanair, easyJet, KLM, Jet2 and British Airways compete for visibility alongside comparison and booking platforms including Kayak, Expedia, Cheapflights, Momondo, Trip.com, Booking.com and Lastminute.com.

Google itself also appears prominently, with 946 Top 10 rankings across the tracked list.

Comparison sites are competing with airlines for the traveller before booking begins

Flight search isn’t simply a battle between airlines.

The SISTRIX data shows comparison and booking platforms occupying a substantial share of Google’s most prominent results.

Kayak records 952 Top 10 rankings, Expedia 858 and Cheapflights 724.

EasyJet, by comparison, records 724 Top 10 rankings, Ryanair 634 and KLM 604.

This matters because the battle for a traveller doesn’t begin when they arrive on an airline’s website.

It starts considerably earlier, when someone types a route into Google and decides which result deserves the next click.

Comparison sites have made themselves very difficult to avoid at precisely that moment.

Airports are competing for search visibility too

Airlines and comparison sites aren’t the only organisations appearing across these searches.

Airport websites also feature within the SISTRIX competition data.

Manchester Airport has a Project Visibility Index of 33.56, Stansted 20.95 and Newcastle Airport 20.46.

Bournemouth Airport records 11.40, London Luton 10.08, Glasgow Airport 8.59, Cardiff Airport 7.46, Heathrow 6.06, Southampton 5.85, Edinburgh Airport 5.21 and Norwich Airport 4.29.

Airport websites therefore form another layer of competition around route searches, particularly where they provide useful information about destinations and flights available from their terminals.

What the data tells us

• Paris wins overall, but not everywhere. It attracts the greatest combined generic flight demand, yet Amsterdam leads from numerous regional departure points and leisure destinations take first place from several smaller airports.
• Regional differences matter. Malaga leads from Belfast, Alicante from Aberdeen, Malta from Bournemouth and Tenerife from Prestwick.
• Overall popularity doesn’t automatically mean bargain hunting. Paris tops general destination demand but sits sixth for explicit cheap-flight searches.
• Some routes dramatically over-index for price-led searches. London to Warsaw, Manchester to Mumbai, London to Delhi and London to Ibiza have particularly high cheap-search intensity among routes with meaningful general demand.
• Dubai combines scale with bargain hunting. It ranks among the largest long-haul destinations for generic demand while also ranking second overall for cheap-flight searches.
• Skyscanner is the standout organic-search player. Its SISTRIX Project Visibility Index is substantially ahead of the other domains measured across the generic keyword set.

Taken together, the data suggests that there isn’t one UK flight market.

Search behaviour changes according to departure point, destination and whether the traveller is explicitly hunting for a lower fare.

For travel brands, that makes understanding individual routes rather more useful than assuming the whole country wants exactly the same thing.

The next battleground: Google visibility versus AI visibility

This research also establishes a useful benchmark for the next stage of the study.

SISTRIX’s competition data shows which brands and websites currently have the greatest visibility across traditional Google search results for these flight queries.

The same routes can now be tested through conversational questions such as:

“Where can I book a flight from London to Paris?”

“What airlines fly from Manchester to Barcelona?”

“What’s the cheapest way to fly from London to Dubai?”

“Where can I find cheap flights from Glasgow to Amsterdam?”

That would allow Koozai and SISTRIX to compare traditional search visibility with AI mentions and citations.

The interesting question isn’t simply which travel brands appear in AI answers.

It’s whether the organisations dominating Google are also the organisations that AI systems choose to mention and cite.

That comparison could expose brands with high traditional search visibility but limited AI presence, as well as businesses that appear disproportionately often in AI responses despite having lower organic visibility.

For now, the Google data provides the baseline.

Methodology

The UK Flight Demand Report 2026 was produced by Koozai in collaboration with SISTRIX.

Koozai analysed two SISTRIX keyword datasets supplied for the research.

The first contains 3,720 UK Google keywords covering generic flight searches. The downloaded keyword export contains a combined 392,320 average monthly searches.

The second contains the corresponding 3,720 UK “cheap flights” keywords, with a combined 19,900 average monthly searches in the downloaded export.

Keywords were grouped by their stated UK departure point and destination. Different tracked phrasings relating to the same origin/destination combination were combined to produce route-level figures.

Search volume represents average monthly Google search demand reported by SISTRIX. Figures measure searches, not unique people, passengers, bookings, ticket sales or revenue.

Country-level destinations such as “Turkey”, “Portugal” and “France” have been retained as separate search destinations because that is how users expressed those queries. They have not been combined with individual cities within those countries.

City-level and airport-level origins have also been retained separately. For example, “London”, “Heathrow”, “Gatwick”, “Stansted”, “Luton” and “London City” are not combined, because they represent different queries within the supplied dataset.

Cheap-search intensity is calculated by dividing aggregated search volume for the tracked cheap-flight formulations of a route by aggregated search volume for its corresponding generic-flight formulations. It is intended as a comparative search-demand measure and should not be interpreted as the percentage of travellers who choose flights based on price.

The cheap-search-intensity route table applies a minimum threshold of 500 average monthly generic searches to reduce distortions caused by very small underlying route volumes.

Organic visibility findings use the SISTRIX Project Visibility Index and Top 100/Top 10 ranking data supplied for the generic flight keyword list.

Data source: SISTRIX. Analysis: Koozai.

About Koozai

Koozai is a UK digital marketing agency specialising in SEO, AI search, digital PR, content and paid media.

The agency works with businesses to understand how people discover, evaluate and choose brands across search and digital channels.

About SISTRIX

SISTRIX provides search and digital market intelligence, including keyword, competitor and organic visibility data.

SISTRIX supplied the keyword-demand and search-visibility data used within this research.

The post The UK Flight Demand Report 2026 appeared first on Koozai.com

Construction is a relationship-led industry, and when the cost, complexity and risk of getting a project wrong are high, knowing that someone else has had a positive experience with a company is incredibly reassuring.

So, why should construction companies stop relying on referrals? Absolutely not, the problem is relying on them alone.

The way people find, research and short-list construction companies has changed. A potential client might still ask a colleague, “Do you know a good contractor?” But increasingly, that recommendation is followed by something else: they search for the company online.

Now your prospective clients look at prospective websites and check that businesses previous projects. Increasingly, they search for reviews and look far deeper into a companies expertise. Let not forget that in todays world it is infinitely easier to compare alternatives. This is all because they are looking for evidence that the company can actually deliver what they need.

However now its highly likely that they will ask an AI search tool those very same questions. That means a referral may get you into the consideration set, but your online presence can determine whether you stay there.

The main reason referrals are so powerful because they reduce perceived risk which is why they work so well in construction. Choosing a construction company can involve a significant financial commitment, long project timelines, multiple stakeholders and considerable reputational risk. A poor decision can mean delays, additional costs, quality problems and difficult relationships.

Now the buyer therefore isn’t simply asking who can do this work, they are also asking who can I trust to do it properly. A recommendation from someone they already trust provides a shortcut to what can be a long search for the right fit.

This is closely linked to the psychological principle of social proof when people are uncertain about a decision, they often look at the behaviour and experiences of others to help determine what is credible or appropriate. Psychologist Robert Cialdini describes social proof as the tendency to look to people similar to ourselves when deciding how to act – and we see this more in referral based businesses.

In construction, that might mean a developer trusting another developer’s recommendation, an architect asking another architect who they use, or a facilities manager seeking a contractor that another organisation has already worked with. The referral effectively says someone I trust has already taken the risk –  that in itself is incredibly powerful.

However there is a clear problem with this method of winning business – you cannot control when someone recommends you. This is the weakness of a referral-only strategy.

Imagine a construction company has spent 20 years building an excellent reputation, completing hundreds of projects, their clients love them, previous customers regularly recommend them – but its website is outdated. The site has very little useful content and the projects aren’t properly showcased, then simply put, it will not appear for the questions its potential customers are searching for online. Regardless of it that company may has an excellent reputation among people who already know it, its what happens when someone who doesn’t know it starts looking. This is where referrals become limiting.

As a referral strategy is largely dependent on someone else knowing the right person, remembering your company at the right moment and being asked the right question – so your odds are getting slimmer!

Your digital presence creates another route into the business and instead of waiting for someone to say I know a company that could help with that, you can build visibility around the things potential customers are already trying to understand. That changes the relationship between marketing and sales.

Construction buyers are no longer following a simple path to purchase

B2B purchasing is increasingly non-linear, Gartner describes today’s B2B buying journey as a series of “jobs” buyers need to complete rather than a straightforward journey from awareness to purchase. These include identifying a problem, exploring solutions, establishing requirements, selecting suppliers, validating their decision and gaining agreement from other stakeholders.

That is particularly relevant to construction as a business might not start by searching for your company, it might start with a problem. For example, let’s start with a simple question:

How much does a commercial roof replacement cost? → How long does a commercial roof replacement take? → What type of roofing system is best for a warehouse? → Commercial roofing contractors Manchester → Company X reviews.

The company they eventually contact may be the company that appears consistently throughout that research process and this is an important distinction. Remember, people don’t always search for suppliers first, they often search for answers first and the psychology behind this matters.

When someone is making a high-value decision, uncertainty creates friction and what is really needed is evidence, reassurance and they want to feel that they understand their options. They want to know that other people have made similar decisions successfully and they want to reduce the possibility of making a mistake. This is where content, case studies, reviews, project examples, expertise and third-party coverage become important.

Gartner’s research into B2B buying found that buyers consult multiple information sources before making a decision, with its research indicating that B2B buyers typically consult four to 10 information sources. The same research highlights the importance of authentic advice from peers, colleagues and other organisations. In other words the referral isn’t necessarily being replaced by digital research, it is being joined by it.

Your referral is probably being Googled

This is one of the biggest reasons construction companies should think beyond referrals. Imagine someone recommends your business, your potential customer has never heard of you, so what do they do? They Google you. Suddenly, your website, reviews, case studies, social profiles and search results become part of the referral. The recommendation gets you through the first psychological barrier – someone I trust says they’re good.

Now, your digital presence then has to answer can I see evidence for myself? This is where construction companies can lose opportunities. A company may have an outstanding reputation offline but fail to communicate that reputation online. The result is a strange disconnect:

Great business → great referrals → weak online presence → lost opportunities.

Its critical your website needs to reassure, not just inform and a construction website shouldn’t simply be an online brochure – it should help someone make a decision.

That means answering the questions buyers actually have. Who do you work with? What types of projects do you specialise in? What sectors do you understand? What geographical areas do you cover? What types of projects have you delivered? What problems can you solve? What does working with you actually look like? You get the idea, but this matters because buyers increasingly research suppliers without speaking to a salesperson.

Gartner research published in 2024 found that 75% of B2B buyers said they preferred a rep-free purchasing experience, while also highlighting the need for better digital information to help buyers make confident decisions. Rest assured, that doesn’t mean construction buyers don’t want human relationships, its quite the opposite. It means the first conversation may happen later than it used to and so your website has to do more of the early work.

Case studies turn reputation into evidence

One of the most powerful ways construction companies can replicate the reassurance of a referral online is through case studies. A statement such as we deliver high-quality commercial construction projects is easy to write and it is also easy for every competitor to say. A detailed case study is different as it can show far more – from the challenge to what did the client need, its much easier to give a full and detailed account as well as giving the prospective customers something to evaluate. It transforms an abstract claim into something tangible. Psychologically, that matters because uncertainty is reduced when people can see evidence of previous success.

And then there is search!

Search gives construction companies something referrals cannot: visibility before the buyer knows who they want to hire. If they later search your brand name, your previous content and project work can reinforce the recommendation they’ve already received.

This is why SEO shouldn’t simply be viewed as a way of getting more traffic as for construction companies, it can help build familiarity and trust before the first conversation takes place.

The construction industry is becoming more digitally driven

This isn’t happening in isolation – the UK construction industry itself is becoming increasingly data and technology driven. The Office for National Statistics reported that construction new orders increased by 5.6% in 2024 to £71.7 billion, while also highlighting increasing adoption of digital technologies including BIM, drones and artificial intelligence across the sector.

At the same time, construction businesses operate in a market where identifying future projects and opportunities is increasingly data-led. ONS itself uses project information from Hubexo and Barbour ABI to help measure construction new orders, with data gathered from planning applications, project information, media and industry contacts.

The broader point is simple – construction buyers are becoming more digitally informed and your marketing needs to keep pace.

So, what happens when you combine referrals with digital marketing?

This is where the real opportunity lies! You don’t need to choose between referrals and marketing, you need them to reinforce one another.

They contact you, with the referral created the initial trust – and your digital presence validated it. That is much stronger than either approach operating alone.

Don’t just market the company. Market the expertise behind it.

One of the biggest opportunities for construction businesses is to stop thinking solely about promoting their services and start thinking about demonstrating their knowledge.

A collection of these resources begins to create something much more valuable than a list of keywords as it creates authority.

This becomes increasingly more important as AI search grows as the way people discover businesses is changing again. Search engines and AI tools increasingly help users research questions, compare options and understand complicated subjects. That means construction companies need to think beyond how do I rank for my service.

Instead start asking what questions does my potential customer need answered before they choose a company like us. That could include questions about costs, materials, regulations, timescales, project management, sustainability, specifications, maintenance, risks and different approaches. The companies that consistently demonstrate genuine expertise around these subjects give search engines and AI systems more useful information to understand and potentially surface.

At the forefront of your mind should be that the goal isn’t to manufacture content for an algorithm – it’s to make the company’s expertise visible and useful.

Construction will always be a relationship-driven industry and of course people will continue to trust recommendations from people they know as they should.

A referral from a respected client or industry contact is one of the most valuable forms of marketing a construction company can receive. However the buyer journey doesn’t stop when the recommendation is made. It often begins there.

The construction companies that understand this can use digital marketing to extend the reach of their reputation. Their digital presence gives potential customers somewhere to go when they inevitably start researching. The objective isn’t to replace referrals, it’s to make sure that when someone recommends your business, the internet backs them up.

The post Why Construction Companies Need to Stop Relying on Referrals Alone appeared first on Koozai.com

Rather than simply carrying out individual marketing tasks, a good digital marketing agency connects these channels around a wider commercial strategy. That might mean improving visibility in Google and AI search, generating qualified leads through paid advertising, building brand authority through digital PR, creating content that supports buying decisions, or improving how effectively a website turns visitors into customers.

The exact work depends on the business, its audience and what it is trying to achieve.

Put simply: a digital marketing agency works out where your potential customers are looking, what influences their decisions and how your business can become more visible and persuasive at the right points in that journey.

For some businesses, that means investing heavily in SEO. For others, paid search produces the quickest commercial return. Another business might have strong Google rankings but weak brand authority, poor AI search visibility or content that attracts traffic without generating enquiries.

That is why digital marketing should not be treated as a collection of unrelated channels.

What services does a digital marketing agency provide?

Digital marketing agencies can provide services including:

* Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
* paid search and PPC
* content marketing
* digital PR
* AI search optimisation
* paid social advertising
* social media marketing
* digital marketing strategy
* analytics and measurement
* conversion optimisation
* website and landing page optimisation

Not every business needs every service.

The role of the agency is to identify which combination of channels is most likely to help the business achieve its objectives, rather than recommending a bit of everything because it happens to be on the agency’s service list.

At Koozai, for example, our work spans SEO, paid search, Digital PR, content marketing, paid social and AI marketing and AI search visibility.

These disciplines can work independently, but they are often much more effective when they share data, audiences, messaging and commercial goals.

What does a digital marketing agency do for a business?

A digital marketing agency typically does five things for a business:

1. Identifies where the biggest digital opportunities are.
2. Creates a strategy for reaching the right audience.
3. Suggests implementation activity across the most appropriate digital channels.
4. Measures whether that activity is generating meaningful results.
5. Continuously improves the strategy using performance data and changes in customer or competitor behaviour.

The important bit is number four.

Traffic, rankings, impressions, clicks and followers can all be useful indicators, but they are not normally the ultimate reason a business hires an agency.

Businesses usually want more enquiries, better-quality leads, increased sales, stronger brand awareness, greater market share or improved return on their marketing investment.

A digital marketing agency should therefore be able to connect marketing activity with business outcomes rather than simply report that some graphs went upwards.

What does an SEO agency do?

An SEO agency helps businesses become more visible when potential customers search for relevant products, services, information and solutions.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can include technical SEO, keyword and audience research, search intent analysis, content optimisation, internal linking, website architecture, link acquisition, Digital PR and user experience improvements.

At Koozai, our SEO agency services focus on helping businesses increase relevant organic visibility across traditional search engines while also considering how people discover brands through AI-powered search experiences.

SEO work might include:

* finding technical issues preventing pages from being crawled or indexed
* researching what potential customers search for
* identifying gaps in existing website content
* improving service, product and category pages
* creating useful content around customer questions
* strengthening internal linking
* earning relevant links, mentions and citations
* improving website speed and user experience
* analysing competitors
* measuring organic traffic, enquiries and revenue
* improving how clearly search engines understand a brand, its expertise and its services

SEO is therefore much broader than “putting keywords on a website”.

Its job is to make it easier for search engines and potential customers to discover, understand and trust a business.

What does a PPC or paid search agency do?

A paid search agency manages advertising campaigns that place businesses in front of people actively searching for relevant products or services.

This commonly includes Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.

Unlike SEO, where visibility is earned organically over time, paid search allows businesses to pay for visibility for selected searches and audiences.

A paid search agency can handle:

* account and competitor research
* keyword research
* campaign structure
* audience targeting
* Google Ads
* Microsoft Ads
* Shopping campaigns
* remarketing
* ad copy
* bidding strategies
* budget allocation
* landing page recommendations
* conversion tracking
* campaign testing
* optimisation
* attribution
* reporting on leads, sales, cost per acquisition and return on ad spend

Paid search is particularly useful when there is clear existing demand.

Someone searching for a specific service, product or solution is already signalling intent. A well-managed PPC campaign tries to capture that demand efficiently while avoiding wasted spend on searches unlikely to convert.

Businesses wanting specialist management can also use Google Ads management services.

What does a content marketing agency do?

A content marketing agency plans, creates, improves and distributes content designed to attract, inform and persuade a particular audience.

Content marketing can include:

* website copy
* service and product content
* blog articles
* guides
* research
* reports
* whitepapers
* case studies
* landing pages
* thought leadership
* video content
* visual assets
* social content

The important distinction is that content marketing is not simply “writing blogs”.

Effective content marketing starts with a purpose.

A piece of content might exist to answer a potential customer’s question, improve organic search visibility, demonstrate expertise, earn links, support a sales conversation or help someone move from researching a problem to choosing a supplier.

Our beginner’s guide to content marketing explains the discipline in more detail.

Businesses that specifically need ongoing editorial content can also use blog content creation services, while commercial website copy may require website content creation or specialist SEO copywriting.

What does a Digital PR agency do?

A Digital PR agency helps businesses earn online media coverage, brand mentions, links and third-party authority.

Traditional PR and Digital PR overlap, but Digital PR usually places greater emphasis on how media coverage contributes to online visibility as well as brand awareness.

A Digital PR agency might:

* develop stories and campaign ideas
* analyse data to find newsworthy angles
* create research-led PR campaigns
* provide expert commentary to journalists
* conduct media outreach
* secure coverage in relevant publications
* earn authoritative backlinks
* generate brand mentions
* support online reputation
* strengthen signals of brand authority

This can support SEO because links and relevant third-party references help establish authority around a website and brand.

It can also have a wider effect.

When prospective customers research a company, they do not necessarily rely on what that company says about itself. They may look for reviews, press coverage, expert commentary and references from sources they already trust.

AI systems can also encounter these independent sources when building an understanding of brands and topics.

Digital PR therefore sits at the intersection of brand visibility, reputation, SEO and AI search visibility rather than existing purely to generate backlinks.

What does an AI search optimisation agency do?

An AI search optimisation agency helps businesses understand and improve how their brands are represented in AI-generated answers.

People increasingly discover and evaluate companies through tools and experiences such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity alongside traditional search.

Our guide to AI search vs Google search explains how these discovery experiences differ.

An AI marketing agency may look at:

* whether AI platforms mention a brand for relevant questions
* which competitors are being recommended
* which sources AI systems cite
* whether information about the brand is accurate and consistent
* the entities and topics associated with the brand
* website structure and crawlability
* content depth and clarity
* brand mentions and citations
* third-party authority
* Digital PR
* structured information
* expert signals
* how clearly services, people, locations and expertise are connected online

This does not mean traditional SEO has suddenly become obsolete.

Many of the foundations that make a website useful and understandable to search engines are also important when trying to build visibility across AI-powered discovery.

The difference is that businesses increasingly need to think beyond whether their own web page ranks.

They also need to consider whether their brand is understood, referenced and recommended across the wider web.

What does a paid social agency do?

A paid social agency runs advertising campaigns on social media platforms to reach specific audiences.

Depending on the audience and business model, that can include LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and X.

Paid social advertising can be used to generate leads, increase sales, build awareness, retarget website visitors and reach potential customers before they actively search.

The work can include:

* audience research
* platform selection
* campaign strategy
* creative development
* professional and demographic targeting
* retargeting
* budget management
* landing page alignment
* creative testing
* campaign optimisation
* conversion tracking

For B2B organisations, LinkedIn advertising can be particularly useful because campaigns can target professional audiences by criteria such as role, seniority, industry and company characteristics.

Consumer campaigns may lean more heavily towards channels such as Instagram advertising.

The right platform depends on where the intended audience actually spends time and how they make purchasing decisions.

How do SEO, PPC, Digital PR and content marketing work together?

SEO, PPC, Digital PR and content marketing perform different jobs, but they can support the same customer journey.

For example:

SEO helps a business become discoverable when people search.

AI search optimisation** considers how the brand is understood and surfaced within AI-generated discovery and recommendation experiences

PPC allows the business to pay for targeted visibility around commercially important searches.

Content marketing gives potential customers useful information and helps answer the questions they ask while researching.

Digital PR builds awareness and authority through independent third-party coverage, links and mentions.

Paid social can reach and retarget defined audiences beyond search engines.

A potential customer might therefore:

1. see a company mentioned in an industry publication
2. later encounter it in Google or an AI-generated answer
3. read one of its guides
4. see a LinkedIn ad
5. search for the brand
6. compare its services with competitors
7. read a case study
8. finally submit an enquiry

Marketing channels rarely operate in the neat little boxes found in monthly reports.

Customers are inconsiderate like that.

They move between search, social platforms, websites, review sites, media publications, AI tools and recommendations before making decisions.

That is why an integrated digital marketing strategy considers the whole journey rather than giving each channel its own separate universe.

For B2B organisations in particular, our guide to mapping digital marketing strategy to the B2B buyer journey explains how different marketing activity can support awareness, consideration and decision stages.

What is the difference between a digital marketing agency and an SEO agency?

An SEO agency specialises primarily in organic search visibility. A digital marketing agency can provide SEO alongside other disciplines such as paid search, Digital PR, content marketing, paid social and wider digital strategy.

There can be considerable overlap.

Some SEO agencies provide content and Digital PR because those disciplines directly support organic search. Equally, some full-service digital agencies have specialist SEO teams.

The difference is therefore usually breadth of expertise rather than an entirely different type of company.

If your main problem is highly specialised technical SEO, a specialist SEO provider may be appropriate.

If your challenge spans organic visibility, paid acquisition, brand authority, content and multiple stages of the buying journey, a broader digital marketing agency may make more sense.

Is a digital marketing agency the same as an advertising agency?

No. A digital marketing agency and an advertising agency can overlap, but they are not necessarily the same thing.

Advertising agencies traditionally focus on paid promotion and creative campaigns.

Digital marketing agencies may manage advertising, but can also work across organic search, content, PR, websites, analytics, conversion optimisation and digital strategy.

A digital marketing agency can therefore influence both **paid and unpaid digital visibility**.

Is a digital marketing agency the same as a social media agency?

No.

A social media agency specialises primarily in social platforms, while a digital marketing agency usually works across a broader mix of channels.

Social media can form one part of a wider digital strategy alongside SEO, paid search, content, Digital PR and other activity.

What is the difference between B2B and B2C digital marketing?

The biggest difference is how customers research, evaluate and purchase.

B2C marketing commonly targets individual consumers and can involve relatively short buying journeys.

B2B marketing often involves several decision-makers, longer research periods, higher-value purchases and more scrutiny before a supplier is selected.

That changes which channels, content and measurements matter.

Our guide to B2B vs B2C digital marketing looks at these differences in detail.

For example, B2B marketing may rely heavily on search visibility, LinkedIn, detailed content, case studies, thought leadership and Digital PR because buyers need evidence before committing.

Our guide to B2B content marketing explains how content can support that longer decision-making process.

Does a digital marketing agency create a marketing strategy?

It should.

A digital marketing strategy defines who a business wants to reach, what it wants those people to do, which channels can influence them and how success will be measured.

Without that, marketing activity can quickly become a collection of disconnected tactics.

An agency should normally understand:

* your business model
* products and services
* commercial objectives
* target audiences
* customer journeys
* competitors
* market conditions
* current marketing performance
* available budget
* internal resources
* sales process
* measurement and attribution

Only then does it make sense to decide which channels deserve investment.

How does a digital marketing agency decide which channels to use?

A good digital marketing agency chooses channels based on audience behaviour, commercial opportunity, available evidence and business objectives.

It should not automatically recommend every service it sells.

For example:

If customers are already making high-intent searches for a product, SEO and paid search could be priorities.

If a brand has excellent products but little authority or awareness, Digital PR and content may play a bigger role.

If a B2B company knows precisely which types of professionals it needs to reach, LinkedIn advertising might be useful.

If a company already ranks strongly in Google but is rarely mentioned by AI platforms, the opportunity may sit around entity clarity, content, authority and AI search visibility.

Channel selection should follow the problem, not the agency’s org chart.

What should a digital marketing agency measure?

A digital marketing agency should measure the metrics that show whether marketing activity is contributing to the organisation’s objectives.

Depending on the business, these can include:

* qualified leads
* sales
* revenue
* pipeline contribution
* cost per lead
* cost per acquisition
* return on ad spend
* organic conversions
* conversion rate
* search visibility
* relevant organic traffic
* AI search mentions and citations
* media coverage
* backlinks and brand mentions
* engagement with commercially important content

Supporting metrics such as rankings, clicks, impressions and reach are useful for diagnosing performance, but they should not automatically be treated as business results.

Ten thousand extra visitors are considerably less exciting if none of them are remotely interested in buying anything.

How does a digital marketing agency work with an in-house marketing team?

A digital marketing agency does not have to replace an internal marketing team.

Often, agencies work alongside in-house marketers by providing specialist skills, additional capacity, technology, data or an outside perspective.

For example, an internal marketing manager might own the overall brand and commercial strategy while an agency provides specialist SEO, paid search or Digital PR expertise.

Other businesses outsource most of their digital marketing because they do not have the resources to employ separate specialists in every discipline.

The right model depends on the skills already available internally and where the gaps are.

What are the benefits of using a digital marketing agency?

The main benefit of using a digital marketing agency is access to multiple areas of specialist expertise without having to recruit a full internal team.

Other potential benefits include:

* access to specialists across several disciplines
* greater capacity
* experience from different markets and campaigns
* access to specialist tools and technology
* independent analysis
* faster identification of problems
* joined-up channel strategy
* ongoing testing and optimisation
* clearer performance measurement

An agency can also challenge assumptions.

Internal teams naturally become very familiar with their own products, terminology and market. An external team can often spot gaps between how the company talks about itself and how customers actually search, ask questions and make decisions.

What are the disadvantages of using a digital marketing agency?

Using an agency is not automatically the right answer.

Possible disadvantages include:

* less day-to-day proximity to the business than an internal employee
* the need for regular communication and access to internal knowledge
* additional approval processes
* poor results if the agency does not understand the business
* dependency on an external supplier
* wasted budget if objectives and measurement are unclear

Most of these risks come down to the relationship.

An agency cannot develop a strong strategy if it is given limited information, and a client should not have to guess what its agency is doing.

Clear objectives, access to the right people, transparent reporting and honest communication matter on both sides.

When should a business hire a digital marketing agency?

A business may benefit from hiring a digital marketing agency when:

* growth has stalled
* competitors are gaining digital visibility
* internal teams lack specialist expertise
* paid advertising is becoming less efficient
* organic traffic is declining
* leads are poor quality
* the website receives traffic but does not convert
* marketing channels operate separately
* the business is entering a new market
* a new website or migration is planned
* there is no clear digital strategy
* Google visibility is strong but AI search visibility is weak
* marketing performance cannot be linked clearly to commercial outcomes

The right time is not necessarily when everything has gone wrong.

Agencies can also help businesses that are performing well but need specialist support to identify the next stage of growth.

What should you expect from a digital marketing agency?

You should expect a digital marketing agency to understand your business before prescribing tactics.

At a minimum, a good agency relationship should provide:

* clear objectives
* an agreed strategy
* defined responsibilities
* access to relevant specialists
* transparent communication
* realistic expectations
* appropriate measurement
* regular analysis
* evidence behind recommendations
* willingness to change course when the data shows something is not working

You should also expect your agency to explain its recommendations.

Digital marketing can be technical, but that is not an excuse to make it deliberately mysterious.

How long does digital marketing take to work?

There is no single timeframe because different digital marketing channels work at different speeds.

Paid search campaigns can start generating traffic as soon as campaigns are live, although effective optimisation takes time and data.

SEO usually takes longer because websites need to be crawled, evaluated and compete against existing results.

Digital PR depends partly on campaign quality, news cycles and media response.

Content marketing often builds value over time as content becomes visible, earns authority and supports different stages of the customer journey.

The wider answer is that digital marketing should be treated as an ongoing process of research, implementation, measurement and improvement, rather than a one-off campaign with a universal finishing date.

How much does a digital marketing agency cost?

Digital marketing agency costs vary significantly depending on the services required, the competitiveness of the market, the size and complexity of the website, campaign budgets and how much specialist time is needed.

Agencies may charge through:

* monthly retainers
* fixed projects
* day rates
* consultancy fees
* campaign fees
* combinations of the above

A small local business requiring limited support will have very different requirements from an ecommerce company with thousands of products or an international organisation operating across multiple markets.

Price therefore makes more sense when considered alongside scope, expertise, expected commercial value and the resources required to achieve the objective.

How do you choose a digital marketing agency?

Choose a digital marketing agency based on whether it understands your business problem and can demonstrate a credible approach to solving it.

Questions worth asking include:

* Have you worked with businesses with similar challenges?
* Who will actually work on our account?
* Which services do you provide in-house?
* How will you decide which channels we should invest in?
* What will you measure?
* How will you connect marketing performance with leads or revenue?
* How often will we communicate?
* What do you need from our internal team?
* What happens if the initial strategy does not perform as expected?
* Can you show relevant case studies or examples of your work?
* How do SEO, paid media, content and PR teams work together?
* How are you adapting your work for AI-powered search?

Be wary of an agency that has decided what you need before it understands what is actually wrong.

Do small businesses need a digital marketing agency?

Not necessarily.

Some small businesses can manage digital marketing effectively in-house, particularly when their requirements are simple and someone internally has the necessary expertise and time.

An agency becomes more useful when the business needs specialist knowledge, wants to grow more quickly, operates in a competitive market or cannot justify recruiting several individual specialists.

The question is less “Does every small business need an agency?” and more “Do we have the skills and capacity internally to achieve what we want?”

Can a digital marketing agency guarantee results?

No reputable digital marketing agency can guarantee specific rankings, revenue or marketing outcomes.

Agencies can control the quality of their strategy, implementation, testing and optimisation.

They cannot completely control competitors, customer demand, search engine algorithms, advertising platforms, media interest, economic conditions or how prospective customers behave.

A credible agency should therefore talk about evidence, opportunities, forecasts and objectives rather than guarantees.

Is hiring a digital marketing agency worth it?

Hiring a digital marketing agency can be worthwhile when the value generated by better marketing exceeds the cost of the agency and associated media or production investment.

That value may come from:

* additional revenue
* more qualified leads
* lower acquisition costs
* increased organic visibility
* stronger brand awareness
* better conversion rates
* reduced wasted advertising spend
* access to skills that would be expensive to recruit internally
* stronger visibility across traditional and AI-powered search

Whether an agency is worth the investment depends on the quality of the agency, the opportunity available to the business and whether both sides are working towards clear commercial objectives.

What does Koozai do as a digital marketing agency?

Koozai is a UK digital marketing agency that works across SEO, paid search, Digital PR, content marketing, paid social and AI search visibility.

We have been working in digital marketing since 2006, helping organisations improve how they are discovered, evaluated and chosen online.

Our core services include:

* SEO services to improve organic search visibility

* AI marketing and AI search services to understand and improve brand visibility in AI-generated answers

* paid search services to generate measurable traffic, leads and sales from search advertising

* digital PR services to build brand exposure, authority, links and media coverage

* content marketing services to create content around search intent and buying decisions

* paid social services to reach defined audiences through social advertising
The important part is how those services connect.

Someone does not become a customer because an SEO ranking moved from position six to position three.

They become a customer because they had a need, discovered a business, investigated it, found evidence that made it credible, compared it with alternatives and decided to act.

The job of a digital marketing agency is to improve that journey: helping the right people find your business, understand it, trust it and ultimately choose it.

That is what digital marketing is supposed to do.

The post What Does a Digital Marketing Agency Actually Do? appeared first on Koozai.com

Now its totally different – the way people search is changing. Of course, Google is still hugely important, but now it is commonplace for people to use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI-powered search experiences to research. Here, with the help of AI they choose their  products, suppliers, materials, regulations – they can even work out costs and potential solutions.

Essentially this creates a significant opportunity for construction businesses, because being found online is no longer simply about ranking number one for a keyword. Now it is increasingly about becoming the business that AI systems understand, trust and recommend when someone asks a question related to what you do.

Its critical to remember that construction buyers aren’t always searching for you and that a potential customer doesn’t necessarily start their search by looking for a company. Todays user is much more likely to start with a problem.

For example, a surveyor might search “what are the current requirements for fire safety in commercial buildings?” An architect might ask “which sustainable materials can be used for this type of project?” And someone managing a construction project might simply ask “how much does X typically cost and what factors affect the price?”

All these searches can eventually lead to a supplier or contractor, but they major shift is clear – they don’t necessarily begin with “construction companies that provide X near me” and that distinction matters.

This creates the opportunity to be discovered before the buyer knows they need you and so if your website only talks about your products and services, you may be missing a huge part of the journey.

The businesses that have the opportunity to appear in these early searches are the ones providing genuinely useful information around the questions their customers are asking.

What has changed?

Traditional search generally works like this:

Question → Google → Search results → Website → Answer

AI search is increasingly becoming:

Question → AI → Research across multiple sources → Combined answer → Recommendation / sources

That’s a huge shift. Consider that an AI system doesn’t necessarily need to send someone to one website to answer their question. It can draw information from multiple sources and combine it into an answer.

That means your website isn’t just competing for a position in a list of ten blue links, your content could become one of the sources used to construct the answer itself. This shift changes the way construction businesses need to think about digital marketing.

Construction businesses need to think beyond keywords – this doesn’t mean keywords suddenly don’t matter, they absolutely still do, but they need to be considered as part of a much bigger picture.

Let’s say you manufacture a particular type of construction material. You could optimise a page for “X construction material supplier” which would be useful, but your potential customers may also be asking:

• What is X material?
• What is it used for?
• How does it compare with alternative materials?
• How much does it cost?
• What are its advantages?
• What are its limitations?
• Is it suitable for commercial projects?
• How long does it last?
• How is it installed?
• Is it environmentally friendly?
• What regulations apply?
• What should I consider before choosing it?

Suddenly its easy to see that you’ve gone from one keyword to an entire collection of questions and that those questions represent different stages of the buying journey.

This is where construction businesses have an advantage because the construction industry has something that AI desperately needs…expertise.

Questions, questions!

There are thousands of questions around construction that require genuine knowledge and experience. Materials, regulations, specifications, installation, costs, safety, sustainability, maintenance, design, planning, compliance – to name just a handful! If your business has experts who know these subjects inside out, you already have something incredibly valuable.

The challenge is turning that expertise into useful, accessible content and importantly, you don’t need to give away your entire business for free. What you need to do is demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about and your website needs to answer the questions your customers are asking.

If, for example you’re a specialist roofing contractor, its likely you have a website containing pages about commercial roofing, roof repairs, roof installation and your services which is all useful.

In addition also having genuinely helpful content is crucial, answering questions such as how long does a commercial roof typically last, how do you know when a commercial roof needs replacing, or what are the different types of commercial roofing systems? Your website isn’t simply saying  “we sell roofing services”, It’s demonstrating thar you understand commercial roofing and that’s a much stronger position. This is useful for both traditional search and AI-driven search. So, don’t just create content, create evidence.

So simply publishing lots of generic, AI-written blog posts isn’t going to give your business a competitive advantage. In fact, it could have the opposite effect if the content is vague, repetitive or doesn’t demonstrate genuine expertise. Think about what your business knows that other businesses don’t.

Give search engines and AI systems more evidence about who you are, what you know and why your business is relevant and your experts could become your biggest marketing asset.

Here at Koozai, another opportunity that construction businesses sometimes overlook is that their people know stuff. If you think about your technical director, surveyors, engineers – whoever it may be, they are constantly answering questions from customers. Those conversations are marketing opportunities.

Its hugely likely a customer asks your team “what’s the difference between these two materials?” and that’s a potential piece of content.

If the business is regularly asked particular questions that’s a potential piece of content. You can look at it like your customers are effectively handing you your content strategy, so listen to them.

What does this mean for construction businesses?

It means the traditional approach of  “we need a few blogs this month” really, really needs to evolve. Instead, think what does our customer need to know before they are ready to buy from us? Then build you can look to build your content around that journey – leading them to a decision.

Here’s where AI gets really interesting. As someone might never search for your company name and instead they might ask ChatGPT “who are the leading UK suppliers of X” or“Can you recommend companies that specialise in X”  if your business has built a strong online presence around that subject, there is a greater opportunity for your brand to be understood and potentially surfaced within those answers.

Keep in mind that this isn’t something you can achieve by publishing one article and crossing your fingers, it comes back to authority and trust. AI needs to understand who you are you, what you specialise in, what evidence supports your expertise and are other reputable sources talking about you.

It is critical that your information accurate and useful and that you have genuine experience in this area. That means your website, content, Digital PR, reviews, industry coverage and wider online presence all become part of the picture.

Digital PR matters too!

One of the reasons Digital PR is becoming particularly interesting for construction businesses is that getting mentioned by a relevant industry publication, news website or respected organisation can do more than generate a backlink, (great news!) it can help establish credibility around your brand and expertise.

Imagine you’re a specialist construction manufacturer and you’re regularly quoted in industry publications about sustainability or construction costs for example, you’ve suddenly got third-party sources demonstrating that your business knows its stuff.

That’s much more powerful than simply publishing “We’re industry leaders” on your own website – because anyone can say they’re an expert and evidence is harder to fake.

So, what should you actually do?

If you’re responsible for marketing a construction business, don’t panic and immediately decide you need to publish 100 AI-generated blogs – you don’t.

Start with these five steps.

1. Find the questions your customers are already asking

Speak to sales teams, technical teams and customer service. Look at enquiries, emails, FAQs, search data and ask your customers what they struggled to find online. From this you’ll probably uncover dozens of content opportunities.

2. Build content around problems, not just products

Don’t only write “our X product” think how do I solve X problem? Then position your product or service as part of the solution.

3. Demonstrate genuine expertise

Use your people, add real examples, share data, explain technical subjects clearly. Show your experience and don’t be afraid of being specific!

4. Build authority beyond your website

Look at Digital PR, industry publications, partnerships, expert commentary and relevant third-party coverage – your reputation shouldn’t exist only on your own website.

5. Think about the entire buying journey

Don’t just optimise the page where someone can request a quote, think about everything they need to know before they’re ready to request that quote. That’s where some of your biggest opportunities could be.

The construction search journey is getting bigger but the biggest change isn’t that Google is disappearing, it’s that search is expanding. People can now discover information through Google, AI search engines, ChatGPT, social media, industry publications, forums, YouTube and countless other sources and they’re using these platforms at different points in the buying journey.

For construction businesses, this means your digital presence needs to do more than simply rank for a handful of commercial keywords, it needs to demonstrate expertise, relevance, authority and trust.

Your future customer may not begin their search by looking for a supplier, they may begin by asking a question. The businesses that answer those questions today have an opportunity to become the businesses customers find tomorrow.

The takeaway

If there’s one thing to take away from all of this, it’s this: don’t just try to be found when someone searches for your company or your product. Become the company people discover while they’re researching the problem you solve. That’s the real opportunity with AI search and for construction businesses, it could be a particularly valuable one.

You already have the expertise, the projects, the people and the knowledge – now you need to make sure the internet can find it!

Don’t just take our word for it

Construction output is still a challenging picture. ONS reports that total construction output grew just 0.3% in Q2 2026, while new construction orders fell 11.8% quarter-on-quarter, driven largely by private commercial and public-sector work.

The industry is actively being pushed towards digital transformation and AI adoption. The Construction Leadership Council has a dedicated Digital, Data and Knowledge workstream and its Construct AI initiative is specifically designed to accelerate AI adoption across construction.

CIOB is similarly positioning AI as a practical tool for construction rather than science fiction – particularly for analysing data, identifying trends, forecasting risk and improving decision-making.

There is still an adoption gap. CIOB notes that many construction businesses are experimenting with tools such as ChatGPT for reports and correspondence but haven’t yet moved into more strategic applications.

Digital adoption itself is becoming increasingly important to competitiveness. CIOB says BIM, drones, 3D printing, augmented reality and data analytics are becoming commonplace, while businesses that are slow to adopt digital technology risk being left behind.

The bigger story isn’t AI is replacing Google its construction buyers are becoming more informed before they ever contact you and AI is changing how they get that information.

The website isn’t necessarily the starting point anymore. It can be the evidence that validates the decision.

The wider construction picture

The Construction Leadership Council is actively promoting digital transformation across the built environment and has established Construct AI to accelerate AI adoption across the industry.

CIOB also describes digital technology as increasingly integral to the built environment, highlighting technologies including BIM, drones, 3D printing and data analytics.

More recently, CIOB has been talking about the adoption divide around AI: businesses are already experimenting with tools such as ChatGPT, but many have yet to move from simple productivity tasks into more strategic applications.

So this isn’t really a story about some distant future – the construction industry is already moving. The question is how quickly individual businesses move with it.

The same fundamentals still matter: useful content, strong technical foundations, authority, reputable links and a website that provides a good experience.

But now there is another layer – can AI understand who you are, what you know, what you’ve done and why someone should trust you?

The construction companies that win the next stage of digital search won’t necessarily be the ones publishing the most content, they’ll be the ones answering the best questions.

The goal isn’t simply to rank number one anymore. It’s to become the company that keeps appearing throughout the research journey.

Useful Reading

Office for National Statistics – Construction output in Great Britain

Construction Leadership Council – Digital, Data and Knowledge

CIOB – Digital Technology and Innovation

CIOB – AI and Construction: The Power of Progress, Not Perfection

CIOB – AI in Construction: The Adoption Divide is Underway

The post From Google to ChatGPT: How Construction Buyers Are Searching for Suppliers and Contractors appeared first on Koozai.com

The difficult part is knowing whether your own brand is showing up alongside them.

For years, SEO reporting has given marketers a relatively clear set of measures. Rankings, organic traffic, click-through rates and conversions all help us understand how a website is performing in search.

AI search is making that picture more complicated.

A potential customer can now ask an AI tool to recommend a provider, compare products or explain which options are worth considering. They might see your competitors mentioned without ever visiting their websites. They might see your brand too, but that visibility won’t necessarily appear in Google Analytics.

This creates a new consideration for SEO teams: how visible is your brand when customers use AI to research the products and services you offer?

Search visibility is becoming harder to measure

Traditional search gives us a useful visual reference. You can see the businesses ranking above you, understand the type of content Google is rewarding and track changes over time.

AI-generated answers work differently.

A customer might ask:

“Which are the best companies for [service]?”

They could receive a shortlist of several businesses, along with an explanation of what each one offers.

Another customer might ask:

“What should I consider when choosing a [product or service]?”

The response could reference information from several websites, reviews, publications and other sources.

There may be no obvious ranking position to track. There may not even be a click.

For marketers, that means an important part of search visibility can sit outside the metrics we’ve traditionally used to assess SEO performance.

Your competitors could be influencing customers before you know it

Consider someone who is researching a significant purchase.

They might start by asking an AI tool for advice, rather than typing a product category into Google. They could ask for recommendations, compare different providers or ask which brands are considered reliable.

If your competitor appears repeatedly during that research, they’ve already gained an opportunity to influence the customer’s shortlist.

You may still see that person arrive at your website later through branded search, direct traffic or another channel. By that point, the original AI interaction could be invisible in your analytics.

This is where the distinction between traffic and influence becomes important.

A website visit is easy to measure. The interactions that contributed to someone choosing to visit are harder to see.

Ranking well doesn’t automatically mean appearing in AI search

It’s reasonable to assume that a strong organic presence should help a brand appear in AI search. There are certainly overlaps between the signals used to understand websites and the information surfaced in AI-generated responses.

However, the relationship isn’t one-to-one.

AI systems can draw on a broad range of information. Depending on the platform and the question being asked, that might include websites, product information, reviews, publications, forums and other third-party sources.

This means a brand’s wider online presence can matter alongside its traditional rankings.

For example, you could have strong rankings for your core commercial terms but relatively little content addressing the questions customers ask before they are ready to buy.

A competitor might have built a much broader body of useful information around the same subject. They may also have reviews, expert commentary and third-party coverage that reinforce their position.

When someone asks an AI tool for a recommendation, those differences can become visible.

What makes a brand more likely to appear?

There isn’t a formula that guarantees inclusion in an AI-generated response. The results can vary between platforms, queries and even individual searches.

There are still some fundamentals worth getting right.

Build depth around the subjects that matter

If you want your business to be associated with a particular area, your website needs to demonstrate knowledge of it.

That means looking beyond a list of target keywords.

Think about the questions customers ask before making contact. What are they comparing? What problems are they trying to solve? What information would help them decide between different options?

Useful content can cover those areas in much more detail than a page designed around a single keyword ever could.

The aim should be to provide genuinely helpful information, rather than simply increasing the number of pages on the site.

Make your business easy to understand

Search engines and AI systems need to understand what a business does and where it has expertise.

A clear website structure helps. So does well-organised content, descriptive page titles, useful internal linking and appropriate structured data.

Consistent information matters too.

If your business details, products, services or areas of expertise are presented differently across different sources, it becomes harder to build a consistent picture of the brand.

Technical SEO remains important here. Crawlability, indexation and a well-structured website provide the foundations for everything else.

Build credibility beyond your own website

Your website only tells part of the story.

Reviews, industry publications, expert commentary, reputable directories, partnerships and other third-party sources can all contribute to how a brand is understood.

This is particularly relevant when AI systems are drawing information from multiple sources.

If competitors have a strong presence across their own websites and the wider web, that gives them more opportunities to be associated with the subjects and qualities that matter to customers.

For SEO teams, this is another reason to look beyond on-site optimisation alone.

Focus on customer questions

Keyword research remains useful, but it shouldn’t be the end of the process.

Look at the questions surrounding your main commercial terms.

What does someone want to know before they contact a provider?

What would they ask when comparing two products?

What could make them hesitate before buying?

What information would help them decide which option is right for them?

These questions can uncover content opportunities that aren’t obvious from a traditional keyword list.

They also give you a better understanding of the information customers need during the consideration process.

AI referrals are already showing up in client data

We’ve been tracking visits from AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini.

In August, AI tools sent 216 sessions to a client’s website, compared with 136 in August 2025. That’s a 59% year-on-year increase.

ChatGPT accounted for 92% of AI referral traffic, with the remainder coming from Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.

The overall numbers are still small compared with traditional organic search, but the year-on-year growth is worth paying attention to. AI referrals are becoming another source of website traffic that SEO teams should be monitoring.

There’s also an important limitation to this data. Referral traffic only captures the people who actually click through from an AI tool. It doesn’t show how many people saw the brand in an AI-generated response, took note of it and then returned later through another channel.

For example, someone might ask ChatGPT to recommend providers in a particular category. Your brand appears in the response, but they don’t click immediately. They might later search for your brand on Google and visit the website directly.

Analytics could record that as direct or organic traffic. The influence of the original AI interaction would be much harder to see.

That’s why AI referral traffic is useful, but it shouldn’t be treated as the full picture of AI visibility.

The question for SEO teams is becoming broader: how often is your brand appearing in AI search, what are people being told about you, and are those interactions leading to visits or conversions later?

How can you see what your competitors are doing?

The simplest place to start is with the questions that matter commercially to your business.

Build a list of prompts based on your customers’ research behaviour. Include questions about products, services, comparisons, problems and recommendations.

For example:

• “What are the best [products/services] for…?”
• “Which [providers/brands] should I consider for…?”
• “What are the main differences between [option A] and [option B]?”
• “What should I look for when choosing a [product/service]?”
• “What are the most reliable [products/services] in this category?”

Run those questions through the AI search platforms your audience is likely to use.

Then record the results.

Look at:

• Which brands appear
• How often your brand appears
• Which competitors are mentioned
• How the brands are described
• Which sources are referenced
• Whether your brand is recommended or simply mentioned

The aim isn’t to produce a perfect score for AI visibility. AI-generated answers can change, so a single test isn’t enough to draw meaningful conclusions.

Repeated testing gives you something much more useful. You can start to identify patterns and see where your brand is consistently present, where competitors have an advantage and where there are gaps.

Context matters as much as the mention

A brand mention on its own doesn’t tell you very much.

Imagine three different results.

Your brand is listed alongside four competitors.

Your brand is described as a leading option for the specific problem the customer is trying to solve.

Your brand is mentioned briefly, while a competitor is recommended as the preferred choice.

All three count as visibility. Their potential commercial value is very different.

That’s why AI search monitoring should look at the context around the brand.

What are you known for?

Look at the attributes associated with your brand. If customers care about quality, reliability, expertise, price or a particular product feature, are those qualities coming through?

Which competitors appear?

The businesses competing with you in AI search may not be the same businesses you see competing for traditional rankings.

Which sources are being used?

The sources cited or referenced in AI responses can reveal useful information. They may highlight content gaps, third-party opportunities or areas where competitors have established greater credibility.

Are you being recommended?

There’s a meaningful difference between being included in a list and being presented as a strong choice.

These details make the analysis far more useful than simply counting how many times a brand name appears.

What should you do if competitors are ahead?

Resist the temptation to respond by producing lots of new content.

Start by understanding what’s happening.

Take the questions where competitors are appearing consistently and look at the information available about those brands.

You might find that they have more comprehensive content around a particular subject. Perhaps they’re frequently mentioned by reputable publications. They could have stronger product information, a larger volume of reviews or clearer evidence of expertise.

The answer will vary by business.

Once you’ve identified the gap, you can decide what needs to change.

That might mean improving existing content rather than creating something new. It could involve building out useful information around an important topic, improving technical foundations or strengthening your brand’s presence across relevant third-party sources.

In some cases, the work won’t sit entirely within SEO.

That’s fine. AI search visibility brings together several areas that have traditionally been managed separately, including SEO, content, digital PR, brand and reputation.

What does this mean for SEO reporting?

This is where AI search creates one of the biggest challenges for marketers.

If someone sees your brand in an AI-generated response and never clicks through, traditional analytics won’t record that interaction.

If they do click, you may be able to see the referral. You still won’t necessarily know what happened before that visit.

For SEO teams, this makes it worth looking beyond traffic and rankings when assessing search performance.

Depending on your business, useful measures could include:

• Visibility across important commercial questions
• Brand mentions and recommendations in AI search
• Competitor visibility
• Non-brand search demand
• Organic engagement and conversion quality
• Assisted conversions and influenced revenue
• AI referral traffic
• The topics and questions where your brand is gaining or losing visibility

That doesn’t mean every one of these measures belongs in a monthly report.

The right metrics depend on the role search plays in your customer journey and the commercial outcomes you’re trying to influence.

The important thing is to understand what your reporting can actually tell you, and where it leaves gaps.

 A practical way to get started

You don’t need a complicated AI search monitoring programme to start learning.

Choose 20 to 30 questions that have genuine commercial relevance.

Include a mixture of early research questions, comparison searches and queries closer to a purchasing decision.

For each question, record:

1. Which brands appear.
2. How your brand is described.
3. Which competitors are mentioned.
4. Which brands are recommended.
5. Which sources are referenced.
6. Whether your brand appears consistently across different tests.

Repeat the exercise over time.

You’ll start to build a picture of how your brand and competitors are being represented in AI search. More importantly, you’ll have a useful source of insight for your wider SEO and content strategy.

The search results are getting bigger

AI search isn’t replacing the fundamentals of SEO. Strong technical foundations, useful content, authority and relevance still matter.

The difference is that there are now more ways for those factors to influence a customer’s decision.

Someone might discover your brand through a traditional Google result. They might encounter it in an AI-generated recommendation. They could read a review, see your product mentioned by a third party and then search for your brand directly.

The final website visit is only one part of that process.

For marketers, the opportunity is to understand the wider picture.

Are your competitors appearing when customers ask important questions? Are you being considered alongside them? And can your current reporting tell you when that happens?

Those are questions worth adding to your SEO strategy now, while AI search is still developing.

Because if customers are using AI to decide which brands deserve their attention, being visible in that conversation could become just as important as where you rank in the traditional results.

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