In the last couple of years, Google search results pages have fundamentally changed. Where a list of blue links once dominated, AI Overviews and shopping grids now answer queries and surface products before anyone even reaches a website. For brands, that means fewer clicks.
The instinctive response is to expand, more platforms = more presence. But without a framework, you’re just spreading resource thin across channels that won’t move the needle for the keywords that matter.
The more useful question isn’t “which platforms should we be on?” It’s “which platforms are actually shaping our audience’s search journey?”
Data first, then activation
The right approach starts before any content gets made. Look at your target keyword set, check what’s ranking in the top 10 results in Google for those terms, and build a share of voice picture per platform. Which platforms are already appearing? At what frequency? Across which categories?
If YouTube has a low share of voice for your keyword set, investing heavily in video content isn’t going to drive incremental visibility. But if Reddit threads are consistently showing up across your core categories, that’s a signal worth acting on. The insight isn’t that one platform is inherently more valuable than another. It’s that neither matters in the abstract. What matters is their visibility within your specific search landscape.
This applies at category level, not just brand level. A single enterprise brand might find that YouTube has strong share of voice in their informational categories but almost none in their transactional ones. Or, that there are certain transactional categories where it plays a dominant role, but not others. This changes the investment case significantly. Platform strategy should follow the data, not the other way round.
Measurement needs to catch up
Knowing which platforms to activate on is only half the problem. The other half is knowing whether it’s working, and that requires a measurement model that reflects how search actually behaves now.
Traffic as a headline KPI is becoming misleading. The goal was never sessions in isolation. It was what those sessions produced. But as AI Overviews absorb clicks on informational queries and shopping grids do the same on transactional ones, organic traffic will decline even when your search presence is strong. Reporting a drop in sessions without that context tells the wrong story.
The more useful lens is incremental revenue: what is organic search actually contributing to the bottom line. That shifts the focus to making the traffic you do receive work harder, which is where SEO and CRO need to start operating much more closely together.
For cross-platform search, measurement gets harder still, because traditional ranking and visibility metrics don’t directly apply to platforms like Reddit or TikTok. The practical proxy is Google visibility of platform content: how frequently are Reddit threads or TikTok posts from your brand appearing in Google results? It’s an imperfect signal, but it’s measurable, and it gives you a basis for platform investment decisions that isn’t purely instinct.
Underneath all of this, it helps to organise KPIs around four goals: discovery (are more people finding the brand?), influence (are they engaging with content?), loyalty (are they returning?), and conversion (are we improving the value of each visit?). Traffic sits under influence, now as a secondary metric. Revenue sits under conversion as the primary one. SEO has always been about driving valuable traffic, that hasn’t changed. But if it wasn’t before, organic revenue should now always be your primary KPI.
Three discipline boundaries worth breaking
The measurement conversation leads naturally to a broader one: SEO simply can’t operate in silo anymore.
Three convergences are becoming impossible to ignore. The first is SEO and CRO. If you’re getting fewer clicks from both informational and transactional queries, the pressure on conversion from the clicks you do get is proportionally higher. Every incremental visit matters more than it used to. SEO and CRO teams need to be working from the same playbook.
The second is SEO and paid social. This is less obvious but increasingly relevant, particularly on Reddit. When Reddit threads are ranking in Google for your target keywords, organic engagement might be one option. But for brands where direct organic participation isn’t appropriate or brand-safe, paid activity on those threads can achieve similar visibility without the risks of organic posting. The SEO team identifies the opportunity. The paid social team executes on it. Neither can see the full picture independently.
The third is SEO and PR. Brand perception matters in AI search responses. When someone asks an AI assistant whether a brand is trustworthy, whether a product is worth buying, whether a company is a good employer, the answer is drawn from content across the open web. Negative coverage, forum complaints, and poor press can feed directly into AI-generated responses about your brand in a way that organic rankings alone won’t protect against. There is a wealth of brand perception data you can gain from AI Overview and Reddit content that your SEO team should be communicating to your PR team, if they aren’t already.
And these are just three. AI has also pulled SEO closer to Influencer, Organic Social, Retail and Programmatic. The direction of travel is clear: the boundaries between SEO and the rest of the marketing mix are dissolving, and the opportunity for true cross-channel activation has never been bigger.
What good looks like
Enterprise brands that navigate this well aren’t the ones that add the most channels. They’re the ones that ask a harder question before they add any: where does our audience actually search, and can we prove it with data?
From there, the work is building a measurement framework that reflects what’s actually happening across all of those touch points, and aligning the disciplines that need to work together to drive performance in this environment.
After all, SEO has always been about adapting to change, and this moment is no different. The Google SERP will keep evolving, so the strategy has to as well. Test, learn from what the data tells you, and build from there.
