GSC Data Is 75% Incomplete
New analysis shows Google Search Console hides roughly 75% of impressions, forcing SEO teams to rethink how they measure performance.
Kevin Indig
Growth Advisor
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Kevin Indig is a Growth advisor who helps the world’s market leaders define and evolve their Organic Growth strategy.
Once a week, he sends an email with Organic Growth strategies and case studies to over 9,000 subscribers called The Growth Memo.
He co-hosts the Contrarian Marketing podcast with Eli Schwartz, which gives you ideas you might not be thinking about.
In the past, he led SEO and Growth at Shopify, G2 and Atlassian and is an angel investor.
Articles
How Do You Compete In Agentic Commerce?
The rise of agentic commerce ends marketing-first SEO and forces brands to compete on data integrity and product truth.
The Great Decoupling
AI search broke the link between traffic and revenue. This piece explains how SEO creates demand without page views.
How Much Can We Influence AI Responses?
LLM visibility is less about control and more about volatility, as studies reveal how easily AI answers can be influenced at scale.
State Of AI Search Optimization 2026
AI search is replacing ranked results with single answers. This guide explains how brands earn retrieval, citations, and user trust.
Scoring My 2025 Predictions
Kevin Indig reflects on his 2025 predictions, scoring the wins, misses, and lessons from AI’s first year of true deployment.
7 SEO, Marketing, And Tech Predictions For 2026
Kevin Indig’s 2026 predictions reveal the end of AI dashboards, the rise of agentic SEO, and a web divided between bots and verified humans.
The Alpha Is Not LLM Monitoring
Fresh data reveals where AI search value is actually accumulating, and which companies may face painful down rounds.
Selling AI Search Strategies To Leadership Is About Risk
AI search buy-in comes when it’s framed as a cost-effective way to prevent losing ground in the next discovery shift.
Budget SEO For Capacity, Not Output
Marketing leaders need to stop funding SEO for clicks and start designing budgets around brand authority in AI-first search.
LLM Traffic Is Shrinking
Despite strong early growth, LLM referral traffic is fading fast as model changes and AI Overviews make clicks obsolete.
AI Is Breaking The Economics Of Content
The decline of Wikipedia’s search visibility highlights a fundamental shift in content value driven by AI and changing user behavior.
The Impact Of AI Mode On SEO – Analysis Of 10 Studies
What do AI Mode studies really say about search behavior, visibility, and brand trust? Kevin Indig separates fact from hype in this research-driven breakdown.
Google’s AI Mode SEO Impact | AI Mode User Behavior Study [Part 2]
The second part of Kevin Indig’s AI Mode study breaks down what’s measurable, what’s myth, and where visibility is really earned.
What Our AI Mode User Behavior Study Reveals About The Future Of Search
Here’s what 250 AI Mode sessions reveal about search: Users stay inside, clicks vanish, and visibility replaces traffic as the real currency.
How AI Really Weighs Your Links (Analysis Of 35,000 Datapoints)
Backlinks still matter in AI search, but quality, diversity, and even nofollow links now shift visibility more than raw volume.
Making SEO Personas Actionable Across Teams
The best market intelligence you’ll ever get is hidden in organic queries, but only if you turn those signals into personas teams actually use.
Personas Are Critical For AI search
Build lean LLM-ready SEO personas using data you already have to win trust clicks and conversions in the AI search era.
Trust Still Lives In Blue Links
Data from 250+ tasks shows how AI Overview preview answers, while purchase intent flows through trusted brands, authority domains, and organic clicks.
Internal Linking Grows Up: Evolving From Link Juice To Entity Maps
From PageRank flow to entity mapping, internal linking has evolved into one of SEO’s most powerful levers for organic visibility.
ChatGPT Vs. Google At Every Stage Of The User Journey
Fresh data shows ChatGPT adoption accelerating while Google stalls, with major implications for user behavior and downstream SEO metrics.
Standby As Google Cannibalizes Itself (While Also Devouring All Of Us)
Google’s AI Overviews show how self-cannibalization works. Kevin Indig revisits product cannibalization with lessons from Apple, Netflix, Amazon, and what it means for marketers.
Is AI Cutting Into Your SEO Conversions?
From AI Overviews to attribution loss, here are five reasons SEO conversions may be falling and how to check what’s hitting you hardest.
Google Ecommerce SERP Features 2025 Vs. 2024
What’s replacing product grids? This year-over-year analysis of Google’s ecommerce SERPs highlights the rise of AI Overviews, visuals, and disappearing UGC.
AI Halftime Report H1 2025
Kevin Indig breaks down AI’s toll on traffic, publishers, and organic visibility, and why the second half of 2025 may hit even harder.
Operationalizing Your Topic-First SEO Strategy
Moving from keywords to topics is just the start. Here’s how to operationalize a topic-first SEO strategy across content, linking, and measurement.
Topic-First SEO: The Smarter Way To Scale Authority
In this week’s Growth Memo, Kevin Indig lays out the case for a topic-first SEO approach, and how it helps future-proof your visibility.
How You Can Track Brand Authority For AI Search
Brand reputation wins in AI search. See how brand authority influences chatbot citations and what you can do to build and measure it effectively.
Keywords Are Dead, But The Keyword Universe Isn’t
In this week’s Growth Memo, Kevin Indig shows how to build a scalable keyword universe that adapts to AI-driven search intent and content priorities.
Query Fan-Out
Kevin Indig explores how query fan-out drives AI Mode and why classic “one query, one answer” SEO no longer cuts it.