The free path to the top of the page got narrower.
SEO is not dead. But the page it optimises for is being clicked a lot less than it used to be, and a growing share of people are getting their answer before they ever reach a website. That is not an opinion we are selling. It is measured, and the people who measured it publish their work.
Measured across US desktop and mobile, January to April 2026. Clicks to independent sites fell further than anything else on the page over two years, while paid clicks grew.
SparkToro, using Similarweb panel dataRoughly half. Only 1% clicked a link inside the summary itself. Pew tracked 68,879 real searches from 900 US adults rather than asking people what they thought they did.
Pew Research CenterAdobe, across more than a trillion visits to US retail sites. Those visitors also converted at a rate 54% better than traffic from everywhere else, so the channel is small and serious rather than small and idle.
Adobe Analytics, May 2026Figures current as of September 2026.
Being found is now two jobs, not one
There is the search page, where the space that still reliably sends a click is increasingly the space you pay for. And there is the answer engine, where people ask an AI assistant and act on what it says. Those visits are still a small slice, but they are growing fast and they convert better than average. Being legible to both is the work now.
Clicks are the easy part to promise
Anyone can buy you traffic. The harder and more useful thing is knowing which of those visits turned into a person your sales team spoke to. So we build the whole pipeline: conversion tracking end to end, wired into your CRM, so a lead arrives with a name and a next step instead of a number in a dashboard. We have worked in HubSpot, GoHighLevel and Mailchimp among others. If you do not have a CRM, we can stand one up.
Intent is still here. It just costs money to stand where it used to be free to stand.
Where the vertical cuts earn their keep. Feed, Reels and Stories, built for the placement rather than cropped into it.
Expensive per click, and worth it when your buyer has a job title. Tighter targeting, fewer swings.
Two seconds to hold someone. On these, the edit is the media buy.
Audit the accounts, the tracking underneath them, and whether the numbers in the dashboard match the ones in your business. Plenty of accounts are measuring the wrong thing before they start spending on the wrong thing.
Conversion tracking end to end, wired into your CRM so a lead has a name and a next step rather than a row in a report. We have worked in HubSpot, GoHighLevel and Mailchimp among others. If there is no CRM yet, we can stand one up.
Structure the campaigns, launch, then keep or kill on evidence. You see the same dashboard we do, plus a plain summary of what changed and why.
- An account and tracking audit you keep, whether or not we work together
- Conversion tracking that agrees with your own numbers
- CRM integration, so a lead lands somewhere a person will actually see it
- Ad creative cut in house, in every ratio the placement takes
- Copy variants written to test one idea at a time
- Campaign structure you could hand to anyone and they would follow it
- A reporting view you can open yourself, any day, without asking
- A monthly read in plain language: what worked, what we stopped, what is next
Most shops that buy media send the creative out. Most studios that make creative cannot run the media. We already cut the video, so when a hook is not landing we recut it that week instead of filing a request with someone else and waiting on it.