I write this as part rant, part reflection.
Over the years, I’ve fought hard to get organizations to look beyond vanity metrics—beyond “rankings” and “traffic”—and embrace insights that could actually change how they think about search, their competitive position, and their customers. Some of these ideas gained brief traction, but many were ignored, misunderstood, or dismissed because they didn’t fit neatly into a departmental KPI dashboard.
What frustrates me most is that these insights are still relevant—perhaps even more critical now, as AI rewrites the search landscape and economic pressure forces companies to do more with less.
So here they are: five insights I still believe in that still matter and haven’t gotten the attention they deserve.
1. SERP Shelf Space: The Digital Shelf Most Companies Ignore
SERP Shelf Space is the concept of owning multiple positions on the search results page for a given topic. It goes beyond just aiming for one high-ranking page but strategically occupying as much of page one as possible. It’s the digital equivalent of CPG companies dominating a physical retail shelf with multiple product SKUs.
The screen capture below is for a critical market for a global spirits company. Despite operating dozens of alcohol brands across 80+ markets, they had no presence in the top 10 results for common queries like “whiskey” or “25-year-old whiskey” in any market. When I generated the first report, they had no exposure in any market due to how they implemented their age verification screen. The various agency developers did not realize that Google could not select a year and click the button, nor had they built a workaround. Once we unlocked the doors, they still had performance issues, not for lacking content but for not optimizing their collective brand presence across the SERP.
In this example, six global whiskey brands have separate domain websites; only one is in the top 10 positions, and five of the six did not have a page in the top 100. If I were a C-level executive, that would keep me awake at night. The crazier thing is that it took almost five years to get executive support to even try to fix it.
CPG giants like P&G, Unilever, or Nestlé spend hundreds of millions annually to analyze and dominate retail shelf space. They know that visibility drives sales, so they ensure that whether you’re shopping for toothpaste, detergent, or coffee, several of their brands are staring you in the face.
Yet when it comes to digital shelf space, the modern gateway to most buying decisions—many of these same companies are blind.
I implemented this approach nearly twenty-five years ago for a client who owned multiple hotel brands in Las Vegas. The goal wasn’t to get one of their hotels on the first page for “Las Vegas hotels” but to own the whole page or as much as they could get. His goal was simple: if someone searched for a “Las Vegas hotel,” they would choose one of his properties but only if he was represented. They ended up with 7 out of 10 positions, capturing a significant share of top-of-funnel traffic across the properties.
Later, I analyzed digital shelf performance for a global spirits company. Despite operating dozens of alcohol brands across 80+ markets, they had no presence in the top 10 results for common queries like “whiskey” or “25-year-old whiskey.” It wasn’t that they lacked content—it’s that they weren’t optimizing their collective brand presence across the SERP.
Why it failed to catch on:
- Siloed thinking: Each brand team or product manager focused only on their KPIs.
- Misaligned metrics: Most digital teams are evaluated on the performance of individual properties, not collective category presence. Reporting systems don’t incentivize share-of-voice or SERP dominance.
- Avoidance of bad news: Some companies didn’t want to see how absent they were from competitive queries.
Why it matters now:
With AI Overviews and Search Generative Experiences (SGE) reducing the number of clickable links, shelf space is collapsing. If you’re not strategically thinking about how to occupy more than one spot, you’re ceding ground—likely to aggregators, retailers, or third-party publishers.
The companies that already understand shelf competition—like those battling for eye-level placement in Walmart or Carrefour are best positioned to lead here. They just need to apply that same rigor to the digital shelf.
2. Co-Optimization (Paid + Organic)
Co-optimization is integrating paid search and SEO strategies to improve both. We introduced this a few weeks after Yahoo launched its paid ads program. Will Reynolds is a current evangelist for Co-Optimization. Despite its power and insights, it rarely becomes institutionalized.
The idea is simple: use paid search data to inform organic opportunities and vice versa. Why pay for clicks you already earn organically? Why not test content in PPC before you commit to long-form content?
Why it hasn’t stuck:
- Turf wars: Paid and organic teams often sit in different departments with different goals and agencies.
- Reporting friction: Metrics don’t roll up in a shared way; cost data doesn’t live alongside SEO performance data.
- Political spin: Agencies may obfuscate data to protect budgets or attribution models.
Why it matters now:
In a world of limited budgets and AI-fueled content production, businesses need every edge they can get. Co-optimization is one of the fastest ways to eliminate waste and increase search ROI.
3. Searcher Intent and Buy Cycle Alignment
Before “intent” was a buzzword, Mike Moran and I mapped it in Search Engine Marketing, Inc. published in 2005 and even earlier in my 1994 business school thesis. At multiple multinationals, we built the “Bingo Card Model”: a grid aligning buy cycle phases (awareness, consideration, decision, etc.) with relevant content. Once we had the phrases, we could check rank and paid campaigns. In the first part of the model, we identified they were missing content for 93% of the queries for their brand and key phrases just before the final purchase. Expanding the model, we identified $580 million in missed opportunity We would then track how users moved through that grid based on their query intent.
This allowed us to:
- Identify content gaps,
- Predict next-best content recommendations and
- Optimize for conversion pathways—not just clicks.
Why it wasn’t widely adopted:
- Requires content strategy maturity most organizations lack.
- Hard to attribute success across multiple touchpoints.
- “Too theoretical” for execs who want short-term wins.
Why it matters now:
AI search is intent-first. Understanding the context and phase of your user’s query gives you a massive advantage when designing content and journeys. Tools and models that seemed overly complex 10 years ago now align perfectly with how AI parses, ranks, and generates results.
4. Authority Reporting
Authority reporting is a brutally honest way to evaluate how authoritative your brand is in the eyes of search engines. Instead of measuring if you rank, it asks: Do we consistently rank across the breadth of keywords that define our category?
It’s like walking into a supermarket and checking how often your brand appears in each aisle. Imagine you’re a pet food company. You offer dry food, wet food, senior dog formulas, and allergy-sensitive options, but when customers browse the pet aisle, your products only show up in one corner. That’s not dominance; that’s irrelevance.
Several years ago, we worked with one such pet food company. They had over 2,700 high-intent keywords tied to pet nutrition, product categories, and care topics. But they ranked in the top 10 for only 170 of them. Despite a large ad budget and established distribution, their organic presence was negligible—meaning they weren’t showing up where their customers were actively searching. In retail terms, they had shelf space, but no brand block or mindshare.
By contrast, a healthcare content client we worked with went from ranking in the top 10 for just 10% of relevant disease-related queries to nearly 98% after applying an authority-focused strategy. Not only did this drive exponential traffic, but it positioned them as the trusted destination for over 50 conditions. That presence is the digital equivalent of walking into a pharmacy and seeing their brand dominate the over-the-counter aisle.
Why it’s often ignored:
- It reveals the real gaps: Authority reports expose how many opportunities a brand is missing.
- Intent modeling is hard: It requires building and maintaining a robust taxonomy of topics, not just looking at a keyword list.
- Success isn’t linear: Authority growth is cumulative and long-term—not easily charted on a monthly KPI dashboard.
Why it matters now:
Google’s query fan-out model and AI-generated summaries reward perceived expertise and topical breadth. If you only rank for a handful of terms in your category, you won’t be chosen as a reliable source for AI responses, featured snippets, or knowledge graphs.
Content Deficit Risk
By not maximizing the continuum and ensuring you are an authority in your topic area, you can experience a content deficit risk. The risk is that your product, brand, or company is disqualified from AI recommendations due to insufficient, unstructured, or unverified information. Let me give you a personal example.
While researching CO₂ detectors, I didn’t just Google—I used Perplexity AI. I asked it to recommend the best models, but the one I purchased didn’t make the list. Curious, I asked why not.
Its response was brutally illuminating:
- Limited information – The search results showed little about my selected product’s features or performance.
- Lack of a proven track record – My selected product wasn’t frequently reviewed or mentioned by credible third-party sources.
- Certification uncertainty – One site mentioned a certification, but that wasn’t corroborated anywhere else. In contrast, the recommended models had certification data mentioned across multiple sites.
- Bias toward established brands – The chosen models were from recognized, heavily documented brands. Mine? Practically invisible in the broader ecosystem.
- Perceived quality concerns – One review lumped it in with “cheap alternatives” even though it shared the same country of origin as others on the list.
The kicker? The model Perplexity recommended the most was promoted by an aggressively SEO-optimized, content-stuffed website clearly written for Google rankings. Still, because that content was comprehensive, and they had it syndicated. Others referenced it an authority on this product category, it became the foundation for multiple other citations in the AI’s reasoning.
Here’s the takeaway:
The product I bought wasn’t disqualified because it was objectively bad. It was absent because there wasn’t enough credible, structured, and corroborated information to justify its inclusion. In other words, it lacked digital authority.
Why Most Brands Miss This
Companies often assume that having a product page, a few reviews, and an Amazon listing is enough. It’s not.
If you’re not:
- Publishing clear, structured information about your product’s features, certifications, and differentiators,
- Earning third-party coverage or credible mentions,
- Showing up across trusted sources in your niche…
…then you’re invisible—not just to search engines but to AI-powered buying agents.
This Isn’t SEO. This Is an Inclusion Strategy.
Traditional SEO focused on getting ranked. Authority reporting today must focus on getting chosen. That means:
- Building enough topical coverage to be considered a subject matter authority,
- Ensuring structured data and certifications are indexable and referenced,
- Cultivating reviews, mentions, and secondary signals that reinforce brand credibility across ecosystems.
If you’re not measuring how often you show up, how completely you’re represented, and whether AI systems trust you, then you’re not just behind—you’re being silently excluded.
In a world where AI makes the shortlist, you don’t need to be #1—you just need to be present. And most brands aren’t. Just as brands fight for endcap placement or category leader status in stores, they should fight for online topic-level authority. And yet, most aren’t even measuring it.
5. Searcher Pathway Mapping
Like Authority Reporting, think of it as the “searcher journey.” We once mapped hundreds of customer journeys from query to content consumption and identified the optimal flow through content. This helped us prioritize not just which pages to build or update but also how to interlink them and which CTAs to present.
This approach is similar to understanding the “query chain” or “searcher continuum,” the progressive series of questions and answers that facilitates natural next steps based on user interest.
Why few companies do this:
- Requires behavioral data that isn’t always easy to capture.
- Most content is still built in isolation, without pathways in mind.
- It’s strategic work, not tactical—which means it’s often de-prioritized.
Why it’s more important now:
AI overviews and voice assistants thrive on continuity. Mapping the implied journey helps create content ecosystems that guide users from discovery to decision—especially when traditional funnels disappear.
Final Thought: Rediscover What Matters
If these ideas sound like old news, that’s the point and the problem. They’ve been around for years but are more valuable today than ever.
AI, economic pressure, and the erosion of traditional web engagement metrics demand new thinking—or rather, better use of old thinking. These five insights can help companies realign their digital strategies around what really drives business results: visibility, relevance, authority, and intent alignment.
It’s not too late to rediscover them. But it might soon be too late to survive without them.
