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There have been so many changes to Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) in the last three years that publishers are still measuring SEO by keyword positions are using the wrong metrics for success.
You can no longer simply use a ranking tool to discover a range of high-ranking keywords, update a page with said keywords and expect that page to improve in rankings and traffic. This is because:
— Google has developed far beyond just using keywords to understand the meaning of a webpage.
— Search results are now populated with so many modules to keep the user inside Google, pushing your website pages down. Ranking number one in the organic results could still mean you are only visible below the fold.
— AI Overviews, as with AI answer engines in general, do not rank in the traditional sense. Due to their probabilistic nature, you can’t guarantee two results will ever be the same.
This does not mean ranking tools are defunct. It just means the old way we used to think of Rank → Click → Traffic → Conversion is too simplistic.
So what are the new metrics we need to be watching in this new age of SEO and AI visibility?
Foundational SEO metrics in 2026
AI systems are trained on and influenced by content that performs well in search.
With that in mind, here are some core metrics I would recommend monitoring.
Search visibility :
— Impressions by query and page
— Average ranking position
— Top ten and top three keyword coverage
— SERP feature presence (featured snippets, PAA, rich results).
Traffic engagement :
— Organic sessions
— Engaged sessions/engagement rate
— Pages per session
— Unique page views
— Return visitors from search.
Indexing health :
— Indexing rate
— Crawl and rendering issues
— core web vitals
— Content decay (ranking and traffic loss over time)
— server response time.
Engagement is particularly important as we know through leaked Google documentation, that this contributes to ranking (navboost).
AI visibility metrics: Measuring influence without clicks
AI visibility is rarely earned without strong SEO fundamentals. Search performance remains a leading indicator of future AI inclusion.
Because AI systems surface content differently than Google search, the goal is no longer just earning the click, but earning inclusion, citation, and trust.
Although traffic from AI answers can be low, the user is more invested in the answer – potentially leading to higher conversions.
Just be mindful when using AI prompt trackers to gauge visibility . They will often produce a score which is entirely based on the prompts you choose or have generated for you. These tools make it easy for you to add hundreds of prompts, but you really need to drill down as to why each prompt is significant for your business.
You can also do the same prompt five times and get five different sets of citations and source links, especially for prompts where there are no strongly authoritative sources to cite.
Against that context we need to look at three aspects of AI visibility:
AI surface presence :
— AI citation frequency: How often your brand or content is referenced in AI-generated answers
— Prompt coverage (the percentage of relevant user prompts where your content influences responses)
— Answer inclusion rate and quality (whether your content appears verbatim, summarised, or paraphrased).
Brand attribution signals :
— Brand mentions without links
— Explicit source naming (“according to…”, “experts at…”)
— Topic association strength: How consistently AI systems associate your brand with specific subject areas.
Answer integrity :
— Accuracy of AI answers based on your content
— Narrative control (does AI answer reflect your framing, terminology, and expertise?).
In AI environments, being present often matters more than being clicked.
Authority metrics: Where SEO and AI converge
I would argue that authority is now the single most important long-term signal across both Google and AI answer ecosystems.
This can be broken down into:
Trust & expertise signals :
— E-E-A-T alignment (experience, expertise, authority, trust)
— Use of recognised authors and experts
— High-quality backlinks and citations
— Consistency of topic coverage over time.
Structural authority signals :
— Strong internal linking and topic clusters
— Scannable summaries and well-structured headings.
Although there is a strong correlation with pages that rank highly in Google and presence in AI answers, it is equally the case that publishers with strong authority regularly appear in AI answers even when they do not rank #1 in traditional search.
This has led to a plethora of black hat techniques to game the system in AI by imitating authority signals. Ultimately some of these techniques are likely to be identified as spam by Google and penalised at some point, mitigating any long-term benefits.
Business impact metrics in 2026
Ultimately tracking visibility in search and AI answers is about the metrics that matter most to your business.
Here are some additional metrics that are important to track from a business reporting perspective.
Branded searches/prompts
Tracking branded searches for publishers used to be a secondary concern, because the main focus was on the wider pool of audience that visited websites via non-branded terms in order to put together the biggest possible total digital audience number to woo potential advertisers.
However, with the advent of zero-click and AI, publishers are being forced to drill into the value of an audience, and branded searches are an excellent way of tracking loyalty and engagement.
Share of voice
This applies equally to both SEO and AI visibility. Knowing if you’ve had success in search or AI is only possible if you know how to gauge performance against a competitive set OR how popular that query/prompt is. Otherwise, you might think you’re a very big fish in a very small pond.
There are a number of tools out there that offer some form of AI visibility share-of-voice (SOV) tracking, but I would still advocate doing this manually to start with. Just fire up a spreadsheet with the relevant questions you want to track, visit your LLMs and note down the response.
Sistix AI Visibility SOV table
Topic authority
Targeting topic authority is an excellent way of weaning teams away from keyword obsessions and fully focusing on audience intention. Rather than spinning up a ranking tool and generating a load of articles via a volume-based keyword list, allocate research time to understand audience intention.
Well-intentioned topic authority pages often rank for many more queries than you might get with the ‘keyword obsessed’ version .
Internal linking and hub/spoke thinking will also contribute to topic authority success.
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