iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Pulling out one of the threads of thought from my post this week, I’ve long thought we are heading quickly to a world where every search is “search volume 1”. 👀 What do you think? Do you agree? 🤔 What are you doing about it?

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I have more questions than answers, but I'm excited to do more testing.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Given a static persona and buying objective, one of my experiments "bought" 9 different products in 12 runs. The one pictured below "bought" 5 different products from 4 different brands from 4 different retailers.One-shot prompt tracking isn't anywhere near capturing this complexity.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I've been in the lab. I wanted to see if I could model the impact of combining randomness in LLM outputs with the branching chaos of conversational paths. I wondered how stable the recommended product and brand would be. The answer? Extremely unstable.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Did you know the Google quality graders consider "content effort" to differentiate things that somehow deserve to rank? You'd be well-served to have a listen to @zyppy.com on the subject. (if you want to hear more, register here for the full content: www.searchpilot.com/winning-ai-c... )

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Who else do you know who's actually worked as a Google quality rater to improve their game?

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

(anyone who has seen him MC an event can attest). It is too rare that he is the beneficiary of the same generosity of spirit, which is a shame because he does his own EXCELLENT research.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

You know who is the GOAT at introducing other people and their work? @zyppy.com - Cyrus Shepard.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The other is obviously the growth of GEO: - Change in revenue attributed to combined organic search + AI discovery over the same time period (+20% central estimate)

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

How can these both be true when organic is such a large channel? Well one key is that the clicks become higher-intent on average: "while session volume may compress overall, nominal price increases (AOV) and higher-intent surviving clicks will likely keep SEO-attributed dollar revenue roughly flat"

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I recently set it the task of forecasting: - Change in Google search *traffic* to large retailers over the next 3 years (-15% central estimate) - Change in total online revenue for the same retailers over the same time period (+31% central estimate)

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I have become very interested in the developing AI capabilities for forecasting. My favourite tool at the moment is @FUTURESEARCHAI which takes a simple forecasting question, builds a panel of researchers and emulates the best human forecasters' approaches to quantitative forecasting.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Guardrail metrics have long been a staple of many forms of testing, but they have been less common in SEO testing. I wrote up three uses for guardrails: www.searchpilot.com/resources/bl...

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Reposted by Will Critchlow

Cyrus Maxx @zyppy.com · 16/09/2026

Crunching the numbers, looks like both you and I were in the top ~10th percentile of consensus Surprising, but guess we aren't very contrarian ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

docs.google.com

Expert Consensus

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

In general, I DON'T think they are especially actionable, but they ARE interesting for understanding the consensus and where you differ.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

In the early days of the Moz surveys, I felt like I had a better view of things when search felt more deterministic. These days I find them almost impossible to answer.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Agree? Disagree? One of the experts who answered this differently to me? I'd love to discuss in the thread.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

In other words, there are brand and reputation signals that cause better "10 blue links" rankings and some of those same signals cause the presence of a knowledge panel. I don't believe that the presence of a knowledge panel causes better rankings.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

For the record, my view is that they are correlated, but that this is a spurious correlation based on a set of confounding variables.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I answered "no effect" for "site has Google knowledge panel". The consensus rated it as a +1.15 where a +3 was "strongly positive". This was the biggest gap between my opinion and the consensus.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

One of the questions was about how much brand & reputation signals INFLUENCE Google rankings. "Influence" is the key word here - not predict, not correlate with, but influence - we are looking for causality.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I am pleased that @zyppy.com is continuing the work of doing ranking factor surveys, and I was pleased to be asked to contribute. I cross-referenced my answers against the published data and found something interesting that is important to know when you're reading the output.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

My conversation with @britneymuller.bsky.social , in which she told some WILD anecdotes and combined deep technical expertise with extreme clarity of thought - now available in the podcast feed: shows.acast.com/business-cla...

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

We're trying something new for this webinar - the registration landing page has a LIVE poll on it. @kevin-indig.bsky.social and I placed a bet last year about what would happen in the search space by the end of 2030...

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Hear the ways @kevin-indig.bsky.social has changed his mind about what will and won't threaten Google's dominance in how people search and discover things in the AI age. Is it more like Snapchat threatening Instagram, or Blackberry vs. iPhone?

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

This really explains WHY we see different performance from the same hypothesis in different tools when we run experiments.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

@kevin-indig.bsky.social has some of the best data out there on the ways that different AI discovery tools are gathering data and representing your products and brand. In this clip he talks about the shocking LACK of overlap between the sources cited between the different tools.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Even worse, there's no connection to your activities so when it changes, you don't know WHY it changed. Whatever effort and money you put into tracking and reporting, you need to put MORE into moving the needle.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

ESPECIALLY because "visibility" (and even more so "share of visibility") is sooo disconnected from revenue and business impact. Nobody in your business can tell you what a three point gain is worth. Not in orders. Not in margin. Not in anything you'd put in a forecast.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Prompt tracking has its place. Just like rank tracking did for SEO. But the plan can't just be "keep tracking this number and see what happens".

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

"I’ve had more questions from leadership in the last 6 months than in the preceding 10 years." If you work in SEO or digital marketing, does this sound familiar? The C-Suite is officially obsessed with AI search. Are you ready for the spotlight?

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Everything's changing fast. It's daunting and exciting. The steer from the market has never been clearer though.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

I'm hearing three very clear and consistent messages repeated by leaders, executives, and the C-suite at all our customers: 1. Are we ready for AI search? 2. Can we go faster / run more tests? 3. How do our efforts compare to the market?

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Told gemini to "make my rocket have an adventure" ✨🚀

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Anyone else find that business wins are a bit like trying to see yourself blink in the mirror? By the time you stop to look, they're gone and it's on to the next thing. Anyway, we celebrated a little milestone @searchpilot.bsky.social with some branded lego:

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

(*) I am aware that there are some metrics available from sampled panel data. I am fairly cautious about both their veracity and their sourcing - but that's a different post.

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Will Critchlow @willcritchlow.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

In *ecommerce* at least, any commercially-valuable activity shows up in first party data eventually via the sale. We are focusing on real business impacts. My view is that this is significantly more important and useful in guiding activities than prompt tracking.

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