When Clients See Red Arrows
We’re having more and more of the same conversation lately. Clients are seeing red arrows and declining session data, and understandably, they’re frustrated. The first instinct is always that something must be wrong. What’s really happening, though, is a shift in how search works at its core.
Every marketer I talk to is seeing the same thing right now. We're living through a very momentous change in how discovery works. Search is completely different than what it was a year ago. Or even six months ago.
AI is rewriting the rules. People still look for information, but they reach it in new ways, mainly without ever visiting a website. The numbers we’ve trusted for years don’t mean what they used to, and when success is judged only by those old numbers, strong work can look like decline.
The End of Traditional “Reach” as We Knew It
For years we equated reach with volume. More visitors = more traffic, right? However, reach in the old sense, impressions and sessions, is no longer telling the full story.
Visibility is happening in new ways. A piece of your content might appear in an AI-generated summary. Perhaps your brand is mentioned as a trusted source within an answer engine. Users may see your message without ever loading your page. All of this is still visibility, it’s just measured differently.
It feels counterintuitive to see less traffic and call it progress when you’ve been conditioned to equate more clicks with better results, but that’s where we are. Search is building a layer between the user and the website, and much of the value now lives in that space.
How AI Search Is Surfacing Fewer Sources
One of the biggest changes right now is that search results are drawing from a much smaller pool of sources. Users are often seeing one single summarized answer instead of ten blue page links.
Visibility is being reshaped in the process. Fewer sites are being surfaced, and inclusion carries more weight than before. The brands that appear tend to have built steady authority and a record of reliability.
Earning visibility today means staying useful, credible, and consistent over time. The space for exposure has narrowed, but the value of being present inside it has grown.
What We Should Be Measuring Instead
The question used to be, “How many sessions did we get?” Now, it's “Where is our brand showing up when people ask questions?”
We’re starting to look at new indicators that better reflect true influence:
- Brand mentions in AI-generated results
- Citations or references in summaries and answer engines
- Referral traffic from AI platforms
- Search presence across emerging AI search engines
These are early signals, but they point to where visibility is really moving. They show us when your brand is recognized as relevant, even if clicks are down.
Adjusting Your Strategy, and Expectations
At Foremost, we spend every day helping clients make sense of change. What’s different now is the speed and depth of the shift. Search is being rewritten right in front of us, and the numbers we traditionally depended on are losing their meaning.
This is not a moment to cling to old reports or chase the ghosts of past performance. It’s a chance to redefine what visibility means for your business and to align your strategy with where attention truly lives, to prepare for this new reality of search and visibility.
We understand that your reports may feel uncertain. We will look beyond the arrows and find the signals that matter. The measures may be changing, but clarity and trust still drive results; that part has not changed at all.
Connect with Foremost Media to turn uncertainty into a clearer path forward.