The five signals that my SEO is working
Clicks on money queries, trending up. Not total clicks, clicks on the queries that precede revenue, year over year. This is the single most honest signal, and Search Console gives it free.
Coverage growing with the site. Pages published should become pages indexed at a high ratio; a widening gap means effort evaporating before it competes.
Impressions converting to clicks. Rising impressions with flat clicks means visibility without capture, either weak titles or, increasingly, answers absorbing your queries on the results page.
Organic conversions you can trace. Sessions to leads to pipeline. SEO that cannot be traced to money is working only in the sense that a treadmill is transportation.
And the 2026 signal: your brand appearing when AI answers your buying questions. Assistants cite the same strong pages good SEO produces, so working SEO shows up in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity answers too. Absence there while rankings hold means your SEO is working on a shrinking surface.
Why is my SEO not working? The three usual answers
If the signals are flat, the cause is almost always one of three. Foundation: indexation or technical problems quietly excluding your work, fixable in the order laid out in how to fix SEO. Mismatch: content answering keywords instead of the questions buyers actually ask, which no volume of publishing overcomes. Or surface: your SEO is fine and the clicks moved, to AI Overviews and assistant recommendations, the pattern diagnosed in is my SEO broken.
Set up the ten-minute monthly check
One spreadsheet, six columns, updated monthly: money-query clicks, coverage ratio, CTR trend, organic conversions, share of AI answers on your top ten questions, and notes on what shipped. The first four come from Search Console and analytics; the fifth from asking the four assistants your buying questions, or from a free AI visibility audit that maps it for you with screenshots. Run it monthly and the question changes from is my SEO working to which surface do we win next, the full assessment lives in is my SEO good.
