The five checks
Indexation ratio. Pages indexed versus pages published, from Search Console coverage. Below roughly 80 percent, you have foundation work before any strategy discussion matters.
Click trend versus impression trend. Twelve months of Search Console: impressions up with clicks flat or down means visibility without capture, increasingly the fingerprint of answers absorbing your queries.
Money-query coverage. List your ten highest value buying questions and check whether a page on your domain directly answers each. Most sites rank for what they happen to have, not what buyers actually ask.
Answer-layer presence. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity those same ten questions. Good SEO in 2026 shows up here, because assistants cite the same strong pages, absence means your rankings are working a shrinking surface.
Pipeline attribution. Can you connect organic sessions to leads and revenue? SEO that cannot report in pipeline eventually loses its budget regardless of rankings.
Scoring yourself honestly
Five for five: your SEO is genuinely good; invest in the answer layer where your next gains live. Three or four: solid foundation with specific gaps, usually money-query coverage or attribution. Two or fewer: fix fundamentals before spending on anything else, in the order laid out in how to fix SEO. And if check two failed while everything else passed, read is my SEO broken, or did the game change, because that pattern is not an SEO problem.
The check most sites fail, and the fast fix
In our audits, check four fails most: brands with respectable rankings that appear in almost none of their category’s AI answers, because assistants draw from sources and specificity rather than authority alone. It is also the cheapest to fix right now, since most categories still have unclaimed answers. The free AI visibility audit runs your money questions through all four assistants and shows exactly where you stand, on a 30 minute call. From there, how to do SEO in 2026 is the full modern playbook.
