Traditional SEO metrics haven’t been good. We don’t need more studies to see what’s happening, but the data confirms it.
Organic traffic is declining for most SEO clients right now. Seer Interactive found that organic CTR dropped 61% for queries with AI Overviews. Executives are watching their dashboards trend downward, often for months at a time.
Most consultants I talk to aren’t prepared for the conversations that come with it. I’m not talking about the diagnostic part. Most of us can figure out why traffic dropped. I mean, the part where you sit across from a CMO and have to explain what’s happening, why, and what you think the company should do about it. That’s a different skill entirely, and we don’t talk enough about it.
I’ve been in SEO for 13 years and have spent the last six running an agency where I personally lead client strategy and present results to senior executives at B2B SaaS companies. The following are the five things I’ve learned about delivering bad news in what is probably the hardest era in which to be an SEO consultant.
1. Executives are more predictable than you think
A few years ago, one of my B2B SaaS clients came to me with a concern I wasn’t expecting. They had gone into their analytics and looked specifically at the performance of our team’s work, separated from the rest of the site’s organic traffic.
The overall numbers we had been reporting looked fine. But when you isolated the work we were responsible for, the performance was flat. It had not grown at all since we started eight months prior.
I looked over the numbers myself, and the client was right.
When I dug into what had happened internally, the picture got worse. My team knew. They had seen that the work was underperforming, but they had made a decision many consultants make: they reported the numbers that looked good and avoided the ones that didn’t. Instead, they kept presenting overall traffic trends without flagging that our work specifically was not delivering.
Nobody wants to walk into a meeting and say, “This didn’t work.” But hiding a failure is often worse than the failure itself. There are two reasons for this.
- The client will eventually find out. Mine did. And when they did, the damage to their trust in us was not about the underperformance. It was about the fact that we had either not caught it, or, worse, had not surfaced it for them.
- When you hide what isn’t working, you lose the opportunity to show the thing executives actually value most: that you’re able to recognize a problem, diagnose why it happened, and bring a revised plan to the table.
This experience changed how I run every client engagement. I started by rebuilding our reporting to isolate the performance of our own work from overall site trends, and then I implemented the rule that underperformance gets surfaced early, with a diagnosis attached.
Anecdotally, every executive I sit across from has…
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