Issue 001: The day I stopped watching only the rankings
By Paige Ranks, Chief Growth Officer · July 2026
I run growth for the studio's own products: directories like Broadband Trader and ISP Locators that publish thousands of pages about business internet. Until its recent sale, that family also included Broadband Locators, the flagship. For years my morning ritual was the rank tracker. Open it, scan the movers, chase whatever slipped. Positions were the scoreboard, and we were good at that game. There was a stretch when our three directories held positions 1, 2, and 3 on the same page of local results for terms like a city name plus T1 line. You cannot own a search result more completely than that.
So understand what it cost me to admit that the scoreboard changed.
The moment was small. A lead came in through one of the directories, and when we asked the ordinary follow-up question, how did you find us, the answer was some version of "I asked an assistant what my options were." Not "I googled it." Asked. That buyer never saw a results page. They saw an answer, and we happened to be in it. The "happened to be" is the part that kept me up. Nothing in my rank tracker measured it. We were flying a second aircraft with no instruments.
Here is the uncomfortable logic I had to sit with. A ranking is a position in a list the buyer still has to read. An AI answer is the list already read for them. When an assistant names two brands and yours is not one of them, you have not dropped to position four. You do not exist in that transaction. Every hour I spent nudging a page from position three to position two was an hour spent polishing a layer some of our buyers no longer look at.
So we changed what we watch. Not what we do, at first. Just what we watch. We wrote down the questions our actual customers ask before they buy: the plain-language versions, phrased the way a business owner phrases them, not the way a keyword tool does. We now put those questions to the major assistants on a regular cycle and log a simple fact each time: were our brands named, cited, or linked, or were they absent? We track it the way we used to track positions. Share-of-voice in answers, alongside share-of-voice in results.
What we have learned so far is qualitative, and I am going to keep it that way rather than dress it up with numbers we could not defend. Three patterns stand out. The pages assistants cite are the ones with clean structure and a real, specific answer near the top, and they are almost always pages that already rank. Mentions lag rankings; you earn the position first, and the answer layer notices later. And consistency beats cleverness: when a brand's name, description, and facts match everywhere the machines look, the machines repeat them with more confidence.
Notice what that means. The work did not change as much as I feared. The foundation is still the foundation. What changed is the definition of winning. Position one used to be the trophy. Now the trophy is being the name the machine says out loud.
The decision, in the end, was a reallocation. Fewer of my hours go to squeezing the last position out of terms we already rank well for. More hours go to making our best pages quotable: one clear answer per page, facts an assistant can lift cleanly, and a brand identity so consistent there is no ambiguity about who we are. Rankings became an input. Answers became the output we manage to. We published the fuller method in our guide to AI search visibility if you want the long version.
If you run a business, here is what I would do in your seat this month. Three things, none of which require buying a tool.
First, run the ten-question test. Write down the ten questions a customer would realistically ask an assistant before buying from you. Ask them yourself in two or three assistants. Record which brands get named. Repeat monthly. That log is your first AI share-of-voice report, and it costs an hour. Our free findability score tool is a fast way to see where you stand today.
Second, fix your facts. Same business name, same description, same core claims on your site, your profiles, and every directory that lists you. Then rewrite your most important page so its first screen answers the one question that page exists to answer.
Third, keep doing the classical work. The answer layer is largely assembled from pages that already rank and already get cited. Traditional SEO is not the old game. It is the qualifying round for the new one.
The rankings still matter. I still check them. Just no longer first.
Paige