Alina Benny
Alina Benny, Head of Content and SEO at Aura

Measuring SEO by clicks is misleading; what matters is the last click that closes the search. Large language models and AI overviews (AIOs) answer many queries directly, leaving blog posts with a new job: moving from discovery to decision support. Google itself trains its quality raters to prioritise high‑intent, trustworthy content.

Alina Benny, Head of Content and SEO at Aura, argues that most brands are still optimising for the wrong moment. They're chasing visibility when they should be supporting outcomes. In her words: 'SEO is shifting. Both AI and traditional algorithms increasingly favour fact-based, decision-stage content rather than run-of-the-mill keyword-stuffed articles.'

Why Clicks Don't Mean Growth

Since Google rolled out broader AIOs in March 2025, impressions climbed while clicks fell. Google now records an impression as soon as someone expands the overview — and every cited source is logged as position one. The result is visibility inflation without visitors, or what's now dubbed 'the Great Decoupling'. Where impressions and clicks once moved in lockstep, there's now a yawning gap.

That sounds grim, but clicks were always a leading indicator, never the business outcome. What matters is the final click that ends the search. One usability study found that for commercial and transactional queries, about 80% of final clicks still went to organic results rather than staying inside the AIO.

Those clicks are fewer in number but higher in intent. But this was a controlled UX study, not a global dataset. Other larger‑scale analyses from Pew, BrightEdge, and Ahrefs show much steeper overall CTR drops of 30%–50% or more when AIOs appear.

Aura's own data shows clicks dropping ~32% even as rankings improved; this lines up with the general CTR drop. Because Aura operates in a YMYL category, users are more skeptical and more likely to double‑check by clicking through. This may keep CTRs relatively higher than in less sensitive niches.

What Decision-Stage Content Looks Like

Decision-stage content helps users choose. Here are some examples:

  • Feature comparisons ('Aura vs. competitor')
  • Buyer guides and checklists ('What to look for in a parental controls app')
  • Pricing breakdowns
  • Technical how‑tos

When Benny joined Aura in 2022, much of the traffic centered on broad, scam-related topics. Useful, but too far from the moment of purchase. Her team doubled down on higher-intent areas tied directly to Aura: credit monitoring, data broker opt-outs, family safety.

'Just last year, we worked through four core Google updates that made holding onto traffic a real challenge. Because we had our blinders on and focused only on our users, we grew transactions, doubled conversion rates, and reduced customer acquisition costs,' Benny says.

Aura's steepest click declines came from top-of-funnel pages. These lost tens of thousands of impressions and thousands of clicks in just three months. Meanwhile, decision-stage topics tied directly to Aura's product — like credit monitoring and data broker removal — held steadier. Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines make this clear: raters are trained to look for content that shows E‑E‑A‑T and gives reliable answers to high‑stakes queries.

In practice, Aura extends this work by:

  • Reviewing which Aura pages are most cited in AIOs and LLMs, and keeping them updated with accurate information and product context.
  • Publishing proprietary studies that LLMs can cite directly, turning Aura into a source.
  • Looking for hallucinated URLs and redirecting them to the correct pages.

Measuring Performance and Influence

It was easy to measure SEO success with formulas around search volume, CTR, and conversion rates. That model no longer works. AI summaries and zero‑click results make it harder to tie rankings directly to revenue. SEO now shapes brand preference and provides decision support wherever people look for answers — in Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, or online communities.

Benny's playbook is built for small teams under pressure. At Sales Hacker, she scaled a practitioner-led site from 19,000 to 100,000 organic sessions and grew the email list to 85,000 — work that helped drive an acquisition by Outreach. At Nextiva, she grew blog traffic 500% by focusing on mid‑ to bottom‑funnel queries and tying blog performance to revenue.

Aura runs the same way today. Two core operators, plus freelancers and internal SMEs, publish content mapped to buyer intent. The system is codified, measurable, and designed to map rankings to transactions.

'We're slowly moving away from crediting only certain pages for transactions,' she says. 'You want your brand to show up consistently enough that choosing you feels inevitable.'

She adds: 'Our job is to translate those signals across channels from SERPs to AIOs to social, so people see the same credible story wherever they look.'

Search isn't just on Google anymore, either. LLMs and AI tools are adding search-like features to apps across the web. Meta AI is now embedded across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. YouTube announced just last month that it's testing automatic video summaries.

You can't only be tracking rankings on Google as a result. For now, Aura uses self-attribution across these channels (like through HDYHAU surveys), but the team is already thinking about bringing SEO, content, social, and brand into one pod.

What's Next

Agentic models where AI assistants act on a user's behalf are just around the corner. That raises the bar to have more structured, information-dense content that agents can pull from directly. Benny believes that SEO will span organic, paid, community, and product marketing so the brand shows up consistently, no matter the channel.