A while back I got hooked on a fitness app. Every morning it handed me a number, and I chased that number like a dog chasing a car. The number went down. I felt great about myself. Then one day I actually looked in the mirror and I looked worse than when I started. Same body. Two scoreboards. And they flatly disagreed with each other.
I’ve thought about that stupid morning a lot this year, because the same thing happened to a website I’ve been rebuilding.
We spent months making e-CENS rank better on Google. And it worked. Over the same stretch, the site’s average position went from around 47 to around 23. Call it twice as good. I was ready to take the win to the team.
Then I looked at the clicks. Down 51%. Almost the exact mirror image of the ranking gain. Rankings up by half, traffic down by half, in the same window.
Now, I’ll be straight with you, because it matters. That’s not a clean experiment. Part of that click drop is us cleaning house, killing off a big pile of junk pages that were pulling garbage impressions from countries we don’t even sell to. So the average position flatters itself a little. I know that. But the shape of the thing is hard to unsee once you’ve seen it. And if you run content for a living, you’ve probably felt a softer version of it in your own dashboard already. Rankings holding steady or climbing. Traffic quietly leaking out the bottom.
Here’s how I make sense of it now. Content has two scoreboards.
The first one is the click. Rankings and sessions. The blue link someone taps to land on your page. We’ve kept score this way for 20 years. Every tool and every monthly “how did the blog do” conversation runs on it.
The second scoreboard is the citation. Whether the AI answer, the thing ChatGPT or Perplexity or Google’s own summary hands the person before they scroll anywhere, actually names you. Whether you’re the source it built its answer out of.
For most of those 20 years the two moved together. If you ranked, you got clicked, so we only ever watched the first board and assumed the second one came free with it. Then the answer started happening before the click. Someone asks a question, a machine answers it in full, and the whole visibility is that citation. No tap required. No session. Nothing your traffic report will ever show you.
So why do we keep staring at the click board while the game slid over to the other one? Because the click board is easy. It has a clean number. My boss understands it. I can drop it into a slide and nobody asks a follow-up. The citation board is new and awkward and it’s not a line anyone’s put on the reporting template yet, so as far as the monthly review is concerned, it doesn’t exist. We chase the number we can see. Honestly, fair enough. I did it too, for months, while half-knowing better.
What I changed after all this is smaller than you’d expect, and it started with what I count.
The big one: I treat every page as a source now, a thing a machine reads to build its answer, instead of a destination I’m trying to drag a human to. Practically, that means the answer to the actual question sits near the top in plain words, not buried under 400 words of me warming up. It means one clear claim a model can quote without mangling it. It means my name and the company name sit on the page in a shape software can actually read, not just something that looks nice to a person.
And I started keeping the second scoreboard by hand. Once a month I sit down and ask the machines the questions my content is supposed to own, and I write down who they name. It’s manual. It’s a little embarrassing, me interrogating a chatbot with a spreadsheet open. It’s also the only number that told me the truth this year.
Here’s the part I’d argue with someone about. If you keep reporting traffic as the whole story, you’re going to get good work killed. Someone’s going to glance at a chart, see clicks down, decide the strategy failed, and cut it, right as it starts winning the board that’s actually growing. I’ve watched sharp teams do exactly that. The traffic dip is real, and it’s scary, and it is also, sometimes, just the sound of the game changing shape underneath you while you’re still keeping the old score.
I don’t have the second scoreboard figured out, to be clear. Measuring citations right now is duct tape and me arguing with a chatbot on a Sunday. But I know which board I want to be winning from here on, and it’s the quiet one. The one that decides whether I show up in the answer at all.
Which leaves the question I’m actually chewing on next. If the citation is the visibility now, how do you measure it without doing it by hand every month like some kind of medieval monk? That’s the thing I want to solve. I’ll tell you when I get there.
Written by
Mostafa Daoud
Head of Content at e-CENS
Mostafa leads content at e-CENS, where he produces the blog, co-produces the Digital Disruption podcast, and builds SEO-driven content engines that turn complex MarTech and analytics topics into pipeline. He also writes newsletters, social campaigns, and landing pages across the company’s MENA and US markets.
