In this report I review some of the biggest winners and losers along with any changes to key search widgets (i.e., AI Overviews) and offer some of my thoughts on what it all means for SEOs going forward.

Who Won In The March 2025 Google Update?

In this section, I take a look at the winners in the March 2025 Google Core update.

The winners range from massive affiliates like Forbes (aka Forbes Advisor) to massive recoveries (see Chowhound.com) and brands like WellsFargo/PNC.

For each domain, I did a small analysis as to what changed and why I think they may have seen a rank bump in this update.

Forbes.com (+68%)

Though it doesn’t look like they benefited directly from the update, Forbes continues its resurgence throughout Q1 and I felt compelled to include them as a winner in this update.

They are a big affiliate for brands like Lemonade (Pet Insurance), Saatva (Mattresses), and Capital One/Discover (Credit Cards).

Historically, they published all of their content in their /advisor/ subfolder keeping it at arms length with their main brand calling it ‘Forbes Advisor’.

Back in November they lost almost all of their traffic as a result of this behavior with Google serving them a manual action related to site reputation abuse (see traffic drop off below).

Their response (and its working) was to integrate Forbes Advisor into their main site Forbes.com via their /forbes-personal-shopper/ subfolder.

The also decided to stop hiring freelancers.

You can see a lot of this growth is from that subfolder.

Though some is coming from the advisor subfolder.

Wellsfargo.com (+149%)

Wellsfargo is a completely different story than Forbes but also surging in visibility.

They’ve been seeing gains in visibility for super valuable keywords like ‘best cd rates’, ‘best personal loans’, and ‘best business credit cards’.

Looking at the page ranking for ‘best cd rates’, looks like WF updated their page template to be more engaging.

The below image has the ‘set your location’ input, which is good and lets the user know they’re going to get relevant rates for their area, but you can see that the page is actually super text heavy.

Looking at the new template for the same page you can see they moved to an experience that has significantly less text.

My take is they are seeing wins from the Google update but also benefiting from page template refreshing.

Fidelity.com (+110%)

Another brand seeing better visibility, in this case Fidelity.

Seeing growth on keywords like ‘best s&p index fund’

Looking at their template, it does look like they’ve improve their UI a bit (below old screenshot)

You can see the updates (below) has the pricing info and more context around the overall rating.

While I don’t think this UI tweak was the sole reason for the growth, I’m a huge believer in UI as a means to increase traffic via SEO.

We know Google looks at on-page signals, so brands should be looking to improve their page UI to improve user signals (i.e., dwell time, scroll depth, long clicks vs short clicks) and help them get to where they are trying to go.

In this case, users want to know what the best index fund is, and the ‘overall rating’ indicator with star rating helps guide the user to that goal.

Personally, I’d enlarge that section and maybe add some comparisons with other funds vs just showing their own fund ‘Fidelity 500’.

Otherwise, I think its going to be hard to get past the middle of the SERP as the intent with a query like ‘best index funds’ would be to compare options.

You can see USNews and Bankrate ranking above Fidelity both with comparison experiences where Fidelity shows just one fund (its own).

Chewy.com (+336%)

If there was ever a site worth following to learn ecom-seo, Chewy might be the gold standard as they continue to reap the rewards in the brand-first algo Google is pushing.

Interestingly, they were seeing declines between July and December.

Now dominating on some of the most valuable keywords in the industry ‘best fresh dog food’, ‘best dog food’, and even ‘best pet insurance’.

‘Best pet insurance’ has traditionally gone to comparison affiliate sites, like Pawlicy, Nerdwallet, or Forbes so I thought it was interesting that Chewy is getting in the game.

Seen below, looks like they launched a Chewy pet insurance product.

Since the page is new, I think they’re benefiting from freshness, but over time they’ll likely slide into page 2 along with other pet insurance companies mainly because the intent of the query is to compare, which lends comparison experiences where a user can look at multiple brands at once tend to win (see the SERP with annotations).

Chowhound.com (+744%)

One of the more interesting winners from this update is Chowhound.com up 744% over the last 3 months,

Zooming out a bit you can see just how this site has seeming come out of nowhere.

Zooming out even more (tapping in AHREFs here to help show visibility pre-landscape creation) you can see this is actually the beginnings of a recovery story.

Chowhound used to be one of the biggest foodie/recipie sites on the internet with a huge UGC motion and a social media like experience, but with food.

They ceased operations in 2022, but then were acquired in 2023 by Static Media and the turnaround seems to be working.

Ill do a deep dive into this site in the future, but at a cursory glance I like their ‘first-person’ style of writing approach, though they are a bit heavy on the ads and they use infinite scroll (to increase page views) which can cause SEO issues.

Thegoodtrade.com (+180%)

One of my favorite on this list (an affiliate site) thegoodtrade.com, huge growth while competing (and winning) on competitive terms like ‘best clean laundry detergent’, and ‘best organic mattress’ with a relatively low authority.

And looking at their content, its clear they’ve invested in quality.

You have human faces with authentic opinions and (relatively) objective stances.

Nearly all of their content is ‘on brand’ meaning its aligned with the sustainable angle (which is noted on their robust about page).

They have active socials and a newsletter, all things we know Google likes to see.

Pnc.com (+466%)

The story with pnc.com is similar to Wellsfargo noted above.

It looks like they are benefiting from Google pushing actual brands and service providers into the finance SERPs.

Outside of that, their UX doesn’t look that different. It does look like they reduced their page count from around 22K in Jun 2024 to 14K in Feb 2025.

Not on this list but also seeing gains is bankofamerica.com, again because I think Google is pushing brands to the top of the fold for more keywords.

Americanexpress.com (+158%)

Another brand / service provider, Americanexpress.com seems to be benefiting from the brand first posture though they are also upping their page experience.

In this landscape, amex is pulling rank for valuable and high traffic terms like ‘best credit cards’ and ‘best balance transfer cards’ where they used to not rank at all.

Anytime I see a massive bump in visibility, I have to see what the old page looked like and in this case the new variant is definitely a step up in UX.

Below you can see they overhauled the entire template following the style the big affiliates use like Usnews and Forbes. I love the icons, and quick navigation to other card types. It seems to be working for them.

Huntington.com (+274%)

I was 50/50 on whether to keep or remove this page from this list because it looks like a lot of their visibility gains is coming from 2-3 keywords (best cd rates).

I decided to keep them because it definitely looks like they are benefiting from this update in the same way wellsfargo, pnc, and americanexpress are all benefiting.

At least for these finance/banking search results, Google is starting to prefer actual brands.

Again, you can see lots of new rankings for terms like ‘best high yield savings account’ and ‘best cd interest rates’.

The top 10 rankings of the ‘best cd interest rates’ search result is essentially all provider brands.

DeltaDental.com (+360%)

DeltaDental has been going up for sometime. I posted on linkedin about their increased visibility related to their programmatic SEO strategy and no doubt they continue to see wins through this update as Google is preferring to show brands over affiliates.

If you’re not familiar, DeltaDental is an dental insurance brand and their SEO strategy is listing out all of their in-network dentists on city pages and they are winning big on mega valuable keywords like ‘best dentist near me’.

With 1000s of programmatic pages that look like this…

Other insurance providers should take notes because this is a clinic in SEO excellence.

In particular, I love their thoughtful site architecture building around their ‘find a dentist’ page (always linked in the breadcrumbs as a parent to the city pages).

It’s a pretty simple page, but nails user intent.

This page and their other ‘dentist search page’ is now completely owning the top and middle of the SERPs for most of their target keywords.

Though I don’t love the fact they have a competing page ‘dentist search’, seen below.

If I was advising them on their SEO strategy, I would nudge them to merge their ‘find a dentist’ and ‘dentist search’ into one page to combine rank signals and try overtake American Dental Association, which seems to be beating on some keywords.

Even still, DeltaDental is miles ahead of ADA on programmatic SEO.

DeltaDental is kinda of a unique blend of provider, since they are the actual insurance company but also affiliate because can show their network of doctors and rank well in SERPs where users want to compare.

The provide aspect means they have this massive SEO tailwind as they expand their SEO program into SERPs that traditionally went to affiliates (i.e., best dentists, etc).

I’ll be doing a deep dive on them soon.

Aetna.com (+85%)

Speaking of insurance providers, Aetna also provides dental insurance, but they also do vision and health and they are seeing some gains.

Looking at the keywords they are ranking on, this feels like aetna.com is winning in spite of themselves (similar to the banking sites mentioned earlier) since Google is starting to prefer actual brands over comparison affiliate experiences.

Seeing them pull rank on keywords like ‘best dental insurance’, ‘best vision insurance’, and ‘best medicare doctors’.

But if you look at their page experience, it’s pretty bad.

For example this is their page template for ‘best medicare advantage plans’.

When their page experience should look something more like this from NerdWallet who ranks #1 for the keyword…

My gut is Aetna will see some gains in the short term but lose them over time as Google collects user signals.

If I was advising Aetna, i’d be rushing to refresh this page to take advantage of the tailwind Google is giving to brands (DeltaDental sure is!).

Cozyearth.com (+228%)

Cozyearth is an ecommerce shop that sell beddings, towels, etc. Kinda like bed bath and beyond.

They are starting to win on keywords that would have traditionally gone to affiliate sites.

For example they are pulling rank for ‘best bamboo comforter’, ‘best pajamas for women’, and ‘best bed sets’

Here is the page ranking #1 for ‘best bamboo comforter’, hardly optimized for the term. The phrase ‘best bamboo comforter’ doesn’t even appear on the page.

Double clicking into ‘best linen blanket’ you can see just how much Google prefers brands over affiliates for these keyword types.

The takeaway again is that Google wants to remove the middleman (i.e., affiliates) in as many SERPs as possible and allow users to get to the end produce they would have gott

Whether that’s actually good for the user is debatable.

Personally, I think affiliates (like thegoodtrade.com) add value and should be rewarded for helping users on their buying journey.

For now it seems like they are but for how long? Will 100% of the SERPs go to brands?

Not sure, but if I am a brand, this might be the best time there’s ever been to get into SEO given how much preference Google has for actual providers of service.

Orkin.com (+143%)

Rounding out my list is good ole’ Orkin.com.

Orkin, like many other brands in this list are seeing wins with Google preferring brands for keywords that have traditionally shown affiliates or comparison experiences.

This is especially true if there any local intent at all in the keyword. For example ‘best pest control columbus ohio’ yielded 70% brands out of the top 20 results!

Who Lost In The March 2025 Google Update?

In this section, I take a look at the losers in the March 2025 Google Core update.

The losers range from Reddit (finally…), to affiliate site declines (see healthgrades.com) and even big name brands like T-Mobile.

For each domain, I did a small analysis as to what changed and why I think they may have seen a rank decline in this update.

Reddit.com (-19%)

First on the list is Reddit.

It looks like they got dinged twice during this update once on March 12th, and again on March 24th.

It’s no secret Reddit has been dominating in the organic listings AND in new discussions and forums widget, where they own 43%+ share of voice (seen below).

My take is that users are getting ‘reddit fatigue’ and that showed up in some report Google users to manage the serps and decided to pull back just how much users are getting results with Reddit in the organic listing AND the discussions forums.

To be clear, Reddit hasn’t lost any visibility in the discussions and forums widget, all of their visibility loss (19%) is from organic listings (the traditional search results).

Quora.com (-9%)

Almost an identical story here for Quora losing visibility similar to Reddit. Not going to go to deep here, just seems like Google over did it with Quora and Reddit in the organic listing AND the discussions and forums widget. I think the pull back and organic listings is 100% warranted and nice to see. Takeaway here is there is now more traffic available to go to brands/other publishers.

Healthgrades.com (-74%)

This may have been the most egregious decline out of this update (at least that I’ve found) dropping more than 70%.

Tapping in AHREFs to show the stark decline after a long history of success…

After 10+ years of operations to see such a drastic decline should underscore the seismic shift Google is taking its algo away from affiliate sites toward brands,

By all accounts healthgrades were executing affiliate at the highest level creating millions of highly engaging and optimized pages.

To be clear, I think affiliate can still work (thegoodtrade.com is an example of this) but it can’t be programmatic at-scale content with millions of pages (i.e,. healthgrades).

Which brings me to my next loser on the list…

Zocdoc.com (-53%)

Another big affiliate lead gen site with a large programmatic SEO strategy (700K+ pages) seeing losses.

Ironically many of the wins mentioned from DeltaDental (mentioned earlier in this list) are coming at the expense of ZocDoc.

For example, ‘best dentist near me’ DeltaDental jumping 5 spots to push down ZocDoc.

Zooming out, the declines for ZocDoc appear to have started around November 2024 after a long and relatively positive life for the site.

Again, the takeaway for me, is programmatic affiliate is very high risk territory right now.

Expertise.com (-92%)

Following the trend of healthgrades and zocdoc, this might be the final bullet in the once dominate expertise.com.

From an SEO perspective, expertise was architected well, but again Google has no interest in ranking affiliate sites like these.

They never published as many pages as healthgrades, closer to 60K pages (vs 1.8 million from healthgrades) but they were still running a large programmatic SEO strategy.

Coupled with the fact they were running programmatic SEO AND Google is moving to a brand-first search landscape, you have a recipe for an affiliate decline like this.

Sleepfoundation.com (-92%)

Yet another affiliate site seeing declines, Sleepfoundation.org purchased by One Care Media a couple years back has been enjoying the mega lucrative affiliate deals that come with being in the mattress niche for years.

So much so they bought sleepdoctor.com to own more share of the same serps.

While still very large they’ve lost top rankings* for many of their ‘best mattress + x’ keywords within their /best-mattresses/ subfolder.

*when I say ‘lost’ they’ve fallen out of the top 20, which is what SiteCurve tracks

If you look at their broader site (via AHREFs), it seems like just a little turbulence.

But double clicking into their /best-mattresses/ subfolder, you can see their mattress empire crumbling even after a bit of a recovery in August.

I can guarantee you they care a lot more about that subfolder than the broader site.

This one is harder to decipher without taking a deep dive into the site.

But at a glance, it could just be an authority thing, where the remaining affiliates (forbes, consumer reports, good housekeeping) just have more raw authority and Google places less emphasis on the niche relevance of SleepFoundation.

Here’s the SERP for ‘best mattress for back pain’ which does have a little bit of YMYL in it (i.e., the pain aspect)

Sleepopolis.com -62%

Speaking of niche sites in the mattress niche, sleepopolis is also seeing big declines along with Sleepfoundation.

You can see a similar story as with Sleepfoundation… lots of losses for affiliate keywords

Again, I think this might be a matter of Google preferring brands, declining value of niche relevance, and bigger authority brands pushing out smaller authority brands.

Justia.com (-27%)

We’ve talked about doctor lead gen (zocdoc, healthgrades), we’ve talked about mattress lead gen, now its time to talk lawyer lead gen.

Justia.com, a lawyer lead gen site seeing some slight declines for keywords like ‘best personal injury lawyer san antonio’ losing visibility to actual law firms / service providers.

The theme for most of this report continues. Brands are gaining visibility on keywords that affiliates and comparison sites once owned.

Taking a slight tangent… the other lawyer lead gen sites in these screenshots, namely bestlawyers.com (-31%), superlawyers.com (-15%) are much smaller and also seeing losses. Bcgsearch.com appears to be the only stable one for now, though again, they are relatively small by comparison.

T-mobile.com (-29%)

The first non-affiliate loser on the list and the first time its clear there’s an SEO strategy problem this brand CAN control.

Most of the losses for t-mobile in this landscape are coming from keywords like ‘best cell phone deals’, ‘best phone deals when you switch’

Looking at ‘best phone deals when you switch’ Verizon had a HUGE jump +15 positions.

Looking at their old page (below)

And comparing it to their new page that saw a +15 position jump (below)

It’s pretty clear the new page is perfeclty optimized to in in this SERP nailing the intent. Whereas T-mobile’s page went from this (old page)

To this new page in 2025 (below)

Can you see the difference? Yeah, there’s no difference, Verizon ate T-mobile’s lunch with better SEO via better UI/UX.

This is a matter of a brand being flat footed on a keyword that I’m sure drive material commercial value for their business.

Highspeedinternet.com (-46%)

Highspeedinternet is an affiliate site owned by ClearLink who also owns Move.org and SafeWise.com, two other affiliate sites that have seen big declines.

In the case of highspeedinternet, the story is the same with most affiliates, they are losing share to brands and higher authority sites.

Looking at their keywords they rank for terms like ‘best internet provider’ and ‘best internet deals’.

You can see that Cnet (a much larger affiliate site) has rolled out their own pages targeting the same keywords.

Google opted keep reddit in the #2, which means highspeedinternet gets slotted at #3 losing a lot of traffic.

You can also see providers like spectrum, t-mobile, at&t, and earthlink starting to creep up among the affiliates

Smartasset.com (-50%)

To round out this list, we have another affiliate site, Smartasset.com.

Smartasset has historically owned keywords like ‘best money market rates’ and ‘best checking accounts’.

Similar to previous affiliates, they’ve lost share to either a) bigger affiliate sites or b) brands or c) both. Seen below you can see its roughly 50/50 affiliate to brand ratio as of 3/31

Comparing that to 7/30/2024 for the same keyword (best banks in California), the SERP went from 5 affiliates in the top 5 positions to just 2 as of 3/31/2025. Smartasset actually owned 2 of the 5 as well!

Were There Any Changes To Search Widget Visibility?

In this section, I take a look at the specific movements of widget visibility on Google search.

AI Overview (+285%)

AI Overviews are now showing up on 13.92% of the 40K keywords, up from 3.61% (285% increase) in September.

Worth noting that the vast majority of keywords being tracked in this landscape are commercial keywords such as ‘best dental insurance no waiting period’.

Though many keywords are showing AI Overviews more, some keywords were seeing AI overviews show up less ‘best medicine for arthritis pain in knees’ and ‘best psoriasis treatment’, which are definitely in the YMYL bucket, which makes sense, Google doesn’t want an LLM to get a YMYL query wrong.

My guess is that Google is gathering data on which keywords users are having a better ‘search experience’ with AI Overviews, and which keywords are creating a worse experience.

For my clients, this information doesn’t change my SEO recommendations, though if were seeing traffic improve/decline for these keywords we have answers.

In terms of leaderboards (i.e., who owns the most share of voice) for AI Overviews in this landscape you can see the usual suspects like YouTube, Reddit, Nerdwallet, but I’m also seeing low authority domains like ‘weglot.com’ ranking well in AI Overviews for high MSV terms like ‘best machine translation translation software’ but then don’t rank as well for it organically.

The takeaway for me being, you can jump 10+ positions and get cited in the AI Overviews even though you don’t rank as well organically.

In this specific case, it looks like weglot.com (below) was the first ’roundup’ style article that listed ‘Google Translate’ as a reliable option. Takeaway for me is to recommend Google products to be featured #1 in AI Overviews.

Discussions & Forums (-21%)

Discussions & Forums has definitely declined going from 66% visibility to 52% (21% drop).

When the widget does show, Reddit is still the king in terms of visibility along with quora.com owning 66%+ of the visibility in this landscape but seeing Tripadvisor and Facebook starting to creep up.

Facebook in particular has gone from 0% visibility in November 2024 up to 1.42%.

Mainly through its Facebook group posts.

For example I’m seeing Facebook with 2 links in the discussions and forums widget for the term ‘best turkey bacon’.

With their facebook group post that looks like this…

As far as I can tell, nothing has changed related to Facebook, Google is now just indexing and ranking these posts in the discussions and forums widget.

The takeaway for me being there is traffic to be captured in the discussions and forums widget and if you are a brand, you should consider adding a forum to your website.

A popular forum software (being used by mattressunderground noted above) is discourse. You can just install that as a subdomain (i.e., forum.yourdomain.com) and immediately start accessing the discussions and forums widget.

People Also Ask (No Change)

Many people I talk to often overlook optimizing for the people also ask widget (PAAs) in favor of the featured snippet widget or now AI Overviews.

Don’t get me wrong, ranking in those widgets is important, but there is MUCH more visibility to be had if you can secure rankings in the PAA widgets.

Below you can see the PAA widget existed 87% the time between 12/31 – 3/31 and held steady.

This is showing me Google likes PAAs and it doesn’t seem like they are going away anytime soon.

Surprisingly Quora actually outpaces reddit for visibility in the PAA widget owning 5.18% of the visibility with Nerdwallet, USNews, and Wikipedia #3, 4, and 5 respectively.

During my time at Three Ships, we spent A LOT of time trying to optimize for PAAs.

Like with anything in SEO, the best way to optimize for a PAA is to create a dedicated page for it.

This might also be why Quara dominates, since their ‘question and answer’ format creates a lot of content for PAA answer boxes.

This ‘create a page’ strategy is exactly what Nerdwallet did here ranking in both the 1st organic position and the 1st PAA position allowing them to ‘double dip’ for the query ‘best business credit cards’ which has a MSV of 38K!

The insight here is they created this dedicated page even though ‘best credit card for llcs’ has almost no search traffic.

You build the page to give you more access to the PAA on the keywords with high search traffic, which again, is whats happening for Nerdwallet on ‘best business credit cards’ which has 38K search volume.

Featured Snippet (-40%)

Similar to ‘discussions and forums’ it looks like Google has pulled back its use of the featured snippet widget starting around March 12th, dropping nearly 40% from 7.6% visibility around Jan 9th to 4.53% on March 12th (the day the update hit)

This is most likely to make room for their increased use of AI Overviews.

Perspectives (+8.5%)

Shifting gears to the perspectives widget, a relatively new widget, which similar to PAAs, can give you access on high MSV SERPs with the right experience.

Below is an example of this widget on the keyword ‘best s&p 500 index fund’

And here you can see the visibility trend for this widget in this landscape… increasing about 3% or 8.5% overall between 12/31 and 3/31.

It seems like Google has no intention of pulling back on this widget, which means brands should be looking to optimize for it.

In my research, it looks like the best path forward is through content published on social media, YouTube and Reddit in particular have the most visibility in this widget.

How I Conducted The Analysis In This Report

To do this analysis I analyzed 151,939 websites across 40,623 keywords.

I have been tracking these keywords and every single website ranking on these keywords everyday in a landscape I launched on SiteCurve on July of 2024.

The common thread behind these 40,623 keywords is that they are all made up of the top keywords by cost-per-click (CPC).

Keywords like ‘best credit card’, ‘best car insurance’, and ‘best accident attorney’ are examples of the keywords being tracked with very high >$4 cost per click if you were to pay for ads in search for these keywords.

I am tracking these keywords specifically because they are incredibly valuable and incredibly competitive, which means the SEO strategies used to rank on these keywords are going to be some of the most advanced out there.

Learning what ranks on these keywords may also indicate Google’s preference when it comes to search results where there are many domains competing for the same keywords.

There’s a lot to learn from sites jockeying for position on competitive keywords which then can inform your own SEO strategy.

The winning and losing sites noted in this list does not include every single winner/loser but rather is (what I think) a representative sample providing a directional assessment of where Google is taking its algorithm.

A Word On Localized Results

All keywords are tracked ‘nationally’ in the United States, meaning they are not localized and you may see slightly different rankings depending on where you live and where you are when you Google a keyword.

For example, if you Google “best pest control near me” you will see localized results specific to your geo which may not agree with the rankings noted in some of the reports below. This is to be expected.

What Traffic, CPC, SoV, and MSV Mean In This Report

The ‘traffic’ in SiteCurve and the screenshots below is specific to the landscape the domain is in and not indicative of the overall traffic the site receives from Google. It is meant to be a directional measure of visibility growth/decline.

SiteCurve calculates estimated traffic via a click curve where the 1st organic position gets 38% of the clicks, 2nd position get 15%, and 3rd gets 8%, etc. SiteCurve then aggregates all estimated traffic for all keywords a domain ranks on.

You might see share of voice (SoV) in this report, which is a percentage of the traffic a domain has relative to all of the traffic a domain could acquire in a landscape. For example, a domain might have 1,000 traffic, but the total addressable market for a landscape could be 100,000 traffic, in which case the domain would have 1% SoV.

Monthly search volume (MSV) and cost-per-click (CPC) data-points are both pulled from Google keyword planner API for the keyword depending on its location.

Comparing Results to AHREFs, SEMRush, etc

Some of the traffic charts noted in this report will not look anything like what you would see in AHREFs, SEMRush, etc.

This is expected behavior and happens because those tools track every single keyword a domain ranks on (which could be millions in some cases).

SiteCurve is a landscape tracker and is only concerned with the specific keywords inside a landscape. In the case for this report, we are tracking a set of 40,623 keywords and then all domains who rank on those keywords.

These 40,623 keywords are made up of the top keywords by cost-per-click (CPC). Keywords like ‘best credit card’, ‘best car insurance’, and ‘best accident attorney’.

From those keywords we estimate how much traffic a site receives just from those keywords based on our click curve (see section above).

Each day we estimate the traffic for a site, which translates into our traffic trend charts seen in this report.

Personally, I like this method better of seeing visibility for domains I’m competing with because it filters out all of the noise from keywords I don’t care about, which you might find with an AHREFs or SEMRush report.

The Websites & Search Widgets I Reviewed In This Report

Below are all of the sites I reviewed in this report along with the % change in visibility.

Want to track these domains yourself? Add these domains to your portfolio to in SiteCurve.

The post March 2025 Google Core Update (Winners & Losers) appeared first on The SiteCurve Blog - See Who's Winning & Losing In SEO.

“Are review sites or e-commerce sites winning more visibility in our product category?”

“Which affiliate sites are gaining traction in the financial services industry?”

“How are different business models performing specifically in the health and wellness space?”

Traditional SEO tools simply couldn’t provide these insights because they lack the ability to analyze performance across different industry segments and business models. You might know who’s ranking, but not how specific types of sites are performing as a collective within your market.

This was the driving force behind SiteCurve’s Industry Aggregation feature—a powerful capability that transforms how you analyze competitive landscapes by revealing winners and losers across different market segments.

What is Industry Aggregation?

Industry Aggregation is SiteCurve’s approach to grouping and analyzing website performance based on industry classifications, business models, and website types. While our AI Segmentation automatically categorizes individual keywords and URLs, Industry Aggregation takes this a step further by allowing you to analyze aggregate performance trends across entire segments of your market.

This creates an entirely new dimension of competitive intelligence—showing not just which specific domains are winning or losing, but which types of sites are collectively gaining or losing ground in your industry.

The Three Dimensions of Industry Aggregation

SiteCurve’s Industry Aggregation works across three key dimensions:

1. Industry Categories

Based on the keywords you track, SiteCurve automatically identifies the primary industries represented in your landscape. Whether you’re focusing on finance, healthcare, e-commerce, travel, or any other vertical, the system creates industry-specific views showing how different websites perform within each category.

This allows you to isolate performance trends specific to particular industries, even if your landscape spans multiple sectors.

2. Business Models

Perhaps most valuable is SiteCurve’s ability to aggregate performance by business model. This classification includes:

• E-commerce: Sites directly selling products online
• Affiliate: Sites monetizing through affiliate links and partnerships
• Lead Generation: Sites capturing and selling leads to service providers
• Advertising: Sites monetizing primarily through display advertising
• Subscription: Sites operating on recurring revenue models
• Marketplace: Multi-vendor platforms connecting buyers and sellers
• Service Provider: Direct service business sites

By aggregating performance across these business models, you can identify which monetization approaches are gaining or losing visibility in your space—intelligence that’s impossible to glean from traditional rank tracking.

3. Website Types

SiteCurve also aggregates performance by website structure and content approach:

• Review Sites: Focused on product/service evaluations
• Forums/Communities: Discussion-based content
• Blogs/Publishers: Editorial and news content
• Directories: Listing-format information
• Comparison Sites: Side-by-side product/service comparisons
• Brand Sites: Official company websites
• Educational Resources: Learning-focused content
• Local Business Sites: Geographically focused businesses

This dimension reveals which content formats and site structures are most effective for capturing visibility in specific industries—insights that directly inform content strategy development.

Beyond Individual Rankings: The Power of Aggregate Analysis

What makes Industry Aggregation so valuable is its ability to reveal patterns that simply aren’t visible when looking at individual domain rankings.

For example, you might notice that while a particular competitor is gaining ground, review sites as a whole are actually losing visibility in your industry. Or you might discover that affiliate business models are collectively outperforming direct e-commerce sites for your target keywords.

These aggregate trends often signal fundamental shifts in how search engines are evaluating content in your industry—shifts that require strategic responses rather than tactical optimizations.

Practical Applications of Industry Aggregation

Let me share some examples of how this feature could be applied to drive strategic SEO decisions:

Content Format Strategy

A healthcare company could use Industry Aggregation to discover that educational resource sites are consistently gaining visibility across their target keywords, while traditional blog formats are collectively losing ground. This insight could prompt a shift toward more structured, educational content formats rather than conventional blog posts.

Business Model Evaluation

A financial services provider might use business model aggregation to identify that comparison sites and lead generation models are outperforming direct service providers in their keyword landscape. This could inform decisions about potential business model pivots or expansions to capture shifting visibility.

Competitive Group Monitoring

A travel brand could track the collective performance of online travel agencies versus direct hotel booking sites versus review platforms. By monitoring these competitive groups over time, they could identify emerging threats before individual competitors become dominant.

Industry Shift Detection

A technology marketplace could discover through industry aggregation that review sites focusing on video content are collectively gaining significant visibility, while traditional text-based reviews are losing ground. This early indicator of an industry shift would be missed if only tracking individual domain performance.

How Industry Aggregation Works in Practice

Let me walk you through how this feature transforms your competitive analysis workflow:

1. Automatic Classification During Landscape Creation

When you upload keywords to create a landscape, SiteCurve automatically identifies the industries represented in your keyword set and begins classifying ranking domains by business model and website type. There’s no manual setup required—the system does this classification automatically.

2. Aggregate View Navigation

Within your landscape, you can navigate to specific aggregate views:

• Business Model Trends: Shows visibility trends across different monetization approaches
• Website Type Performance: Compares different content formats and site structures
• Industry Category Breakdown: For landscapes spanning multiple industries

Each view shows both individual domain performance and aggregate metrics for each classification.

3. Filtering for Specific Insights

The power of Industry Aggregation becomes even more apparent when combined with SiteCurve’s filtering capabilities. You can apply filters to focus on:

• Specific time periods to identify when shifts occurred
• Particular keyword groups to analyze segment-specific trends
• Combinations of classifications (e.g., review sites using affiliate models)

This allows for incredibly nuanced competitive analysis that reveals not just who is winning, but how and why they’re winning.

4. Trend Monitoring and Alerts

You can set up alerts specifically tied to aggregate performance changes. For example, you might want to be notified if review sites collectively gain more than 10% visibility in your landscape, or if affiliate business models start showing consistent gains against direct e-commerce sites.

Real Strategic Value: Identifying Market Shifts

The most significant value of Industry Aggregation lies in its ability to identify fundamental market shifts that would otherwise remain hidden.

Consider these scenarios that Industry Aggregation would reveal:

Search Intent Evolution

By monitoring aggregate performance of informational versus transactional website types, you might notice search engines increasingly favoring educational content in categories that were previously dominated by commercial sites. This signals a shift in how Google interprets user intent for those keywords—a strategic insight that would inform your entire content approach.

Business Model Viability

If affiliate sites are collectively losing ground to direct e-commerce across your landscape, this might indicate changing algorithm preferences that impact the viability of certain business models in your space. This insight could save you from investing in approaches that are falling out of favor with search engines.

Content Format Trends

When certain website types consistently outperform others across your landscape, it reveals patterns in the content formats and structures that search engines are preferring. These patterns provide a blueprint for content strategy development that goes far beyond simple keyword targeting.

How Industry Aggregation Complements AI Segmentation

While our AI Segmentation feature focuses on automatically categorizing and filtering individual keywords and URLs, Industry Aggregation takes a broader view by analyzing collective performance across business models and website types.

Think of AI Segmentation as the tool that helps you organize and navigate your data, while Industry Aggregation is the lens that reveals patterns across entire segments of your competitive landscape.

These features work in tandem to provide both granular filtering capabilities and high-level strategic insights.

Getting Started with Industry Aggregation

If you’re intrigued by the possibilities of aggregate analysis, here’s how to start leveraging this capability in SiteCurve:

1. Create a comprehensive landscape: Include a diverse set of keywords that represent your market (at least 250-500 keywords is ideal)
2. Review automatic classifications: Explore how SiteCurve has classified ranking domains by business model and website type
3. Navigate to aggregate views: Explore the Business Model Trends and Website Type Performance sections
4. Look for divergent patterns: Pay special attention to aggregate trends that differ from individual domain performance
5. Set up alerts for significant shifts: Create notifications for meaningful changes in aggregate performance

The most valuable insights often come from comparing trends across different classifications rather than focusing solely on individual website performance.

Beyond Rankings: Strategic Intelligence for Market Positioning

Industry Aggregation represents a fundamental evolution in competitive SEO analysis. Instead of simply tracking who ranks where, you gain intelligence about which approaches are winning across entire segments of your market.

This shift—from tactical ranking data to strategic market intelligence—transforms how you develop and adapt your SEO strategy:

• Instead of simply copying a successful competitor, you can identify which business models and content approaches are collectively succeeding
• Rather than reacting to individual ranking changes, you can respond to fundamental shifts in how search engines evaluate content in your industry
• Beyond chasing rankings for specific keywords, you can position your site to align with the content formats and structures that are gaining favor

For executives and strategists, this provides the context needed to make informed decisions about not just SEO tactics, but broader business model and content strategy choices.

Conclusion: From Individual Rankings to Market Intelligence

Industry Aggregation elevates SEO analysis from tracking individual performance to understanding market dynamics. By revealing which types of sites and business models are collectively winning or losing visibility, it provides strategic context that traditional rank tracking simply can’t deliver.

This capability is particularly valuable in rapidly evolving markets where understanding industry-wide shifts is essential for staying ahead of competitors. Rather than simply reacting to individual ranking changes, you can identify and respond to fundamental shifts in how search engines are evaluating content in your space.

Whether you’re an agency helping clients understand their competitive position, an in-house team developing long-term content strategy, or a consultant providing strategic guidance, Industry Aggregation provides the market-level intelligence needed to make truly informed decisions.

Because in today’s complex search landscape, knowing who ranks isn’t enough—you need to understand which approaches are winning and why.

The post Industry Aggregation: How SiteCurve Reveals Winners and Losers appeared first on The SiteCurve Blog - See Who's Winning & Losing In SEO.

We could show we’d moved from position 5 to position 3 for an important keyword, but we couldn’t answer the crucial follow-up question: “Will we stay there, or are we likely to bounce back down next week?”

In other words, how volatile are our rankings compared to our competitors?

This missing piece of the puzzle isn’t just an analytical curiosity—it’s fundamental to proper resource allocation, performance forecasting, and risk assessment. Yet traditional SEO tools don’t provide this critical context.

That’s why I built Volatility Tracking into the core of SiteCurve—to answer the question that executives, clients, and SEO professionals have been asking for years: “How stable are our rankings compared to our competition?”

What is Volatility Tracking?

Volatility Tracking is SiteCurve’s proprietary metric that measures the stability of a website’s rankings over time, compared to all other sites within the same landscape.

The system analyzes daily ranking changes across all keywords a domain ranks for, calculating the frequency and magnitude of position shifts. This data is then normalized into a 1-100 score, with higher scores indicating greater volatility relative to other websites in the landscape.

This isn’t just about tracking a few fluctuations—it’s about understanding your ranking stability relative to your entire competitive ecosystem.

Why Volatility Matters

Ranking volatility provides insights that go far beyond traditional SEO metrics. Here’s why it matters:

1. Risk Assessment

Volatile rankings represent risk. A site that bounces between positions 3 and 8 will likely deliver inconsistent traffic and conversion performance. By identifying whether your site is more or less volatile than competitors, you can better assess your SEO risk profile.

2. Algorithm Sensitivity

Sites with high volatility scores are often more sensitive to algorithm updates. If your site consistently shows higher volatility than competitors, it may indicate that your SEO approach is more vulnerable to Google’s frequent changes.

3. Authority Indicators

Generally speaking, lower volatility (especially for competitive keywords) correlates with stronger overall domain authority and trust. Established, authoritative sites tend to maintain more stable rankings even as Google’s algorithm evolves.

4. Performance Forecasting

Understanding your historical volatility enables more accurate traffic and performance forecasting. If your rankings fluctuate significantly, your traffic projections should account for this variability rather than assuming stable performance.

5. Competitive Benchmarking

Perhaps most valuable is the ability to benchmark your stability against competitors. If your site has a volatility score of 78 while your top competitor scores 25, this suggests a fundamental difference in how Google perceives your respective domains.

How Volatility Tracking Works in SiteCurve

Our approach to volatility tracking has several key components:

Relative Scoring

Instead of using arbitrary thresholds, we calculate volatility relative to all other sites in your landscape. This means a score of 75 indicates your site is more volatile than approximately 75% of domains in your competitive ecosystem.

This relative approach ensures the metric remains meaningful regardless of your industry or keyword set.

Historical Trending

Beyond the current score, SiteCurve tracks volatility trends over time. This allows you to see whether your site is becoming more or less stable and how that trend compares to competitors.

Segment Breakdowns

Volatility isn’t uniform across a website. SiteCurve allows you to analyze volatility by specific segments of your site:

• By category or niche
• By keyword type (informational, transactional, etc.)
• By URL pattern or subfolder
• By SERP feature presence

This granularity helps pinpoint exactly which parts of your site are contributing to overall volatility.

Practical Applications of Volatility Tracking

Let me share some examples of how this feature could be applied to drive strategic SEO decisions:

Identifying Algorithm Winners and Losers

After a major Google update, a finance company could use volatility tracking to identify which competitors were most affected. Sites with sudden spikes in volatility often indicate algorithm sensitivity, while those maintaining stable rankings despite the update demonstrate algorithm resilience.

This insight could help the company model their content and technical approach after the most stable competitors rather than those showing high sensitivity to updates.

Diagnosing Content Quality Issues

An e-commerce retailer might discover that their product category pages have significantly higher volatility scores than their top competitors. This disparity could indicate underlying content quality or relevance issues that aren’t apparent from rankings alone.

By identifying which specific page types exhibit the highest volatility, they could prioritize content improvements where they’re most needed.

Forecasting with Confidence Intervals

A SaaS company preparing traffic projections for investor presentations could use volatility scores to establish appropriate confidence intervals. Rather than presenting overly optimistic projections based on best-case rankings, they could model expected performance based on their historical volatility profile.

For highly volatile keywords, they might use wider traffic projection ranges, while stable keywords would warrant narrower, more confident forecasts.

Building Authority Roadmaps

A healthcare website might use competitor volatility comparisons to benchmark their domain authority development. By identifying which competitors maintain the most stable rankings across competitive keywords, they could analyze the factors contributing to that stability (content depth, backlink profiles, user engagement metrics) and build a roadmap toward similar stability.

Volatility in Context: How to Interpret Your Score

Interpreting volatility scores requires context. Here’s a general framework:

Low Volatility (1-25)

Sites with scores in this range demonstrate exceptional ranking stability relative to their landscape. This typically indicates:

• Strong domain authority
• Well-established content relevance
• Robust technical foundation
• Long-term SEO investment

For competitive keywords, low volatility usually signals strong market position and lower SEO risk.

Moderate Volatility (26-50)

Domains in this range show average stability within their landscape. This commonly represents:

• Developing domain authority
• Competitive but not dominant market position
• Generally solid SEO foundation with room for improvement

Many successful sites operate in this range while still delivering reliable performance.

Elevated Volatility (51-75)

Sites scoring in this range experience more frequent or significant ranking fluctuations than most of their competitors. This may indicate:

• Evolving content relevance
• Recent major site changes
• Moderate algorithm sensitivity
• Competitive pressure in key areas

While not necessarily problematic, elevated volatility warrants closer monitoring and strategic attention.

High Volatility (76-100)

Domains with the highest volatility scores experience substantial ranking instability compared to their landscape. This often signals:

• Significant technical or content issues
• High algorithm sensitivity
• Potential quality or relevance concerns
• Unstable backlink profile or authority signals

High volatility typically requires immediate investigation and strategic intervention to build greater stability.

Volatility Beyond Rankings: The Strategic Implications

Understanding volatility has strategic implications that extend far beyond day-to-day ranking monitoring:

Resource Allocation

Sites with higher volatility typically require more constant attention and optimization. When prioritizing SEO resources across multiple properties or sections, volatility scores can inform how you distribute your team’s time and budget.

Content Strategy Refinement

Content that creates unstable rankings may need fundamental improvements in depth, expertise, or user engagement metrics. By comparing the volatility of different content types within your site, you can identify which content approaches are creating stable versus unstable rankings.

Technical Foundation Assessment

Technical issues often manifest as ranking instability before they cause outright ranking drops. Sustained high volatility despite content improvements may signal underlying technical concerns requiring attention.

Competitive Strategy Development

Understanding which competitors maintain the most stable rankings—and why—provides a blueprint for long-term SEO success. By reverse-engineering the stability factors of low-volatility competitors, you can develop a more resilient SEO approach.

Getting Started with Volatility Tracking

To begin leveraging volatility insights, I recommend:

1. Establish your baseline: Create a landscape tracking at least 250-500 relevant keywords to generate a meaningful volatility baseline.
2. Identify stability patterns: Review which competitors consistently show the lowest volatility scores and analyze their common characteristics.
3. Segment your analysis: Compare volatility across different sections of your site to identify which areas need stability improvements.
4. Monitor trends over time: Track whether your volatility score is improving or worsening relative to competitors, especially after implementing changes.
5. Incorporate into reporting: Add volatility context to executive reporting to provide a more complete picture of SEO health and risk.

The most valuable insights often come from comparing your volatility profile to specific competitors rather than focusing solely on your absolute score.

Conclusion: From Rankings to Stability

As SEO continues to mature as a discipline, we need to move beyond simplistic ranking reports toward more sophisticated performance indicators. Volatility tracking represents this evolution—transforming raw ranking data into strategic insights about stability, risk, and competitive position.

Whether you’re an agency explaining SEO performance to clients, an in-house team presenting to executives, or a consultant developing strategic recommendations, volatility context adds a critical dimension to your analysis.

Because ultimately, sustainable SEO success isn’t just about achieving high rankings—it’s about maintaining stable, predictable performance that businesses can rely on for growth.

Volatility tracking helps transform SEO from an unpredictable, fluctuating channel into a more reliable, measurable component of your marketing strategy.

The post Volatility Tracking: A New Lens for Understanding SEO Stability and Risk appeared first on The SiteCurve Blog - See Who's Winning & Losing In SEO.

“How are we performing in the finance category versus the health category?”

“Which competitors are gaining traction specifically for informational content?”

“Where are review sites outperforming traditional e-commerce domains?”

Traditional keyword tracking tools left us to manually tag and organize everything. My team would spend countless hours categorizing keywords and URLs just to get a semi-coherent view of our competitive landscape. And even then, the slightest shift in strategy meant starting the laborious categorization process all over again.

This frustration was a key driver behind one of SiteCurve’s most powerful yet understated features: AI Segmentation.

What is AI Segmentation?

AI Segmentation is SiteCurve’s automatic classification system that intelligently categorizes every keyword and URL in your landscape without requiring any manual effort. The moment you create a landscape, our AI goes to work, analyzing and categorizing your data across multiple dimensions:

• Categories: Broad market segments (Finance, Health, Home Services, etc.)
• Niches: Specific verticals within categories (Credit Cards, Weight Loss, Plumbing, etc.)
• Website Types: Content formats and site structures (Blogs, Marketplaces, Forums, etc.)
• Business Models: Monetization approaches (Affiliate, E-commerce, Lead Gen, etc.)

This isn’t just simple tagging—it’s a sophisticated classification system that understands the nuances of different industries and content types. The AI analyzes keyword intent, page content, and site structure to make intelligent categorization decisions.

Why Automatic Segmentation Changes Everything

The impact of this automatic segmentation is profound in several ways:

1. Immediate Strategic Insights Without Manual Work

From the moment your landscape is created, you have access to segmented views that would normally take weeks of manual classification. There’s no setup period, no tedious tagging process—just immediate strategic insights.

When a client recently came to me wanting to understand their position in the home renovation market, we created a landscape with their keywords and immediately had visibility into how they performed across specific niches like kitchen remodeling, bathroom fixtures, and flooring. What would have been days of manual analysis was available in minutes.

2. Multi-Dimensional Analysis

Because we classify across multiple dimensions simultaneously, you can perform incredibly nuanced competitive analysis:

• See which domains are winning in specific niches within broader categories
• Compare performance across different website types using the same business model
• Identify which business models are gaining traction in emerging niches

This multi-dimensional view exposes patterns and opportunities that flat keyword lists simply can’t reveal.

3. Dynamic Filtering Capabilities

The real power of AI Segmentation becomes apparent when you start using SiteCurve’s filtering capabilities. Every categorization dimension becomes a filter you can apply to your landscape views, allowing you to instantly shift perspectives:

• Compare affiliate site performance against e-commerce sites within the fitness niche
• See which content publishers are gaining traction in financial services
• Identify review sites that are losing ground in the technology category

These filtered views update in real-time, allowing you to explore your competitive landscape from countless angles without waiting for new reports to generate.

4. Saved Views for Ongoing Monitoring

Once you’ve applied filters to focus on a specific segment, you can save these configurations as custom views for ongoing monitoring. This creates a dashboard-like experience where you can quickly switch between different competitive perspectives.

For example, one agency I work with maintains saved views for each of their client’s primary competitor types—one for direct product competitors, another for content publishers in their space, and a third for emerging affiliate sites. This allows them to quickly assess competitive threats from multiple angles during client meetings.

Practical Applications of AI Segmentation

Let me share some examples of how teams could leverage these segmentation capabilities to drive tangible results:

Identifying Category-Specific Strategies

An e-commerce company could use AI Segmentation to compare their performance across product categories. They might discover that certain content structures are significantly more effective in their electronics category than in their home goods category. This insight could lead them to develop category-specific content strategies rather than applying the same approach across their entire site.

Monitoring Emerging Business Models

A financial services company could use business model segmentation to track the growth of affiliate sites in their space. If they noticed affiliate sites focusing on card comparison tables were gaining significant traction, this could prompt them to develop specific content to compete in this format, potentially resulting in improved visibility for their credit card offerings.

Competitive Response Planning

A healthcare provider could use website type segmentation to identify if medical directories were rapidly gaining visibility for their target symptoms keywords. Instead of trying to outrank these directories with similar content, they could pivot to create symptom assessment tools that offered unique value the directories couldn’t match.

Content Gap Analysis

A travel brand could use niche segmentation to discover they were underperforming specifically in the “family travel” niche despite strong performance in “luxury travel” and “adventure travel.” This targeted insight would allow them to focus content development efforts on a specific weakness rather than broadly creating more travel content.

How AI Segmentation Works in Practice

Let me walk you through how this feature transforms your workflow from the moment you create a landscape:

1. Automatic Classification During Landscape Creation

When you upload keywords to create a landscape, our AI immediately begins analyzing and categorizing them. There’s no configuration needed—the system automatically identifies the most appropriate categories, niches, website types, and business models based on the keyword set and ranking URLs.

2. Filter-Based Exploration

Once your landscape is active, you can begin exploring using the filter menu. This allows you to narrow your focus to specific segments of your competitive landscape:

• Filter by Category → Finance
• Further refine by Niche → Credit Cards
• Add Website Type filter → Review Sites
• Add Business Model filter → Affiliate

Each filter narrows your view, showing winners and losers specific to the selected segment. This allows you to identify who’s dominating particular niches or content types with just a few clicks.

3. Saved Views for Ongoing Monitoring

After applying filters that reveal valuable competitive insights, click the “Save View” icon to preserve this specific perspective. Give it a descriptive name like “Credit Card Affiliate Reviews” so you can instantly return to this filtered view in the future.

Saved views appear in your dashboard’s left navigation, creating a custom monitoring system tailored to your specific competitive priorities.

4. Portfolio Creation from Filtered Segments

When you identify interesting competitors or trends within a segment, you can follow those domains to add them to your portfolio. This creates a curated list of competitors specific to particular segments of your business.

For example, you might create separate portfolios for “Direct Product Competitors,” “Content Publishers in Our Space,” and “Emerging Affiliate Sites” to monitor different competitive threats independently.

The Technical Foundation of AI Segmentation

While I won’t delve too deeply into the technical aspects, it’s worth understanding the sophisticated system powering these capabilities:

Our classification system uses a combination of machine learning models and rule-based algorithms trained on millions of keywords and URLs. It analyzes:

• Keyword intent and modifiers
• Page content and structure
• Site architecture and technical elements
• Historical classification patterns
• User engagement signals

This hybrid approach allows us to achieve significantly higher accuracy than either pure ML or rule-based systems alone. And importantly, the system continues to learn and improve over time as more data is processed through the platform.

How AI Segmentation Fits Into Your SEO Stack

AI Segmentation doesn’t replace your existing SEO tools—it enhances them by providing a layer of strategic intelligence that most tools lack:

• Use traditional rank trackers for daily position monitoring
• Use technical SEO tools for site audits and optimization
• Use content tools for on-page optimization
• Use SiteCurve’s AI Segmentation to understand competitive positioning across different segments of your market

The combination gives you both the tactical capabilities of specialized tools and the strategic insights needed to deploy them effectively.

Getting Started with AI Segmentation

If you’re intrigued by the possibilities of automatic segmentation, here’s how to start leveraging this capability in SiteCurve:

1. Create a comprehensive landscape: Include at least 250-500 keywords that represent your core market segments
2. Explore the automatically generated segments: Review how your keywords and competitors have been categorized
3. Experiment with filters: Try different filter combinations to view your landscape from various perspectives
4. Save useful views: Preserve the most insightful filter combinations for ongoing monitoring
5. Create segment-specific portfolios: Follow key domains within important segments

Don’t overthink the initial keyword selection—the AI works best when given a broad set of keywords to analyze. You can always refine your approach as you gain insights from the initial segmentation.

Beyond Basic Segmentation: Advanced Applications

As you become more familiar with AI Segmentation, consider these advanced applications:

Segment-Based Forecasting

By monitoring growth rates within specific segments, you can forecast emerging trends before they impact your overall market. For instance, if review sites are rapidly gaining visibility in your niche, you might prioritize review-focused content in your upcoming content calendar.

Competitive Vulnerability Analysis

Use segmentation to identify where competitors are strong versus where they’re vulnerable. A competitor might dominate product pages but show weakness in informational content—a potential opportunity for your content strategy.

Content Strategy Alignment

Align your content development with segment-specific opportunities. Instead of broadly creating “more content,” target specific underperforming segments with tailored content approaches.

Conclusion: From Data Overload to Strategic Clarity

The shift from manual keyword tracking to AI-powered segmentation represents a fundamental evolution in SEO analysis. Instead of drowning in data or spending countless hours on manual categorization, you gain immediate strategic clarity across every dimension of your competitive landscape.

This capability transforms how you approach competitive analysis and strategy development. Rather than making broad assumptions about your market, you can base decisions on granular yet comprehensive insights into who’s winning and why across specific segments of your landscape.

Whether you’re an agency working across multiple client industries, an in-house SEO managing diverse product categories, or a consultant helping clients understand their competitive position, AI Segmentation provides the strategic context that traditional keyword tracking simply can’t deliver.

And perhaps most importantly, it does all this automatically—freeing you to focus on strategy and execution rather than tedious data organization.

The post AI Segmentation: How SiteCurve Automatically Uncovers Hidden Competitive Insights appeared first on The SiteCurve Blog - See Who's Winning & Losing In SEO.

For years, valuable search intelligence has been locked behind expensive paywalls, accessible only to those who can afford premium subscriptions. This creates an unfortunate reality where smaller businesses, independent professionals, and up-and-coming SEOs are often left without access to the competitive insights they need.

When building SiteCurve, I wanted to challenge this status quo. What if there was a way for SEO professionals to freely share valuable data with their communities? What if transparency and open access could benefit both the sharer and the recipient?

That’s why we created Public Landscapes — a feature that fundamentally rethinks how SEO data can be shared and consumed across the industry.

The Democratization of SEO Data

Public Landscapes allows anyone to create a landscape of keyword data and make it freely accessible to the entire SiteCurve community. This isn’t just a minor feature — it’s a completely new approach to SEO intelligence sharing.

Think about it: While other SEO tools keep data siloed and accessible only to paying customers, SiteCurve enables a collaborative ecosystem where insights can be freely exchanged, discussed, and built upon.

Why Share Your Data Publicly?

You might wonder why someone would choose to make their SEO data public rather than keeping it private. From my experience working with thousands of SEO professionals, here are the compelling reasons:

1. Establishing Authority and Expertise

By sharing valuable landscape data publicly, you position yourself as an authority in your niche. When others see your insightful comments on search trends or your detailed analysis of winning content strategies, they naturally view you as an expert.

Several of our users have leveraged Public Landscapes to significantly raise their professional profiles. One agency founder I know created public landscapes tracking local SEO trends across major metropolitan areas. Their reputation for local search expertise grew so substantially that speaking invitations and client inquiries increased by over 40% in just three months.

2. Community Visibility Through the Feed

One of the most powerful aspects of Public Landscapes is how they integrate with SiteCurve’s activity feed. When you create a public landscape and contribute insightful discussions, your comments and alerts bubble up to the main dashboard feed seen by users across the platform.

This creates an organic way for your expertise to be discovered without any additional promotion or marketing. Your analysis and insights can reach thousands of SEO professionals simply by contributing valuable perspectives within your public landscapes.

3. Lead Generation and Business Development

For consultants and agencies, Public Landscapes serves as a remarkably effective lead generation tool. By showcasing your approach to SEO analysis in public, you attract potential clients who resonate with your methodology.

One consultant told me they’ve entirely stopped cold outreach since creating several public landscapes. “Clients now come to me pre-sold on my expertise,” they explained. “They’ve already seen how I think about SEO through my public landscapes and discussions.”

4. Reciprocal Learning

Perhaps most valuable is the collaborative learning environment that Public Landscapes foster. When you share your data publicly, others can provide perspectives and insights you might not have considered. This collective intelligence creates learning opportunities that closed systems simply can’t match.

How Public Landscapes Work

Creating and managing a Public Landscape is remarkably straightforward:

1. Create a landscape with the keywords and domains relevant to your area of expertise
2. Select “Public” in the access settings during setup
3. Enable discoverability to make your landscape visible in the SiteCurve discovery ecosystem
4. Start discussions by commenting on interesting trends or notable winners and losers
5. Interact with the community that forms around your data

Once published, your Public Landscape becomes available to everyone on SiteCurve. Users can:

• Explore the data without limitations
• Create their own portfolios from domains in your landscape
• Set up custom alerts based on your landscape data
• Engage in discussions about the trends you’re tracking
• Share insights from your landscape on other platforms

The Discovery Ecosystem for Public Landscapes

Creating a Public Landscape doesn’t mean starting from zero visibility. SiteCurve has built a comprehensive discovery system that helps others find your landscape:

The Landscape Discovery Directory

At sitecurve.com/discover-landscapes, users can browse all discoverable landscapes, including public ones. This directory serves as a central hub where SEO professionals can find specialized landscapes relevant to their needs.

Popular Landscapes Leaderboards

Public Landscapes with active communities and valuable insights can earn spots on our “Most Popular Landscapes” leaderboards. This additional visibility drives significant organic user growth without any additional marketing effort.

Domain Search Integration

When users search for a specific domain in SiteCurve’s global search, they can see which public landscapes are tracking that domain. This creates an organic pathway for users to discover your landscape when searching for domains in your niche.

Real-World Success Stories with Public Landscapes

Let me share how various professionals are using Public Landscapes to build their authority and drive business results:

The Industry Commentator

An SEO blogger created a public landscape tracking content performance across major publishers. Their weekly analysis posts within the landscape discussion section became so valuable that their subscriber base doubled in six months as landscape users sought out their newsletter for additional insights.

The Agency Differentiation Strategy

A mid-sized agency created public landscapes for each of their core industries, demonstrating their specialized knowledge in these verticals. When potential clients researched SEO partners, the agency’s public analysis and discussion repeatedly positioned them as the clear industry expert. Their close rate on proposals increased by 35%.

The Conference Speaker Breakthrough

One SEO professional used insights from their public landscapes to develop unique presentations for industry conferences. The data-driven approach and fresh perspective helped them secure speaking slots at major events, further enhancing their professional reputation.

The Community Builder

A solo consultant created a public landscape focused on e-commerce trends. The discussions became so valuable that a community naturally formed around the landscape. This community became the foundation for a paid membership program the consultant later launched, turning free data sharing into a sustainable business model.

Building a Personal Brand Through Public Landscapes

Public Landscapes can become a cornerstone of your personal branding strategy in the SEO space. Here’s my advice for maximizing this opportunity:

1. Choose Your Focus Carefully

The most effective public landscapes have a clear focus that aligns with your expertise and target audience. Consider:

• Industry verticals where you have deep experience
• Specific SEO strategies you’ve mastered (technical SEO, content SEO, local SEO)
• Emerging trends you’re actively studying
• Market segments where you want to attract clients

2. Create Valuable Discussions

Simply sharing data isn’t enough. The real value comes from the insights and discussions you contribute:

• Highlight interesting trends and explain their significance
• Analyze what’s working for top performers
• Share strategic takeaways others can implement
• Ask thought-provoking questions that spark conversation

3. Be Consistent and Responsive

Building authority through Public Landscapes requires consistency:

• Contribute regular insights (weekly is ideal)
• Respond promptly to questions and comments
• Update your analysis as new data emerges
• Reference past observations to show pattern recognition

4. Cross-Promote Strategically

While your landscape will gain organic visibility within SiteCurve, strategic promotion can accelerate its impact:

• Share interesting findings from your landscape on social media
• Reference your public landscape in guest articles or podcast appearances
• Include landscape insights in your newsletter or blog
• Invite industry colleagues to join discussions within your landscape

The Network Effect of Public Participation

What makes Public Landscapes truly powerful is the network effect they create. Each valuable contribution you make:

• Appears in the main SiteCurve feed
• Can be discovered through landscape exploration
• Might be included in weekly email digests
• Potentially attracts new users to your landscape
• Builds your reputation across the platform

Over time, this creates a virtuous cycle where your expertise attracts attention, which drives more people to your landscape, which provides more opportunities to demonstrate your expertise.

Public vs. Private vs. Paid: Choosing the Right Approach

SiteCurve offers three landscape visibility options, each with distinct advantages:

Public Landscapes

• Best for: Building authority, generating leads, growing your profile
• Visibility: Open to all SiteCurve users
• Revenue model: Indirect (leads, reputation, network)

Private Landscapes

• Best for: Client work, confidential research, internal teams
• Visibility: Limited to invited users or approved applicants
• Revenue model: None (utility-focused)

Paid Landscapes

• Best for: Direct monetization of expertise, premium insights
• Visibility: Limited to paying subscribers
• Revenue model: Direct subscription revenue

Many users start with Public Landscapes to build their reputation before launching Paid Landscapes once they’ve established their authority.

The Future of Collaborative SEO Intelligence

Public Landscapes represents more than just a feature — it’s a shift in how our industry approaches competitive intelligence.

The traditional model of keeping SEO data locked behind expensive paywalls has created information asymmetry that benefits only those with large budgets. By enabling free sharing of valuable search data, we’re working toward a more collaborative, innovative SEO ecosystem.

When insights flow freely, everyone benefits:

• Newcomers gain access to valuable data they couldn’t otherwise afford
• Experts gain recognition for their knowledge and analysis
• The community collectively identifies patterns and strategies faster
• The overall quality of SEO work improves through shared learning

Getting Started with Your First Public Landscape

Ready to share your SEO expertise and build your authority? Here’s how to create your first Public Landscape:

1. Define your landscape focus — Choose a niche, strategy, or market segment where you have valuable insights to share
2. Select relevant keywords — Add at least 250-500 keywords that provide meaningful competitive intelligence for your focus area
3. Make it public and discoverable — During setup, choose “Public” access and enable discovery so others can find your landscape
4. Seed initial discussions — Start several conversation threads analyzing interesting patterns or notable performers in your landscape
5. Invite strategic participants — Reach out to colleagues who might contribute valuable perspectives to initial discussions
6. Share your landscape — Let your existing network know about your new public resource through social media, email, or direct outreach

Within weeks of consistently sharing valuable insights, you’ll likely begin seeing the benefits: new connections, inbound inquiries, and growing recognition of your expertise.

Conclusion: Open Data as a Growth Strategy

The decision to make your SEO data public might seem counterintuitive in an industry that has traditionally valued exclusive access to competitive intelligence. Yet the most successful SEO professionals I know have built their careers on generously sharing their knowledge and insights.

Public Landscapes takes this philosophy to its logical conclusion: why not share not just your conclusions, but the actual data that informs them?

By doing so, you demonstrate not only expertise but confidence and transparency. You show potential clients and colleagues that your value lies not in hoarding data but in your unique ability to derive meaningful insights from that data.

In today’s connected world, authority is increasingly built through public contribution rather than private knowledge. Public Landscapes gives you a powerful platform to contribute at scale, establishing yourself as a leader in your SEO niche while helping others grow their own expertise.

The post Public Landscapes: Democratizing SEO Data and Building Your Authority appeared first on The SiteCurve Blog - See Who's Winning & Losing In SEO.

Think about it — you pay thousands of dollars annually to access valuable search data, but you can’t easily share or monetize the insights you develop from that data. The traditional model forces everyone to pay the same SEO platforms directly, with no way for experts to create value on top of that data.

As someone who’s been on both sides of the table — building SEO-driven businesses and leading enterprise SEO teams — I saw this as a missed opportunity not just for consultants and agencies, but for the entire SEO ecosystem.

That’s why we created Paid Landscapes, a feature that fundamentally rethinks how SEO data can be shared, accessed, and monetized.

Turning SEO Data into Revenue Streams

Paid Landscapes allows anyone to create a specialized landscape of keyword data and charge others for access to it. Think of it as creating your own mini-SEO platform centered around specific niches, strategies, or insights.

This isn’t just another feature — it’s a completely new business model for SEO professionals.

Who Benefits from Paid Landscapes?

SEO Consultants and Influencers

If you’ve built an audience or client base that values your SEO insights, Paid Landscapes offers a new way to monetize your expertise beyond one-off consulting or courses.

I’ve watched several consultants transform their businesses using this model. Instead of chasing hourly work, they now maintain landscapes that provide:

• Ongoing monthly revenue from subscribers
• A platform to demonstrate their expertise in real-time
• A community of engaged professionals discussing trends
• Data-driven proof of their SEO insights

One consultant I know created a landscape focused exclusively on health and wellness websites, providing niche-specific insights that generalist SEO tools simply don’t offer. They now earn more from their landscape subscriptions than from traditional consulting.

Agencies and Their Clients

For agencies, Paid Landscapes solves several persistent problems:

First, it creates a compelling, transparent deliverable that clients can actually access and understand. Rather than mysterious monthly reports filled with metrics that executives don’t fully grasp, clients can directly explore the competitive landscape and see exactly where they stand.

Second, it transforms the client relationship from purely service-based to product-plus-service. When the agency creates and maintains a landscape specific to the client’s industry, they provide dual value: both the ongoing insights and the strategic guidance based on those insights.

Third, it creates a more sustainable client relationship. If a client decides to move on from your agency, they can continue subscribing to your landscape, maintaining a revenue stream and relationship that might eventually bring them back.

Industry Analysts and Research Firms

For those already producing SEO research, Paid Landscapes offers a way to transform static reports into dynamic, ongoing data products.

Rather than publishing a quarterly or annual industry report that quickly becomes outdated, analysts can maintain landscapes that continuously track the metrics that matter. Subscribers get real-time access to the data, while the analysts can focus on providing high-level interpretation and strategic guidance.

How Paid Landscapes Work

The process is remarkably straightforward:

1. Create a landscape with the keywords and competitors relevant to your expertise or client focus
2. Set your price for monthly price to access
3. Enable discovery to make your landscape findable in SiteCurve’s ecosystem
4. Share and promote your landscape to potential subscribers

SiteCurve handles all the payment processing (via Stripe), subscriber management, and data updates, while you focus on providing valuable insights and growing your subscriber base.

We take a simple 10% transaction fee on subscription revenue, with no hidden costs or complicated fee structures. This small fee covers the platform infrastructure, payment processing, and discovery features that help your landscape get found.

Real-World Applications of Paid Landscapes

Let me share some creative ways I’ve seen professionals leverage this feature:

The Investment Analyst Approach

One financial analyst created a landscape tracking SEO performance across publicly traded e-commerce companies. By correlating SEO visibility changes with earnings reports, they provide subscribers with potential early indicators of business performance before financial results are announced.

The Agency Upsell Model

Several agencies now include basic landscape access with their standard services, while offering premium landscape access (with more keywords, competitive analysis, and strategic guidance) as an upsell. This tiered approach has increased average client value by over 30% for some agencies.

The Education + Community Hybrid

A well-known SEO educator created a landscape that serves as both a learning tool and community hub. Members not only get access to the data but participate in weekly discussions analyzing what’s working in the landscape. The insights generated often inform the educator’s broader content strategy.

The Client Transition Plan

One agency uses Paid Landscapes as part of their client graduation strategy. After working intensively with clients for 12-18 months, they transition them to a maintenance plan that includes ongoing landscape access, creating a more sustainable long-term relationship.

Beyond Data: Building Communities Around Search Intelligence

What makes Paid Landscapes truly powerful isn’t just the data monetization — it’s the communities that form around that data.

Each landscape includes robust discussion features that allow subscribers to:

• Analyze recent winners and losers together
• Share observations about effective strategies
• Ask questions about specific domains or approaches
• Network with others interested in the same niche
• Learn directly from the landscape creator’s expertise

This community aspect transforms Paid Landscapes from a pure data product into something more valuable: a living, collaborative intelligence hub centered around specific search categories.

Think of it as combining the best aspects of private communities like Circle.so, Facebook Groups, or Slack channels with real-time, actionable search data.

The Discovery Ecosystem: How Subscribers Find Your Landscape

One of the most powerful aspects of Paid Landscapes is our built-in discovery system that helps potential subscribers find your expertise.

When you create a paid landscape and enable discovery, your landscape becomes visible in several key places:

The Landscape Discovery Directory

At sitecurve.com/discover-landscapes, users can browse all discoverable landscapes, including yours. This directory serves as a marketplace where SEO professionals can find specialized landscapes relevant to their needs.

Your landscape appears with details about the keywords tracked, categories covered, and subscription cost, making it easy for potential subscribers to evaluate whether it meets their needs.

Popular Landscape Leaderboards

High-performing landscapes with active communities and valuable insights can earn spots on our “Most Popular Landscapes” leaderboards. This additional visibility can drive significant subscriber growth without any additional marketing effort on your part.

Domain Search Integration

Perhaps most powerful of all is our domain search integration. When users search for a specific domain in SiteCurve’s global search, they can see which landscapes are tracking that domain.

For example, if someone searches for their own company’s domain and discovers your paid landscape is tracking it, they’ll likely be interested in accessing that competitive data. This creates an organic pathway for domain owners to discover and subscribe to relevant landscapes.

This discovery ecosystem means you’re not starting from zero when monetizing your landscape. SiteCurve actively helps connect your expertise with the professionals most likely to value it.

Getting Started with Your First Paid Landscape

Ready to transform your SEO expertise into a sustainable revenue stream? Here’s my advice for creating a valuable paid landscape:

1. Start with a Clear Focus

The most successful paid landscapes have a specific focus rather than trying to cover everything. Consider:

• A specific industry vertical (e.g., fintech, health and wellness, e-commerce)
• A particular SEO strategy (e.g., affiliate SEO, local SEO)
• A defined geographic market (e.g., UK financial services)

2. Provide Unique Context and Analysis

Anyone can access raw SEO data. Your value comes from the context, analysis, and insights you provide around that data. Plan to:

• Regularly highlight significant movements and explain why they matter
• Analyze successful strategies of leading domains
• Provide actionable takeaways subscribers can implement

3. Build Community Engagement

Active landscapes with engaged communities retain subscribers longer. Consider:

• Posting weekly discussion prompts about recent winners or losers
• Encouraging subscribers to share their own observations
• Creating regular live events analyzing landscape trends

4. Optimize for Discovery

Make your landscape more discoverable within SiteCurve:

• Use descriptive, keyword-rich titles for your landscape
• Include popular domains in your tracking to appear in more domain searches
• Create a compelling landscape description that clearly communicates its value
• Select appropriate categories and tags to help your landscape appear in relevant searches

5. Promote Strategically

Beyond SiteCurve’s discovery features, actively promote your landscape:

• Offering free trial access to prospective clients or audience members
• Creating content that showcases insights from your landscape
• Leveraging your existing email list or social following

How Paid Landscapes Changes the SEO Industry

This feature represents more than just a new revenue opportunity — it fundamentally changes how SEO knowledge circulates in our industry.

Instead of data being locked away in expensive platforms accessible only to those who can afford enterprise subscriptions, Paid Landscapes creates a model where:

• Specialists can monetize their niche expertise
• Data becomes more accessible through targeted, affordable landscapes
• Knowledge flows more freely through landscape communities
• The emphasis shifts from tools to interpretation and insight

The long-term impact could be significant: a more distributed, accessible ecosystem of SEO intelligence where experts thrive by creating value on top of data rather than simply accessing it.

Beyond Traditional Monetization: A New Business Model for SEO Experts

For too long, SEO professionals have been limited to three basic business models:

• Consulting (trading time for money)
• Agency services (scaling time-for-money through teams)
• Creating courses (one-time or limited recurring revenue)

Paid Landscapes offers a fourth model: creating ongoing value through data curation, analysis, and community. This approach combines the leverage of digital products with the recurring revenue of a subscription business.

By building and monetizing landscapes, you’re creating assets with long-term value rather than simply selling your time. That’s a fundamental shift in how SEO expertise can be packaged and monetized.

[INSERT SCREENSHOT: Success story featuring a landscape creator and their revenue growth]

The Future of Paid Landscapes

We’re just at the beginning of what’s possible with this feature. Looking ahead, we plan to expand Paid Landscapes with:

• More granular access controls to create tiered membership levels
• Enhanced analytics to help creators understand subscriber behavior
• Expanded community features to foster deeper engagement
• Integration options to connect with other platforms and tools

The goal is to make Paid Landscapes not just a feature, but a comprehensive platform for SEO experts to build sustainable, profitable businesses around their knowledge and insights.

Conclusion: Unlocking the Value of Your SEO Expertise

Traditional SEO tools have always focused on providing data. SiteCurve’s Paid Landscapes feature goes further by helping you extract value from your expertise in interpreting that data.

Whether you’re a consultant looking for recurring revenue, an agency seeking stronger client relationships, or an analyst wanting to monetize your research, Paid Landscapes offers a new approach to turning your SEO knowledge into a valuable, sellable asset.

In an industry that’s constantly evolving, this represents a significant shift in how SEO professionals can build sustainable businesses around their expertise.

The post Paid Landscapes: How SiteCurve Helps You Monetize Your SEO Expertise appeared first on The SiteCurve Blog - See Who's Winning & Losing In SEO.

What happened? Google happened.

During my years as a VP of SEO and as an independent operator building and selling SEO-driven businesses, I’ve watched Google steadily increase its presence in search results through featured snippets, knowledge panels, “People Also Ask” boxes, and dozens of other SERP features.

These widgets don’t just change the appearance of search results—they fundamentally alter user behavior and can dramatically impact your traffic, even when your rankings remain stable.

That’s why we built the Google Visibility Index at SiteCurve—to quantify exactly how much Google is encroaching on your keywords and to help you develop strategies to adapt.

The Invisible Traffic Thief

For years, SEO professionals have been flying blind when it comes to measuring Google’s impact on their search visibility. We knew Google widgets were appearing more frequently, but we lacked concrete data on:

• Exactly what percentage of our keywords include Google widgets
• Which specific widgets appear for our most valuable terms
• How these widgets change over time
• Which competitors are successfully getting their content into these widgets
• How to adjust our strategy to either compete with or leverage these widgets

Without this data, we’re left with a dangerous blind spot in our SEO strategy. Traffic losses might be attributed to ranking drops or content issues when the real culprit is increased Google visibility on your keywords.

Beyond Ranking: Understanding the Full SERP Landscape

The Google Visibility Index gives you comprehensive visibility into how Google is impacting your search landscape. Here’s what it reveals:

1. Google Score: Quantifying Google’s Presence

Our proprietary Google Score measures how prominently Google features appear across all keywords in your landscape. This score answers the critical question: “How much of the SERP real estate does Google own for my keywords?”

The higher the score, the more Google is dominating visibility for your keywords through its various widgets and features.

2. Widget-Level Visibility Tracking

We break down Google’s presence by specific widget types—AI Overview boxes, Featured Snippets, People Also Ask, Knowledge Panels, and more. This granular view shows you exactly which SERP features are appearing for your keywords and how frequently they show up.

This isn’t just interesting data—it’s strategic intelligence. Different widgets demand different optimization approaches, and knowing which ones dominate your landscape shapes your content strategy.

3. Domain Ownership Within Widgets

Perhaps most valuable is our tracking of which domains appear inside Google’s widgets. We show you, in rank order, which websites Google prefers to feature within each widget type.

This answers the crucial question: “Who’s winning the battle for visibility within Google features?”

If your competitors are consistently appearing in People Also Ask boxes while you’re nowhere to be found, that’s an opportunity to analyze their approach and adapt your content strategy.

4. Winners and Losers by Widget Type

Traditional SEO tools might tell you who’s winning in general search rankings, but SiteCurve takes it further by showing you winners and losers specifically within each widget type.

This unique view reveals which domains are gaining or losing visibility within AI Overview boxes, Featured Snippets, and other crucial SERP features—intelligence you simply can’t get elsewhere.

Real-World Applications of the Google Visibility Index

Let me share how I personally use this feature to develop more effective SEO strategies:

Diagnosing Traffic Losses Despite Stable Rankings

When clients or team members report traffic drops despite maintained rankings, the Google Visibility Index is my first stop. I can quickly determine if increased Google widget presence corresponds with the traffic decline.

In one recent case, we discovered that a client’s traffic drop coincided perfectly with a 37% increase in Google’s visibility on their top keywords—primarily through newly added AI Overview boxes. This completely changed our response strategy.

Competitive Intelligence for Widget Optimization

By identifying which competitors consistently appear in specific widgets, we can reverse-engineer their approach. For example, we noticed a client’s competitor dominated “People Also Ask” boxes across their landscape.

By analyzing their content structure, we found they consistently used question-based H2 headers followed by concise, direct answers. We adapted this format for our own content and saw our inclusion in PAA boxes increase by 43% over the next quarter.

Strategic Keyword Selection Based on Google Presence

Not all keywords are created equal when it comes to Google’s presence. Using the Google Visibility Index, we can identify categories of keywords with lower Google widget presence, where organic listings still capture most clicks.

These keywords often become strategic priorities, as they offer clearer paths to valuable traffic.

How to Leverage the Google Visibility Index

Here’s my practical advice for using this feature to improve your SEO results:

1. Establish Your Baseline

First, measure the current Google visibility across your landscape. This baseline helps you track changes over time and identify sudden shifts that might impact traffic.

2. Segment Analysis by Widget Type

Different widgets require different optimization strategies. Focus on the widget types most prevalent in your landscape:

• For Featured Snippets: Structure content with clear, concise answers to common questions
• For Knowledge Panels: Ensure your entity information is well-structured and consistent across the web
• For AI Overview boxes: Create comprehensive, authoritative content that addresses user intent from multiple angles

3. Study the Winners

Identify domains that consistently appear in Google widgets for your keywords. Analyze their content approach, structure, and formatting to understand what Google prefers for each widget type.

4. Monitor Trends Over Time

Google’s approach to SERP features evolves constantly. Tracking the Google Visibility Index over time helps you spot emerging trends and adapt before they significantly impact your traffic.

5. Balance Direct Competition and Adaptation

Sometimes the best strategy is to target keywords with lower Google visibility. Other times, it’s worth optimizing to appear within Google’s widgets. The right approach depends on your specific landscape and resources.

How Google Visibility Index Integrates with Your SEO Stack

The Google Visibility Index complements your existing SEO tools by adding crucial context:

• With rank tracking tools: Understand why traffic might fluctuate despite stable rankings
• With content optimization tools: Inform your content structure to better compete for widget placement
• With analytics platforms: Correlate traffic changes with Google widget presence for more accurate diagnosis

The Future of SEO Is Widget-Aware

As Google continues to evolve the SERP landscape, traditional ranking metrics become increasingly insufficient. Position #1 isn’t position #1 anymore when multiple widgets appear above it.

Forward-thinking SEO strategies must account for Google’s own visibility and develop approaches that either compete with or leverage these widgets effectively.

The Google Visibility Index gives you the data to develop these next-generation strategies—moving beyond simplistic ranking goals to a more sophisticated understanding of the complete SERP ecosystem.

[INSERT SCREENSHOT: Future projection dashboard showing Google visibility trends]

Getting Started with the Google Visibility Index

Ready to understand Google’s impact on your search landscape? Here’s how to begin:

1. Create a comprehensive landscape: Include at least 250-500 keywords that represent your core market
2. Review your Google Score: Understand Google’s overall presence across your keywords
3. Analyze widget distribution: Identify which specific widgets appear most frequently
4. Study domain ownership: See which competitors appear most often in these widgets
5. Develop widget-specific strategies: Create content that’s optimized for the dominant widgets in your space

Beyond Rankings: A Complete View of Search Visibility

The Google Visibility Index represents a fundamental shift in how we approach SEO measurement and strategy. It acknowledges that rankings alone no longer tell the full story of search visibility.

By quantifying Google’s presence and tracking which domains appear within its various widgets, we gain a more complete picture of the competitive landscape—and more importantly, actionable insights to adapt our strategies.

Because in today’s search environment, understanding Google’s visibility is just as important as understanding your own.

The post Google Visibility Index: Measuring and Adapting to Google’s Growing SERP Presence appeared first on The SiteCurve Blog - See Who's Winning & Losing In SEO.

I know I have. As someone who’s been in SEO since 2016 — first building and selling my own businesses, then as a VP of SEO managing 30+ people at an enterprise level — I’ve experienced this frustration firsthand.

We’re drowning in data but starving for insights.

Traditional keyword tracking tools tell you where you rank. Great. But they don’t tell you what to do about it, or more importantly, who’s winning in your space and why.

That’s why we built the Winners and Losers feature at SiteCurve — to completely transform how you approach SEO strategy.

The Problem with Traditional Keyword Tracking

When I was leading SEO teams, we’d spend thousands on keyword tracking tools that would tell us we moved from position 7 to position 5 for “best credit cards.” The executive team would celebrate. Marketing would pat themselves on the back.

But here’s what kept me up at night:

• Who’s actually dominating the entire category?
• Which competitors are consistently gaining visibility?
• What specific content and SEO approaches are driving those gains?
• How are we performing relative to our domain authority?

Traditional rank tracking left these crucial questions unanswered. We’d be celebrating a minor ranking improvement while completely missing the fact that our competitors were outpacing us across hundreds of other keywords.

How Winners and Losers Tracking Changes the Game

SiteCurve’s Winners and Losers feature takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of just tracking your own keywords in isolation, we track entire “landscapes” — comprehensive views of all the players in your niche, their performance trends, and what’s actually working.

Here’s what sets it apart:

1. Visibility Beyond Your Own Domain

Winners and Losers tracking shows you not just where you stand, but which competitors are gaining or losing ground across your entire keyword landscape. This is critical intelligence that traditional rank tracking simply doesn’t provide.

[INSERT SCREENSHOT: SiteCurve Winners and Losers dashboard showing comparative performance across multiple domains]

2. Performance Relative to Authority

One of my biggest frustrations was seeing low-authority sites outperform much stronger domains (including ours). SiteCurve’s Curve Score measures performance relative to domain authority, instantly highlighting sites that are “punching above their weight.”

These are the sites you should be studying — they’re doing something right that even the big players haven’t figured out.

3. Pattern Recognition Across Categories

When you can see who’s winning across entire categories rather than just individual keywords, patterns emerge. You’ll notice specific content types, page structures, or technical approaches that correlate with success.

This is where the real SEO gold lies.

4. Volatility as a Strategic Signal

Our volatility tracking shows which sites experience frequent ranking fluctuations. This isn’t just a curiosity — it’s a strategic indicator of how Google views those sites. Stable rankings often indicate stronger, more trusted domains, while volatility can signal opportunity or risk.

How We Use Winners and Losers at SiteCurve

Let me walk you through how I personally use this feature to drive strategy:

1. Weekly competitive review: Every Monday, I check who gained and lost share of voice in our key landscapes over the past 7 days. This immediately shows me which competitors deserve my attention.
2. Algorithm update analysis: After major Google updates, I filter Winners and Losers to see which sites benefited or were penalized. This gives me immediate insights into what Google is valuing.
3. Content opportunity discovery: When I spot a competitor suddenly gaining visibility, I examine their recent content to identify what’s working. This has directly informed our content calendar.
4. Performance forecasting: By tracking the trajectory of winners over time, we can forecast competitive threats before they become major issues.

How Winners and Losers Fits Into Your SEO Stack

I’m not suggesting you throw out your existing tools. Far from it. Here’s how SiteCurve complements what you’re already using:

• With technical SEO tools: Your crawlers and technical tools identify issues, while SiteCurve shows you which technical improvements are actually moving the needle for competitors.
• With content tools: Your content optimization tools help improve individual pages, while SiteCurve shows you which content types and topics are winning across your entire category.
• With analytics platforms: Your analytics show what’s happening on your site, while SiteCurve reveals the competitive context behind those trends.

The Shift from Keyword Tracking to Landscape Intelligence

The fundamental shift here is moving from tracking keywords to tracking landscapes. It’s not that keyword tracking isn’t valuable — it’s that it’s incomplete without competitive context.

Think of it this way: keyword tracking tells you your position in the race. Landscape tracking shows you the entire racecourse, who’s gaining ground, and most importantly, why.

Getting Started with Winners and Losers

If you’re intrigued by this approach, here’s how to get started:

1. Define your landscape: Identify the 500-1,000 most important keywords in your niche. For more focused markets, even 250 keywords can provide meaningful insights.
2. Monitor consistently: The real value comes from tracking trends over time. Set a weekly cadence to review Winners and Losers reports.
3. Look for patterns: Don’t just focus on individual winners and losers. Look for patterns in content types, page structures, or technical approaches that correlate with success.
4. Take action quickly: When you identify a winning strategy, implement it across your site promptly. SEO rewards fast movers.

Beyond Rankings: Building a Complete SEO Intelligence System

Winners and Losers tracking is just one component of what we’re building at SiteCurve — a complete SEO intelligence system that helps you not just track rankings, but actually understand what’s working in your space and why.

Because at the end of the day, knowing your rank for a handful of keywords isn’t enough. Understanding who’s winning in your landscape — and more importantly, WHY they’re winning — is the real competitive advantage.

That’s the insight that traditional keyword tracking tools simply can’t provide.

The post Winners and Losers: How Landscape Tracking Unlocks A New Way To Analyze Your Competitors appeared first on The SiteCurve Blog - See Who's Winning & Losing In SEO.

As someone who’s built and sold SEO-driven businesses and led enterprise SEO teams, I’ve experienced the limitations of traditional competitor research firsthand. It’s precisely this experience that shaped SiteCurve’s unique approach to competitive intelligence.

The Problem with Traditional Competitor Research

Traditional SEO tools typically approach competitor research in one of three flawed ways:

1. The “Domain vs. Domain” Approach

Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush offer direct domain comparisons, but require you to:

• Already know exactly which competitors to track
• Manually add each competitor individually
• Analyze each comparison separately

This creates blind spots—you miss emerging competitors and broader competitive patterns.

2. The “Traffic Estimate” Approach

Tools like SimilarWeb provide traffic estimates across broad categories, but:

• Include competitors from unrelated business segments
• Offer limited keyword-level insights
• Provide estimates that can vary wildly from reality

The result is overwhelming data with limited actionable intelligence.

3. The “Keyword Overlap” Approach

Some tools identify competitors based on keyword overlap, but this approach:

• Often surfaces indirect competitors who target similar keywords for different purposes
• Creates excessive noise in competitive analysis
• Fails to distinguish between true market competitors and content competitors

This leads to diluted focus and misaligned strategy.

SiteCurve’s Landscape Approach to Competitor Research

SiteCurve fundamentally reimagines competitor research through our landscape approach. Instead of starting with domains, we start with the market you care about—defined by the specific keywords that drive your business.

This simple shift in perspective transforms competitive intelligence in several critical ways:

1. Precision-Targeted Competitive Sets

By building landscapes around the exact keywords that matter to your business, SiteCurve ensures you’re analyzing true market competitors, not just sites that happen to share some keyword overlap. This improves your signal-to-noise ratio dramatically.

For example, if you’re in financial services focusing on credit cards, a traditional keyword overlap approach might surface content sites with credit card comparison tables, affiliate blogs, news sites mentioning credit cards, and actual credit card providers—an overwhelming mix of different business models.

SiteCurve’s landscape approach lets you focus specifically on direct competitors with similar business models, ensuring your competitive intelligence is precisely targeted to your actual market position.

2. Complete Competitive Discovery

Unlike traditional tools that require you to know and input your competitors manually, SiteCurve automatically:

• Discovers all domains ranking for your keyword set
• Tracks their performance over time
• Alerts you to new entrants as they emerge
• Identifies which competitors are gaining or losing visibility

This ensures you never miss an emerging threat or opportunity because you didn’t know to look for it.

3. Winners and Losers Tracking

SiteCurve’s daily winners and losers tracking provides a dynamic view of your competitive landscape that traditional tools simply can’t match:

• See which competitors are gaining share and which are losing it
• Track competitive shifts across multiple timeframes (24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, 3 months, 6months, etc)
• Identify the specific keywords driving competitive gains and losses
• Understand performance patterns across different business models and site types

This real-time competitive intelligence helps you spot trends early and adapt your strategy accordingly.

4. New Entrant Monitoring

One of SiteCurve’s most distinctive capabilities is automatic new entrant tracking:

• Identify domains that never previously ranked for your keywords but have now entered the landscape
• Receive alerts when significant new competitors emerge
• Analyze what’s enabling new entrants to gain traction
• Spot emerging business models or content approaches early

This feature alone provides critical early warning that traditional tools simply don’t offer.

The Practical Impact on Competitive Strategy

SiteCurve’s approach to competitor research transforms how you develop and refine your SEO strategy:

Identifying True Competitive Patterns

By focusing only on the keywords that matter to your business, you can identify true competitive patterns:

• Which content types consistently perform well in your space
• What site structures drive the strongest results
• How competitors are adapting to algorithm updates
• Which business models are gaining or losing ground

These insights cut through the noise and highlight what actually works in your specific market.

Prioritizing Strategic Opportunities

With clear winners and losers tracking, you can prioritize opportunities based on competitive vulnerability:

• Target keywords where leading competitors are losing ground
• Identify content gaps where no competitor has established dominance
• Focus on areas where competitors with similar business models are succeeding
• Avoid investing in approaches that consistently underperform across the landscape

This ensures your SEO resources are allocated to the highest-potential opportunities.

Developing Competitive Early Warning Systems

SiteCurve’s new entrant tracking and winners/losers monitoring serve as an early warning system for competitive threats:

• Spot new competitors before they become established threats
• Identify successful new approaches before they become industry standards
• Recognize shifting competitive dynamics early enough to adapt
• Monitor how algorithm updates are redistributing visibility in your landscape

This proactive competitive intelligence helps you stay ahead of market shifts rather than reacting to them after the fact.

How Different Organizations Leverage SiteCurve’s Competitive Intelligence

For In-House SEO Teams

In-house teams use SiteCurve’s competitor research capabilities to:

• Develop data-backed SEO strategies based on what’s working in their specific market
• Monitor direct competitors’ performance across their keyword landscape
• Identify successful content strategies to adapt for their own sites
• Provide executives with clear competitive positioning reports
• Demonstrate progress against specific competitors over time

For Agencies

Agencies leverage SiteCurve’s competitive intelligence to:

• Develop client-specific strategies based on true market dynamics
• Identify underperforming competitors to target for client gains
• Showcase comprehensive competitive landscape understanding to prospects
• Deliver more value through targeted, data-backed recommendations
• Track client progress against a complete competitive set

For SEO Consultants

Independent consultants use SiteCurve to:

• Quickly understand competitive dynamics in new client markets
• Develop differentiated strategies based on competitive gaps
• Present clients with comprehensive competitive analysis
• Track the effectiveness of implemented recommendations against all competitors

A Side-by-Side Comparison: Traditional vs. Landscape Approach

To illustrate the difference, let’s compare how traditional tools and SiteCurve approach competitor research:

How to Implement Landscape-Based Competitor Research

To leverage SiteCurve’s approach to competitor research:

1. Define your market precisely: Create landscapes based on the specific keywords that drive your business
2. Start broad, then segment: Begin with a comprehensive landscape, then create focused views through filters and indexes
3. Analyze patterns, not just domains: Look for consistent patterns across winning sites, not just individual competitor performance
4. Monitor the winners and losers leaderboards: Track which competitors are gaining and losing ground over time
5. Pay special attention to new entrants: These often bring fresh approaches that can reshape competitive dynamics

The key difference is approaching competitor research from a market perspective rather than a domain perspective—seeing the entire competitive ecosystem rather than isolated competitor comparisons.

Conclusion: A New Standard for Competitive Intelligence

In today’s complex search landscape, the traditional domain-vs-domain approach to competitor research is increasingly insufficient. By starting with markets rather than domains, and tracking all competitors rather than just pre-selected ones, SiteCurve provides a level of competitive intelligence that simply wasn’t possible before.

The landscape approach ensures you’re focused on true market competitors, not distracted by indirect or irrelevant sites. It reveals competitive patterns that would remain hidden in traditional analysis. And most importantly, it provides early warning of competitive shifts through winners/losers tracking and new entrant monitoring.

For SEO teams seeking to develop truly data-driven strategies, this comprehensive view of the competitive landscape isn’t just helpful—it’s essential. It transforms competitor research from a periodic, manual exercise into an ongoing, automated intelligence system that informs every aspect of your SEO strategy.

If you’re ready to take your competitive intelligence to the next level, I invite you to explore how SiteCurve’s landscape approach can transform your understanding of your market.

Want to see your true competitive landscape? Request a demo to experience SiteCurve’s revolutionary approach to competitor research.

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Having worked closely with agencies of all sizes, I’ve seen this struggle firsthand. It’s why we designed SiteCurve with agency lead generation as a core use case. By leveraging landscape-based competitive intelligence, agencies can transform their new business development from generic outreach to targeted, data-driven conversations that resonate with potential clients.

The Agency Lead Generation Challenge

Traditional lead generation approaches for SEO agencies suffer from several limitations:

1. Generic value propositions: Without specific competitive data, agencies rely on generalized claims about SEO value
2. Limited competitive intelligence: Most pitches include only basic competitive analysis of 2-3 competitors
3. Speculative outcomes: Projected results are often based on industry averages rather than specific market dynamics
4. High research overhead: Creating customized pitches requires substantial manual research time

The result is a low-conversion sales process that relies heavily on volume rather than precision—a challenging model in today’s competitive agency landscape.

How SiteCurve Transforms Agency Lead Generation

SiteCurve’s landscape approach fundamentally changes how agencies can identify, approach, and convert potential clients. Here’s how:

1. Create Industry-Specific Landscapes

Agencies can build comprehensive landscapes for industries they serve or want to target. For example:

• A landscape covering the home services industry
• A landscape focused on financial services providers
• A landscape tracking SaaS companies in a specific vertical

Each landscape automatically tracks all rankings, traffic estimates, and competitive positioning across your keyword set, creating a living map of the entire competitive ecosystem.

2. Identify High-Potential Prospects

Once your landscape is running, SiteCurve helps you identify the most promising potential clients:

• Underperforming domains: Sites with strong domain authority but poor visibility (high potential for improvement)
• Declining performers: Previously successful sites losing ground to competitors
• Category laggards: Sites significantly behind category leaders despite similar business models
• Emerging competitors: Growing sites that could benefit from accelerating their momentum

The platform essentially creates a prioritized list of prospects most likely to benefit from your services, allowing you to focus outreach efforts where they’ll have the highest impact.

3. Develop Data-Driven, Personalized Pitches

When approaching potential clients, you can now build pitches with unprecedented specificity:

• Show their exact position within their competitive landscape
• Identify specific competitors outperforming them
• Quantify the visibility and traffic gap to industry leaders
• Highlight specific keyword categories where they’re underperforming
• Demonstrate which content types and strategies are working for leaders

This isn’t theoretical—it’s concrete, specific, and directly relevant to their business. You’re not selling SEO in general; you’re showing them precisely where they stand and the opportunity that exists.

For example, you might approach a potential client with:

“Your site currently has 4.3% market share in the home services landscape, while your direct competitor has captured 12.8%. Our analysis shows they’re outperforming you primarily in installation guides and cost comparison content, with an estimated 45,000 monthly visits you’re currently missing. We’d like to show you exactly how we can help close this gap.”

4. Demonstrate Progress with Objective Metrics

Once you’ve secured a client, SiteCurve becomes a powerful tool for demonstrating ongoing value:

• Track market share improvements over time
• Show how the client is gaining ground on specific competitors
• Identify new opportunities as they emerge in the landscape
• Provide objective, third-party validation of your work’s impact

The same landscape that helped you acquire the client becomes your framework for demonstrating success and justifying continued investment.

Practical Implementation for Agencies

Here’s a step-by-step approach to implementing this strategy:

Step 1: Strategic Landscape Selection

Begin by identifying industries where:

• You have existing expertise or case studies
• Competition for agency services isn’t saturated
• Businesses typically have adequate budgets for SEO services
• The keyword landscape is substantial enough to create meaningful differentiation

For most agencies, starting with 2-3 focused landscapes is ideal. Each landscape should include at least 500-1,000 keywords to provide comprehensive market coverage.

Step 2: Target Identification and Qualification

Once your landscapes are active, identify potential targets by:

1. Reviewing underperformance metrics relative to domain authority
2. Assessing current content quality and quantity
3. Evaluating business size and likely marketing budget
4. Checking for signs they’re actively investing in digital marketing
5. Looking for recent visibility changes that might create urgency

SiteCurve’s Curve Score metric, which measures performance relative to domain authority, is particularly valuable here—sites with high domain authority but low Curve Scores often represent the highest-potential opportunities.

Step 3: Personalized Outreach Strategy

With qualified targets identified, develop a personalized outreach approach:

1. Create a custom report for each prospect showing their specific landscape position
2. Highlight the exact competitive gap they face against key competitors
3. Identify 3-5 specific keyword categories where opportunity exists
4. Develop sample content recommendations based on what’s working for leaders
5. Provide a conservative estimate of potential traffic growth based on landscape data

This approach transforms cold outreach into valuable, personalized intelligence that prospects won’t receive from other agencies.

Step 4: Client Success Tracking

For converted clients, establish a routine for tracking and communicating progress:

1. Set up regular reporting cadences showing landscape positioning changes
2. Create dashboards focused on closing the gap to specific competitors
3. Highlight new opportunities as they emerge in the landscape
4. Use objective third-party data to validate your strategy recommendations

This creates a powerful retention and referral engine based on transparent, verifiable results.

Real-World Benefits for Agencies

Agencies implementing this landscape-based lead generation approach can expect several tangible benefits:

Higher Conversion Rates

When you approach prospects with specific, data-driven insights about their current market position and opportunities, conversion rates typically increase dramatically. You’re no longer selling generic SEO services—you’re offering a specific solution to a documented problem.

Larger Initial Engagements

The specificity and confidence demonstrated in your pitch often justifies larger initial engagements. When prospects can clearly see the gap between their current performance and their potential, they’re more likely to invest appropriately to close that gap.

Expanded Service Offerings

The comprehensive nature of landscape data often reveals opportunities beyond traditional SEO, allowing agencies to pitch content creation, conversion optimization, and even broader digital strategy work from the initial engagement.

Reduced Sales Cycle

With concrete, specific data driving the conversation, the typical extended sales cycle for SEO services often shortens considerably. Prospects can clearly see the opportunity cost of delay, creating greater urgency in the decision process.

Case in Point: Transforming Agency Lead Generation

Consider how this approach transforms the typical agency prospecting scenario:

Traditional Approach: “We’re an SEO agency with proven results. We’d love to audit your site and show you how we can help improve your rankings and traffic.”

SiteCurve-Powered Approach: “We’ve been analyzing the home services industry, and I noticed your site currently captures about 3.5% of the available search visibility in your category. Your competitor, ABC Home Services, has 11.2% market share despite a similar domain authority. They’re primarily outperforming you in installation guides and cost comparison content, with an estimated 45,000 monthly visits you’re currently missing. I’d like to show you exactly where these gaps exist and how we can help you close them.”

The difference is striking—and the impact on conversion rates reflects this difference.

Conclusion: A New Paradigm for Agency Lead Generation

The landscape-based approach to lead generation represents a fundamental shift in how agencies can identify, approach, and convert potential clients. By leveraging comprehensive competitive intelligence to deliver specific, data-driven insights, agencies can position themselves not as generic service providers, but as strategic partners with unique market understanding.

This approach not only increases conversion rates and initial engagement size, but creates a foundation for long-term client relationships based on transparent, verifiable results. As competition for agency services continues to intensify, this data-driven approach provides a powerful differentiation strategy that delivers value before the first dollar changes hands.

If you’re an agency looking to transform your lead generation approach, I invite you to explore how SiteCurve’s landscape intelligence can reshape your new business development.

Ready to revolutionize your agency’s lead generation? Request a demo to see how SiteCurve can transform your new business development approach.

The post Agency Lead Generation: How Agencies Can Use SiteCurve for Data-Driven Business Development appeared first on The SiteCurve Blog - See Who's Winning & Losing In SEO.