As the web fills inexorably with AI slop, searchers and search engines are becoming more skeptical of content, brands, and publishers.

Thanks to generative AI, it’s the easiest it’s ever been to create, distribute, and find information. But thanks to the bravado of LLMs and the recklessness of many publishers, it’s fast becoming the hardest it’s ever been to tell the difference between genuine, good information and regurgitated, bad information.

This one-two punch is changing how Google and searchers alike filter information, choosing to distrust brands and publishers by default. We’re moving from a world where trust had to be lost, to one where it has to be earned.

As SEOs and marketers, our number one job is to escape the “default blocklist” and earn a spot on the allowlist.

With so much content on the internet—and so much of it AI-generated slop—it is too taxing for people or search engines to evaluate the veracity and trustworthiness of information on a case-by-case basis.

We know that Google wants to filter out AI slop.

In the past year, we’ve seen five core updates, three dedicated spam updates, and a huge emphasis on EEAT. As these updates are iterated on, indexing for new sites is incredibly slow—and arguably, more selective—with more pages caught in Crawled—currently not indexed purgatory.

But this is a hard problem to solve. AI content is not easy to detect. Some AI content is good and useful (like some human content is bad and useless). Google wants to avoid diluting its index with billions of pages of erroneous or repetitive content—but this bad content looks increasingly similar to good content.

This problem is so hard, in fact, that Google has hedged. Instead of evaluating the quality of each and every article, Google seems to have cut the Gordian knot, choosing instead to elevate big, trusted brands like Forbes, WebMD, TechRadar, or the BBC into many more SERPs.

After all, it’s far easier for Google to police a handful of huge content brands than many thousands of smaller ones. By promoting “trusted” brands—brands with some kind of track record and public accountability—into dominant positions in popular SERPs, Google can effectively innoculate many search experiences from the risk of AI slop.

(Worsening the problem of “Forbes slop” in the process, but Google seems to view it as the lesser of two evils.)

In a similar vein, UGC sites like Reddit and Quora have their own inbuilt quality control mechanisms—upvoting and downvoting—allowing Google to outsource the burden of moderation:

In response to the staggering quantity of content being created, Google seems to be adopting a “default blocklist” mindset, distrusting new information by default, while giving preference to a handful of trusted brands and publishers.

Newer, smaller publishers are default blocklisted; companies like Forbes and TechRadar, Reddit and Quora, have been elevated to allowlist status.

Hitting the “boost” button for big brands may be a temporary measure from Google while it improves its algorithms, but even so, I think this is reflective of a broader shift.

As Bernard Huang from Clearscope phrased it in a webinar we ran together:

“I think with the era of the internet and now infinite content, we’re moving towards a society where a lot of people are default blocklisting everything and I will choose to allowlist, you know the Superpath community or Ryan Law on Twitter… As a way to continue to get content that they deem to be high-signal or trustworthy, they’re turning towards communities and influencers.”

In the pre-AI era, brands were trusted by default. They had to actively violate trust to become blocklisted (publishing something untrustworthy, or making an obvious factual inaccuracy):

But today, with most brands racing to pump out AI slop, the safest stance is simply to assume that every new brand encountered is guilty of the same sin—until proven otherwise.

In the era of information abundance, new content and brands will find themselves on the default blocklist, and allowlist status needs to be earned:

In the AI era, Google is turning to gatekeepers, trusted entities that can vouch for the credibility and authenticity of content. Faced with the same problem, individual searchers will too.

Our job is to become one of these trusted gatekeepers of information.

• Be selective with what you publish. Don’t be a jack-of-all-trades; focus on topics where you possess credibility. Measure yourself as much by what you don’t publish as what you do.
• Create content that aligns with your business model. Coupon code and affiliate spam subdirectories are not helpful for earning the trust of skeptical searchers (or Google).
• Avoid “content sites”. Many of the sites hit hardest by the HCU were “content sites” that existed solely to monetize website traffic. Content will be more credible when it supports a real, tangible product.
• Make your motivations crystal clear. Make it obvious who you are, why (and how) you’ve created your content, and how you benefit.
• Add something unique and proprietary to everything you publish. This doesn’t have to be complicated: run simple experiments, invest greater effort than your competitors, and anchor everything in first-hand experience (I’ve written about this in detail here.)
• Get real people to author your content. Encourage them to show off their credentials through photographs, anecdotes, and author bios.
• Build personal brands. Turn your faceless company brand into something associated with real, breathing people.
• Use Google’s gatekeepers to your advantage. If Google is telling you that it really trusts Reddit content, well… maybe you should try distributing your content and ideas through Reddit?
• Become a gatekeeper for your audience. What would it mean to become a trusted gatekeeper for your audience? Limit what you share, carefully curate third-party content, and be willing to vouch for anything you publish.

Final thoughts

Shopping SERPs have been looking more like a feed than ranked results for a while now. In December, I wrote about the integration of Google’s shopping tab into the main results for shopping queries in e-commerce shifts. The result is a marketplace that looks more like Amazon than web search results.

SERP features and query refinements play a big role in this transition. They direct users from unrefined searches to finding products as quickly as possible, having an outsized impact on clicks and revenue.

In this deep dive, I analyzed +28,000 shopping SERPs to understand how query refinements work and how e-commerce sites can use them.

It’s a bit early for shopping season, but I’m writing a lot of e-commerce because most shops need some time to make changes on their site (especially the big ones). So, if you want a fruitful 2024, now is the time to get the work on the roadmap.

This piece builds on two analyses I’ve published previously:

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What Are Query Refinements

Query Refinements are “pills” at the top of the search results that help users refine their search. In essence, query refinements are product filters.

First announced at Google Search On 2022, Google explained that refinements (and filters on desktop) follow real-time search trends (bolding mine):

Whole page shopping filters on Search are now dynamic and adapt based on real-time Search trends. So if you’re shopping for jeans, you might see filters for “wide leg” and “bootcut” because those are the popular denim styles right now — but those may change over time, depending on what’s trending.1

Examples of Query Refinements. (Image Credit: Kevin Indig)

The purpose of query refinements is to bring users from the “messy middle” to conversion as quickly as possible as they literally refine the query. When you click on a pill, Google sends users to another SERP, just like when users click the product filters on the left.

To understand how query refinements work and how e-commerce sites can use them to their advantage, I dug up some data.

How Query Refinements Work

I analyzed 28,286 shopping keywords (US, desktop) with seoClarity and found that query refinements:

• follow distinct patterns sites can use for keyword targeting.
• lead to search queries without search volume.
• trigger new AI Overviews on mobile.

Common Refinements

I analyzed which refinements come up most often in “position” one, two and three. Think about position one in this context as the first refinement from the left, which is the most visible.

Most refinements specify gender. The term “women” comes up most often in the top 3, but “men” comes up most often in the first refinement. 45% of query refinements mention one gender at least once, 61.4% if you include kids. It makes sense: before diving into product attributes like color or size, you want to make sure a product is “for you.”

The most common query refinements. (Image Credit: Kevin Indig)

The second most common group of refinements is location. Ten percent of the top three refinements include “nearby,” which is much more visible on mobile. Google shows maps by default on mobile devices, as mobile device users are more likely to be on the go.

The third group is attributes around queries that include “for” or “with”, where users try to specify use cases (9.8%), and the fourth is price (9% of refinements include the term “sale”).

Query refinements have a high overlap with product filters on desktops and often feature the first few filters as refinements. Product filters don’t exist on mobile, likely because users might expect the filter sidebar on desktop, but it doesn’t make sense on mobile.

Product filters (desktop) and query refinements tend to have high overlap. (Image Credit: Kevin Indig)

The sorting and visibility of refinements are different on mobile and desktop. Due to the difference in bigger screen size, mobile search results show ~4 refinements on load, while desktop can show over 10.

Since query refinements are based on realtime searches, they also overlap heavily with autosuggest.

(Image Credit: Kevin Indig)

Interesting Findings

Three insights from the data surprised me:

First, Google keeps refinements strictly focused on product attributes but not user intents. I expected searchers to be interested in opinions and reviews on Reddit, but neither “Reddit” nor “reviews” came up as a refinement a single time.

Two, query refinements exactly match the query, meaning you won’t find synonyms or closely related terms in them. As a result, brands don’t appear in refinements, either.

Three, most query refinements don’t have search volume or a CPC. Only 10,696 / 27,262 keywords in the first refinement have search volume (median = 70), and only 6,514 / 27,262 keywords have a CPC. Since query refinements are based on search behavior, we can conclude that search volume and other keyword planner data are very limited metrics.

AI Overview Refinements

Of course, I came across AI Overviews (AIOs) in my research. For the queries I analyzed, mobile results returned AIOs but desktop doesn’t. An example is brown mascara.

Brown mascara on desktop, no showing an AIO. (Image Credit: Kevin Indig)

Brown mascara on mobile, triggering an AIO. (Image Credit: Kevin Indig)

You likely spotted the AIO tabs on the screenshot above, which appear independently of refinements and explain common product attributes.

(Image Credit: Kevin Indig)

Notice how the AIO provides additional guidance and information in tabs (see screenshot below).

(Image Credit: Kevin Indig)

At this point, it’s unclear whether citations in AIO tabs are good because they drive traffic to review articles or bad because they give the answer away.

(Image Credit: Kevin Indig)

For other queries, like “air compressor”, I was able to spot refinements in the AI Overview instead of above it. Clicking an AIO refinement leads to another search with the refinement in the query. For example, on the SERP for “air compressor”, one refinement is “for painting cars”. Clicking it leads to another SERP for the query “air compressor for painting cars” (with another AIO and tabs but no refinement). Notice that I was logged into the SGE beta, which means those features might not yet be live for every user.

(Image Credit: Kevin Indig)

5 Lessons

5 key lessons surfaced from my analysis of over 28,000 shopping queries:

• You should create specific product and category pages for men/women/kids when it matters for products (e.g. fashion).
• Mine query refinements and autosuggest to find relevant query variations for your keyword research (for example, seoClarity can do this).
• Monitor ranks by query refinement to drive your decisions around facetted indexing (like Nike or Target). Refinements showing different URLs are an indicator of building specific facets.
• You need to identify searcher interest beyond search volume. The fact that more than half of queries don’t have search volume, but query refinements are optimized for search behavior shows that you might miss a lot of opportunities by limiting yourself to queries that have search volume. Instead, leverage onsite search data, surveys and qualitative research to enhance keyword targeting.
• Monitor and compare clicks from desktop and mobile results to understand the impact of product filters (desktop) and AIOs (mobile).

The type of dashboard you create often depends on who you’re making it for—your own website, a small business, or an enterprise business.

In this article, I’ll explain the basics of SEO reporting dashboards and how to tailor them for your particular audience.

Ahrefs’ Looker Studio Integration – Site Explorer Template

In the above example, we can see the results are positive because the line chart goes up, and the KPI comparisons are also mostly green, showing positive yearly growth.

This is the power of an effective SEO reporting dashboard—you can instantly communicate SEO performance at-a-glance.

The simple answer is anything you want. But it’s best to include SEO metrics that matter to the website you‘re reporting on.

This could include metrics like:

• Clicks
• Sessions
• Click-through-rate (CTR)
• Conversions
• Conversion rate (CR)
• Organic Traffic
• Average Position
• Referring domains
• And so on…

Let’s simplify this further.

At the most basic level, there are two core elements you should include in an SEO reporting dashboard:

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – KPIs can be anything that is important to report on for your business and could include conversions, revenue, leads, orders, or any other SEO metrics
• Organic traffic performance chart – Tracking your traffic performance across the year

So, how can you create your very own SEO reporting dashboard?

One of the most popular methods is to use a tool called Google Looker Studio (GLS). Dashboard solutions like GLS integrate with many popular data sources for free out of the box, making them perfect for most websites looking to create an SEO reporting dashboard.

Here’s an example of the basic GLS connectors, with some useful ones for SEO highlighted.

Although GLS is great for small personal websites or small-medium businesses (SMBs), in my experience, enterprise businesses usually require more powerful alternatives, as they have more complex demands.

So, based on this, we can say there are three broad categories of websites you can build for:

• Small personal websites
• SMB websites
• Enterprise websites

Let’s explore these further.

Creating an SEO reporting dashboard for a small personal website is a good option if you want to monitor SEO performance but don’t want the hassle of logging into lots of different tools regularly.

This was the conclusion I came to when I wanted to monitor my portfolio of affiliate sites with the least amount of effort possible.

There was no way I was prepared to check every single site’s performance manually. So, I decided to create a mini SEO reporting dashboard in GLS that looked something like this:

This dashboard wasn’t visually impressive, but it was functional and displayed SEO performance at a glance.

It combined two data sources: Sessions from Google Analytics and clicks, impressions, and CTR from Google Search Console. Checking this data manually is possible, but it would be an inefficient use of time, especially across more than one website.

Having this setup meant I could:

• Spend more time improving the websites rather than obsessing over the details and not doing anything that improves performance
• Understand where to focus my efforts in the portfolio – I had many sites in the dashboard, so checking them all wasn’t feasible or efficient use of time
• Identify performance patterns between websites—for example, if there was a Google update, I could get a bird’s-eye view of performance across the website portfolio to see if there were any common performance drops or increases following the roll-out of the update
• View year-over-year (YoY) comparisons: green if they were positive and red if they were negative – this way, I could quickly scan many websites and understand whether SEO performance had increased or decreased for each website
• Able to check quickly – if you’ve used GLS before, you’ll know that the more charts and visualizations you add, the longer it can take to load the page

Even though I felt proud I’d created a minimal dashboard that saved time. I realized afterward that I’d re-created Ahrefs’ Webmaster Tools dashboard with a few added metrics—oh dear.

Sidenote.

The advantages of using AWT for personal websites are:

• It’s free if you are a webmaster
• It’s easy to set up if you have GSC access
• You can view both GSC data and Ahrefs data

So, when creating an SEO reporting dashboard for a small personal website, it’s best to consider what metrics you want to track before you start. This will help you determine the best solution for your reporting demands.

In short:

• If it’s just GSC and for your personal use, use AWT with GSC connected
• If you want to combine multiple data sources and share with others, then use GLS

If you need more detailed GA or GSC data, you can also visualize it quickly using GLS’ dedicated community templates. I used the GSC template below to provide detailed information on each site.

Here’s how you can set this up:

How to connect Google Search Console to Google Looker Studio

If you need more data from GSC or want to visualize performance, Google Looker Studio’s Search Console templates are your friend. A pre-built Google Looker Studio community template can get you up and running in a few minutes.

To do this, log into Google Looker Studio and connect to this template:

Then click on Use my own data and Replace data.

Then, select your site from the list.

Then select either Site Impression and web or URL Impression and web, depending on your preference. I am using URL Impression and web in this example.

Click Add at the bottom right-hand corner. You’ll then probably get a pop-up—click Add to report.

Once that’s added, you should get something that looks like this but with your website’s data showing.

And there you go—your very own GSC-flavored SEO reporting dashboard.

This dashboard reports on:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• CTR
• Top Landing Pages
• Top Queries
• Device performance
• Country performance

Of course, you can customize it to your requirements, but I usually find this a good starting point for visualizing basic GSC data.

How to connect Google Analytics (GA4) to GLS

Similar to this, you can create a dedicated GA4 SEO reporting dashboard by using a GLS community template.

To do this, log into GLS and connect to this template.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll get a template that looks something like this:

If GA4 reporting is important for your business, you’ll find a good selection of metrics to explore here. Again, you can customize or add new tabs to expand or reduce the report’s scope, depending on your website’s reporting requirements.

At its most basic level, most SMBs want to know whether their SEO campaign is moving positively.

If so, you only need to share the SEO performance chart and the year-over-year KPIs.

It’s straightforward to share this using Ahrefs’ Site Explorer Google Looker Studio integration.

Ahrefs’ SEO reporting dashboards

For example, our Site Audit dashboard is best for monitoring the technical SEO performance of any website.

This would be a useful SEO reporting dashboard for development teams to track whether site improvements have been successfully implemented.

Our Rank Tracker dashboard is best for monitoring keyword rankings in Google for any website.

The most obvious choice for an SEO reporting dashboard is the Rank Tracker template. As it reports on positions, SERP features, competitors, tags, traffic share, and other keyword metrics.

This would be useful for sharing with SMBs that want to know more about SEO rankings and the specific performance of their keywords.

With so much SEO data available here, this usually covers most of an SMB’s reporting demands. And if you have any other custom data you can usually include it through Google Sheets on a custom dashboard.

Brand vs. non-brand traffic split

Here’s a clean-looking GLS template created by John Reinesch that does exactly that.

This template clearly shows brand vs. non-brand data over time using GSC data. If the SMB you’re working with wants to monitor brand activity closely, a separate brand and non-brand dashboard like the above could be a good option.

Common enterprise reporting challenges

Vast amounts of data

Complex data segmentation demands

Cross-team collaboration demands

What tools to use

Power BI

Power BI is a Microsoft tool for creating interactive dashboards from different data sources. It’s also useful for creating SEO reporting dashboards.

Here’s an example of a third-party SEO reporting dashboard created in Power BI.

By Coupler.io: Get the template here.

Power BI’s insights and rich visualization options help inform decision-making for enterprise businesses.

Here are the pros and cons of Power BI:

Pros

• Ability to connect to various data sources like Google Analytics, Search Console, rank tracking tools
• Powerful data visualization capabilities
• Easy sharing and collaboration features to distribute reports/dashboards
• Affordable pricing compared to some BI tools
• Good integration with Microsoft ecosystem (Excel, Azure, etc.)

Cons

• Limited native SEO data connectors may require additional tools or custom data prep
• A steep learning curve, especially for advanced analysis Performance, can degrade with very large datasets or complex visualizations
• The dashboard interface can appear cluttered or overwhelming for some users
• Time-consuming to process and transform data for optimal reporting

Tableau

I used Tableau with two different enterprise clients and found that, if set up properly, it’s one of the most powerful dashboarding tools for SEO dashboard reporting.

It’s a great choice if you work with an enterprise business that covers multiple territories, as I did a few years ago.

Here’s the overview page from an SEO reporting dashboard that reports over 20 territories.

It may look simple, but the data behind this was pulled from multiple sources, and it was just one of many parts of the dashboard.

If you’re thinking of using Tableau, here’s my opinion on its pros and cons:

Pros

• Powerful data visualization capabilities
• Range of integrations like Google Analytics and Google Sheets
• The drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to analyze and visualize SEO data without coding
• Collaboration features allow teams to share and distribute reports/dashboards easily
• Tableau Server or Tableau Online enables secure sharing and deployment within the enterprise
• Useful for multiple territory reporting – I’ve personally tested it with 20+ territories

Cons

• A steep learning curve for advanced analysis and calculations
• Limited native SEO data connectors may require additional tools or custom data prep
• Customization of visualizations can be limited compared to custom solutions

As both of these solutions don’t always cover everything you need, as an enterprise SEO, you may need more SEO-specific tools to provide extra details about their website’s performance—like Ahrefs.

Combining tools

Although Tableau and Power BI are powerful dashboard reporting tools, they can often be less SEO-specific—especially if they’ve been built internally by the enterprise business.

Combining tools can help enhance your SEO reporting by providing a second opinion. I preferred this option when working with enterprise brands because it allowed me to gain insights from multiple sources rather than relying on one platform as a single source of truth.

The clients I worked with had access to Tableau and platforms like GA360 and Adobe Analytics, but to make sense of it all, I often returned to SEO tools like Ahrefs to get a more detailed SEO perspective.

Here’s an example of what a custom reporting solution could look like at its most basic level. You can use this to supplement your existing SEO reporting dashboard.

Creating a dashboard like this allows you to compare and contrast first and third-party data and add any other data you have.

• First-party data – Like Google Search Console and Google Analytics
• 3rd-party data – Like Ahrefs or another SEO tool
• Custom data – Like Google Sheets or any other database

Final thoughts

Creating an SEO reporting dashboard is a good investment for businesses that want to track their SEO performance, automate SEO reporting, and identify areas for improvement in their SEO campaign.

However, creating a dashboard isn’t always easy if you don’t have any experience building one. That’s why Ahrefs’ Looker Studio Integration is the perfect starting point for most businesses. With just a few clicks, you can have a fully functioning SEO reporting dashboard without the headache of designing and building one from scratch.

Got questions? Let me know on LinkedIn.