"For more than a decade, sessions have been among the most relied-on metrics in digital marketing. They offered a simple and intuitive way to measure growth. More sessions meant more visibility. More visibility meant better SEO performance. For leadership teams, session growth became shorthand for success in organic search. That mental model is no longer reliable. AI-led search experiences are reshaping how users discover, consume and trust information."
"It indicates that a user reached your site and initiated an interaction. It does not indicate whether the content helped, confused or failed them altogether. In a click-based search world, that limitation was acceptable because ranking position and click-through rate acted as rough proxies for relevance. AI systems do not operate on proxies. They operate on outcomes. When AI models assess content quality, they are not evaluating how often a page is visited."
Sessions historically served as a simple, intuitive metric linking traffic volume to SEO success and leadership shorthand for organic search growth. AI-led search experiences increasingly summarize answers, infer intent and present conclusions directly, often without redirecting users to websites. As a result, traffic volume becomes an incomplete and sometimes misleading signal because sessions record arrival but not whether content resolved the user's task. AI systems assess outcomes and learn from user behavior, making engagement metrics a more relevant lens for evaluating search performance. Declining session counts may reflect fewer required clicks rather than diminished influence, so optimizing for value over volume reduces strategic risk.
Read at MarTech
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