The #1 ranking doesn’t mean what it used to.
In fact, 57% of top organic results are above the fold on desktop, and only about 40% on smartphone.
The takeaway from a guy who works at a rank tracking company: Ranking alone is no longer enough.
Capper explored your brand position from a pixel height lens, SERP result sizeAnd SERP Share of Voiceand argued that SEOs need to reframe their channel into brand impressions, not just clicks.
Watch the webinar on demand now and learn what mattered.
Position 1 is often invisible. The median result is 635 pixels.
Reaching position 10 takes about five full screens of scrolling.
On a desktop, the median #1 organic result is about 635 pixels from the top of the page, compared to a typical laptop viewport of about 800 pixels.
Position two is already, most often, below the waterline.
The situation on mobile is worse. “Almost two-thirds of the time or three-fifths of the time, the number one organic result is not visible at all, not even the first line of text on a typical smartphone,” Capper said. “It’s pretty horrible, isn’t it?” »
Where did position 1 go: AI insights and compensation are above the fold
Once organic is abandoned, what replaces it depends entirely on intention.
On informational SERPs, AI previews alone consume almost a third of the visual space above the fold. Add Knowledge Graph and the figure jumps to around 41%, or two-fifths of what users see before scrolling.
Commercial SERPs are even more unbalanced. Paid business units take up more than 60% of space above the fold, with popular products exceeding two-thirds in some categories. Organic gets around 16%.
Vertical matters a lot. Watch on demand for learn what to focus on, by vertical.
Optimize for results screen size, not just ranking
Capper’s most cutting-edge tactical reframing: Stop prioritizing keywords only by rank or volume, and start prioritizing by size.
A simple organic result is approximately 120 pixels high. An organic listing with images, prices, and ratings (IPR) spans about 240 pixels, or double the visual footprint.
His Lord of the Rings analogy made him stay. When Gimli tells Legolas that taking down a tower-sized elephant “still only counts as one”, he is obviously wrong.
Same in organic: a Brex Flowers listing with comprehensive and rich results eclipses a simple Trustpilot link below. “Are you really going to say that this counts as the Trustpilot result? No, it’s huge.”
Action item: Audit your main business keywords For Eligibility for IPR and prioritize schema work based on pixel gain, not search volume.
Watch the webinar on demand now to access the audit.
Branded Search Now Surpasses Domain Authority as a Ranking Signal
Capper revived data from a presentation he gave nine years ago showing that branded search volume was a more powerful predictor of organic ranking than domain authority. Perform the same analysis today and the brand signal has only gotten stronger.
“Branding is getting stronger and stronger as a proxy for your ranking,” Capper said. “And again, how to build your brand using SEO? You are visible.”
This creates a flywheel that SEOs have underestimated for years: viewability builds brand recognition, brand searches increase, rankings improve, visibility increases. It’s not about abandoning authority measures, but about stopping treating brand as a vague result of “awareness” and starting treating it as a measurable element of organic performance.
Find out what you should be following nowin the on-demand webinar.
Q&A: Most useful questions from the webinar
Q: Any suggestions on how to sell visibility and pixels to senior leaders who are anchored in share of voice and ranking?
Tom replied: Pixels are an easier sell because you can show side-by-side SERPs where the traditional metric says you win but visual reality says you don’t. He recommends mixing pixels in how share of voice is calculated, because share of voice was always meant to be an analogue of viewability, and pixels measure it more honestly than ranking. The hardest part is repositioning SEO as a brand channel, but Tom’s shortcut works: “If you have other channels that are generating impressions, show that impression data, put it next to the impressions that you’re generating… SEO is an incredible impressions channel.”
Q: Should we skip all SERP optimization and go straight to agent optimization?
Tom replied: Not yet. Agents still need to decide which businesses to surface, and they do so using anchored LLMs that build on the SERPs underneath. “One way or another it comes back to the SERPs.” Additionally, Google Search still eclipses LLM interfaces in terms of traffic volume. He noted an unverified statistic he saw minutes before the webinar that AI Mode had reached about a million users, which is “incredibly low when you consider Google’s overall user base.” Agent-only futures could happen, but the underlying response APIs will still be SERPs in machine-readable form.
Q: What are some accessible ways to measure AEO/GEO visibility, since there is no equivalent to Search Console for LLMs?
Tom replied: Three things. First, track brand visibility at the prompt level, but don’t fall into the “I’m monitoring 10,000 keywords but only 50 prompts” trap. The variety of LLM responses requires a real sample size. Second, think in terms of topic volume and not prompt volume, because most specific prompts have a volume of one. Third, focus on mentions and recommendations rather than citations: “This is not a ranked follow…you are trying to be the tool, product, or brand that is mentioned and recommended in the answer. » He also suggested analyzing server logs to see which pages the LLM grounding bots are actually viewing.
Q: Is organic likely to continue to deteriorate, or will AI fatigue bring back traditional research?
Tom replied: It’s not getting better, but the pace may slow down. He cited Google I/O as evidence: Google held back from widely deploying AI mode, suggesting internal nervousness about user readiness. AI mode handles information queries reasonably, but struggles with navigation searches and specific result types like weather widgets. ChatGPT and AI Mode have also added more links over time as users still want to access websites. His honest take: “I don’t think we’re going back to where we were. I worry that ultimately people like to be asked the answer.”
Watch the full webinar
The complete sessionincluding Capper’s SERP comparisons, vertical level breakdowns and AI tracking framework, is available on request from the Search Engine Journal. Watch it for the data, stay for the budget pitch.
