“In the beginning of the internet, Sergey Brin & Larry page created a search engine called Google which ranked websites according to relevance AND authority. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
Mostly, because it never seemed like Google chose YOUR site to be number one, all of these bothered WRONG sites were number one.
So, some ladies and gentlemen determined to stop adding gifs to their sites, joining web-rings, midi-files and visitor counters and tried to optimize their site for this new “Search Engine” . Their goal was to get their page to the top.
Some succeeded.
Flush with success they touted their success on their Mypace page, crowed in AOL chatrooms and on various forums and BBs. VERY shortly therafter, other site owners who kept asking for them to do the same for them actually started to offer MONEY for this OPTIMIZATION for SEARCH ENGINES.
But how much would it cost? How much would ranking number one actually earn the business? If they invested in SEO...would that money ever return?
THE LEGEND OF SEO ROI
There’s a reason why calculating the return on investment for optimizing your website for search is FAR more complicated than paid advertising. There’s a simple formula you can apply to your online advertising, and come up with a nice, comforting ROI percentage.
Take the revenue generated by your advertisement subtract the cost, divide that number by the original cost and multiply that by 100 to get a percentage.
Jeremy’s 2026 Refresh: Don’t Panic About Zero-Click SEO ROI
When I wrote this in 2022, the hard part of SEO ROI was that you couldn’t draw a clean line from a #1 ranking to a dollar the way you can with a paid ad. In 2026 that math got harder still, because the click itself is disappearing. Pew Research tracked 68,879 Google searches and found people clicked a traditional result in just 8% of visits when an AI Overview showed up, versus 15% without one — and they almost never click the links inside the summary. If your ROI model still depends entirely on sessions and clicks, the AI-overview era looks like a catastrophe. It isn’t. It’s a measurement problem dressed up as an existential one.
So here’s the towel I’d hand you: stop treating a click as the unit of value and start treating being cited as the answer as the asset. Brand searches, assisted conversions, and direct/branded traffic that spike after an AI engine quotes you are the new leading indicators — which is exactly the point Robert Spinrad and I dug into on Good SEO Is Good AI Visibility: the work that earns a citation in ChatGPT or an AI Overview is the same fundamentals work that used to earn a #1 ranking. The ROI is still real. You just have to measure the influence, not only the click.