For about ten years my job had one shape: get more traffic, and traffic meant Google. Keyword research, an article, links, a technical pass, repeat. It worked because there was a bargain underneath it. You publish something worth reading, Google borrows it to answer a query, and Google sends you the person. I never wrote that deal down, because nobody did. Then it stopped holding, and every client I had inherited the same problem at once. Gisele Navarro runs HouseFresh, an independent air-quality review site, and she is the first person I have interviewed who came out the other side of that with a measurement instead of a theory. She wrote it down the whole way through, and everything she has published since is still on the site under her name.
Ten years of my job assumed Google would keep its side
Here is the part that should bother you if you sell SEO. HouseFresh did everything the guidance asks for. They buy every unit they test. They run no ads and take no sponsorships. When a US-only product cannot be shipped to their UK office, they pay what the product costs to a charity the manufacturer picks rather than accept a free sample, because, in her words, “we want to be very clear that we have no connection.”
That is first-hand testing, disclosed methodology, real expertise, the whole checklist we have all been reciting to clients since E-E-A-T became a slide. It did not save them. Traffic started sliding in September 2023 and the March 2024 core update took it to nearly nothing. When she compared notes with other independent publishers, they were all losing to the same handful of sites regardless of subject:
“How can it be that I’m reviewing an air purifier, and you are reviewing a pair of trainers, and you are reviewing a Star Trek show, and we are all competing with Forbes?”
Google engaged, which I did not expect. A call with the search team first, then a day at the Googleplex with 19 or 20 other sites and a room of engineers, working on the question none of us can answer: “how can the robot figure out that this is a real human piece of content?” What she took away from it was not a fix. It was “it’s going to take a long time, it’s never going to come back to where it was.”
Some of it came back anyway. August 2024 for brand queries, March 2025 alongside the algorithmic side of site reputation abuse. Then AI Overviews arrived and split her metrics down the middle: “our impressions were through the roof and our clicks kept falling, even though the positions were holding.”
The measurement that made me rewrite a slide
Two minutes. That is how long a visitor sent by ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini stays on HouseFresh. A visitor sent by Reddit or YouTube stays six to eight and reads more than one page.
“people who come from ChatGPT, from Claude, from Gemini, they spend very little amount of time on the site – like around two minutes. And then people who come from Reddit, YouTube, they spend six to eight minutes on the site. And they will go to multiple pages.”
I had been repeating the industry line that AI referrals convert better because they arrive further down the funnel. She hears that line too, and her own data disagrees with it:
“I have seen the claims that actually traffic from ChatGPT is more engaged and it performs better and it stays longer – and it doesn’t match with what I see, comparing to something like Reddit or YouTube, or actual social networks, where I know the traffic coming from there is more likely to be a human being.”
Her read on why is the useful bit. The person is not looking. They already looked, somewhere you cannot see, and they came to confirm.
“Whereas I feel like the traffic we’re getting from LLMs is people that are coming maybe to check, but not necessarily to find. They already found, because the LLM told them.”
Hold the limits with the claim. One site, one vertical, her own analytics rather than a controlled test. I have also seen the argument that surfacing in an LLM makes somebody more likely to search your brand afterwards, which would land as Google brand traffic and never show up as an AI referral at all – I believe that is real, but I have not measured it myself and neither has she, so treat it as a hypothesis you would need to instrument. What is not in doubt is that she trusted her own numbers enough to rebuild the site around them: everything the reader needs inside the first two scrolls, everything the viewer needs inside the first three or four minutes of a HouseFresh video, depth still there for whoever wants it.
What she does instead of opening the analytics
She stopped looking. Not as a productivity trick – as self-preservation.
“And since then I like to not check at all. I just pay attention to our traffic. I don’t look at analytics, I’m not checking where we’re ranking.”
“If I see it again it’s going to just kill me. I don’t think I can do it twice, of going down to nothing.”
I have sat with founders in that exact state and told them to check the dashboard anyway, because you cannot manage what you cannot see. I think I was wrong about the emphasis. She did not stop measuring. She swapped the metric. Rank tracking told her what a third party thought of her; on-site behaviour by source tells her what actual people did after they arrived. One of those she can act on this week.
If you have a client who flinches at their own Search Console, the move is not to force them back into it. It is to give them a number that responds to their own work.
Owning the audience is not the same as owning the channel
Her subreddit exists because her website could not rank. That is the whole origin story, and she says it plainly: “when we started the subreddit, we did it because our website wasn’t ranking.” She looked at the results for her own queries, worked out which surfaces were still reachable – images, social posts, Reddit – tried Quora, dropped it, and started posting the critical reviews that were never going to rank on her own domain.
The dates line up on the public record. The subreddit she opened was created on 15 March 2024, days after the update that flattened them, and had 897 subscribers when I checked Reddit’s API on 9 September 2026.
Then a manufacturer tried to sue them over a review, their YouTube video got pulled on an automated counterfeit claim, and the page picked up spam links. Reaching out for advice put them in front of Linus Media Group, which turned into a video that did millions of views and put HouseFresh in front of an audience that still recommends them unprompted in other people’s subreddits.
None of which she mistakes for security:
“Right now they are all walled gardens. And tomorrow, from Reddit to YouTube to X, all of them can turn around similarly as Google did and drop us all. None of this is ours.”
That sentence is the correction I would make to my own last decade. The channel was never the asset. The relationship is, and the way she maintains it is unglamorous: every message answered, every morning, across every inbox they have. She calls it being “the human LLMs.”
They have also chosen not to block the AI crawlers, and the reason is not traffic. During a wildfire, while they were ranking nowhere, people bought units that did nothing for them. She would rather the models read good data than none: “no, I would rather they eat our information. It’s fine, but at least recommend something good.” I raised the culture around that on tape, the reason why AI slop leaves a fingerprint and why the backlash got so loud so fast. She was not interested in winning that argument. She was interested in whether the person shopping in an emergency ends up with the right filter.
What I would tell a client sitting where she was in March 2024
This is judgement, not a finding, and I will own it as mine. If you want it applied to your own site instead of read about, that is what a foundational consulting session is for.
- Change what you measure before you change what you publish. Engaged time by referrer source, not rank. It tells you which visits are worth designing for, and it is the same argument I make for measuring SEO by ROI instead of by rankings.
- Design the top of the page for the visitor who is only confirming. If two minutes is what you get, spend it.
- Go where your answers are already being asked for, under your own name. She opened a subreddit rather than posting into someone else’s, and it took a year and a half to matter.
- Assume every platform will do to you what Google did. Build the list, the habit and the name. Those are the only three you take with you.
The last thing she said about her plans was about getting air-quality workshops into schools, not about traffic at all. “We just have to make them happen instead of just waiting for them to happen, basically.” That is the posture, and it is the one I now recommend. Stop waiting for the algorithm to hand it back.
Find Gisele: her X account and her LinkedIn profile. HouseFresh, her author archive, the subreddit and the YouTube channel are all linked above.
The Unscripted SEO Podcast is brought to you by Ignitvio. Ignitvio studied 1,824 businesses and found 68% never respond to an inbound lead within 24 hours. See the work at Ignitvio.