Clicks don’t count (and they never did) jonoalderson.com

For most of its history, SEO measured the wrong layer.

Not deliberately. Simply because it was the only layer we could see.

Rankings, impressions, clicks, visits, authority scores. These became the discipline’s core metrics because the search interface exposed them. They moved when we changed things. They could be graphed, compared, and reported. They gave us something to optimise.

But they were never measures of competitiveness. They were measurements of an interface.