Level #1 doesn’t mean what it used to do.
In fact, 57% of organic position-one results stay above scrolling on a desktop, and about 40% do on a smartphone.
A takeaway from a guy who works at a position tracking company: position alone is no longer enough.
Capper went through your brand position from the lens of pixel pitch, SERP result size, and SERP share of voice, and pointed out that SEOs need to reframe their channel as product impressions, not just clicks.
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Position 1 is Often Invisible. Average Result Stays at 635 pixels.
Getting to position 10 takes about five full scrolling screens.
On a desktop, the average #1 organic result sits about 635 pixels from the top of the page, versus a laptop viewport of about 800 pixels.
The second position is already, often, under wraps.
The cell phone picture is terrible. “About two-thirds of the time or a third of the time, the first organic result is not visible at all, even the first line of text on a typical smartphone,” Capper said. “It’s very scary, isn’t it?”
Where the 1st Rank Goes: AI Overview & Paid Beyond the Wrap
If the organic is thrown down, what replaces it depends entirely on the purpose.
In informational SERPs, AI Overviews consume about a third of the visual space above the folds themselves. Add an infograph and the figure rises to about 41%, two-fifths of what users see before scrolling.
Commercial SERPs suffered the most. Premium shopping units take up more than 60% of the surface space, with Popular Products taking up two-thirds of the other categories. Organic gets about 16%.
Specifics are very important. Watch where you are needed to learn where to focus, vertically.
Adjust the Result Screen Size, Not Just the Level
Capper’s sharpest outline: stop prioritizing keywords by rank or volume alone, and start prioritizing by size.
The empty organic effect is 120 pixels tall. Creative listings with images, prices, and ratings (IPR) use about 240 pixels, which doubles the visual area.
The analogy of His Lord of the Rings made it stick. When Gimli tells Legolas that taking down an elephant the size of a tower “still counts as one,” he’s obviously wrong.
Similar to the organic: Brex Flowers list with rich full results reduces the empty Trustpilot link below it. “Are you really going to say that this counts as a Trustpilot result? No, this is huge.”
Object of action: Check your top selling keywords for IPR eligibility and prioritize schema activity by pixel gain, not search volume.
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Brand Search Now Overrides Domain Authorities as a Position Signal
Capper updated data from a presentation he gave nine years ago showing that branded search volume was a stronger predictor of organic ranking than Domain Authority. Run the same analysis today and the product signal is only strengthened.
“The product is getting stronger and stronger and stronger as a predictor of quality,” Capper said. “And again, how do you build your brand with SEO? It’s visible.”
That creates the flywheel SEOs have laid down for years: visibility builds brand recognition, keyword searches increase, ranking improves, and visibility builds. The point is not to discard authority metrics, but to stop treating productivity as a vague “awareness” result and start treating it as a measurable input into environmental performance.
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Q&A: Most Helpful Questions from the Webinar
Q: Any suggestions on how to sell visibility and pixels to top executives focused on voice distribution?
Tom answered: Pixels are easy to sell because you can show both sides of the SERPs where the common metric says you’re winning but the physical reality is you’re not. He recommends combining pixels with how to calculate voice sharing, since voice sharing should always be a visual analog, and pixels measure that more reliably than a standard. The hardest part is repositioning SEO as a product channel, but Tom’s shortcut works: “If you have other channels driving impressions, expose that impression data, put it next to the impressions you’re generating… SEO is an amazing impression channel.”
Q: Should we skip all SERP optimization and just go straight to agent optimization?
Tom replied: Not yet. Agents still have to decide which businesses to show up, and they do that using bottom-based LLMs that rely on SERPs underneath. “One way or another, this comes back to the SERPs.” On top of that, Google search still has little to do with LLM in terms of traffic volume. He noted an unconfirmed figure he saw minutes before the webinar that AI Mode had hit about 1 million users, “which is very low when you look at Google’s user base.” An agent-only future may be coming, but responsive APIs will still be machine-readable SERPs.
Q: What are the accessible ways to measure AEO/GEO visibility, since there is no equivalent to Search Console for LLMs?
Tom replied: Three things. First, track product visibility at a quick level, but don’t fall into the “I’m tracking 10,000 keywords but only 50 ads”. LLM response variability requires a true sample size. Second, think in terms of subject volume, not immediate volume, as most specific information has one volume. Third, focus on mentions and recommendations instead of quotes: “This is not tracking… you are trying to be the tool or product or brand mentioned and recommended within the response.” He also suggested server log analysis to see which pages the LLM grounding bots are actually hitting.
Q: Could organic continue to get worse, or will AI fatigue take back traditional search?
Tom replied: It’s not better yet, but the speed might be slower. He pointed to Google I/O as evidence: Google has held back on releasing AI Mode broadly, suggesting internal panic about user readiness. AI mode handles information queries reasonably well but struggles with navigational searches and certain types of results like weather widgets. Both ChatGPT and AI Mode have been adding more links over time, because users still want to access websites. His candid take: “I don’t think we’re going to go back to where we were. I’m afraid that eventually people like to be asked the answer.”
Watch the Full Webinar
The full session, including Capper’s SERP comparison, exact ranking breakdown, and AI tracking framework, is available on demand at Search Engine Journal. Watch it for the data, stay for the budget estimate.
