On "3 Predictions For 2027, And Why You Won’t Be Able To Check Them"

The decoupling thesis is real and overdue — Google's ranking surface is already visibly different from where traffic actually flows, and that gap will keep widening as AI answers and discovery feeds eat into traditional search. The uncomfortable part isn't the prediction itself; it's the admission that we won't have good data to verify it, which means SEO practitioners are flying blind on the very metrics that matter most. If you can't measure whether your work moves the needle on actual business outcomes, you're managing rank as a proxy for something increasingly disconnected from it. Start thinking about what you'll optimize for when the ranking data becomes noise.