Hey Reader!

I've been thinking a lot about a situation that’s been coming up lately in conversations with clients and leads, and that’s diagnosis before investigation.

Here's what I mean. At some point you'll have a situation where someone on your team (or a client, or a stakeholder) sees a number that looks wrong and immediately wants to fix it. Traffic's down? Let's redesign the homepage. Conversions dropped? Must be the new checkout flow. Engagement rate tanked? Time to rewrite all the content.

Jumping to solutions before you understand the problem is how you end up wasting time and money on fixes that don't actually address what's happening. If analytics isn’t set up right, if you aren’t reporting on the right things, you might end up making decisions based on faulty assumptions instead of actual evidence.

For example, in my talk that I’m giving Wednesday for LocalU Global, I have an example of AI Overview traffic that converts horribly. Why? Not because AI Overview traffic is inherently bad, but because the types of searches that are resulting in visits to pages on adjacent topics. For example, people asking if they even need this service or what they can do instead of calling a professional. By digging in, we were able to come up with a plan to either optimize these pages for conversion or just accept that you need this content for SEO relevance and not worry about it.

This is why I'm such a fan of taking the time to actually test your hypotheses before committing to a course of action. Run the experiment. Check the statistical significance. Look at the data from multiple angles. The extra time you spend understanding what's really happening will save you exponentially more time later.

Dana DiTomaso Founder ​dana@kpplaybook.com​

How AI Mode Clicks Actually Show Up in Search Console

Jean-Christophe Chouinard published a detailed post and video on tracking AI Mode clicks in Google Search Console, and it’s a great resource to keep handy when you get these questions from clients or colleagues (because you will).

JC ran hundreds of queries through AI Mode, clicked on links in different positions, tested logged-in versus logged-out states, and even asked colleagues to run similar queries, all to figure out how Google is actually recording this data.

I really appreciated his details on how position data in AI Mode is calculated compared to what you might expect. Google counts every link in the AI response as a position, including their own links. So if you think you clicked on position 1, you might actually be seeing position 8 in your reports. 🤷

When "One Tag for Everything" Breaks Your Analytics

Eugenia Maksymova at Pro Analytics Academy published a step-by-step guide on unlinking combined Google Tags, and it's worth your time if you've ever wondered why Google even offers this as an option (I wish they didn’t).

Honestly on the surface, combined Google Tags seems like a useful idea. But in practice, what happens is that properties have different configurations, consent settings, or data needs. Eugenia walks through exactly how to diagnose whether combined tags are causing issues in your setup and how to unlink them without breaking everything.

ChatGPT for Marketers: What Actually Works

Britney Muller joined me for a webinar all about AI, and I've published a full recap of our conversation for anyone who missed it.

One point Britney made that really resonated with attendees is that the marketers who are getting the most value from AI tools aren't the ones trying to use AI for everything. They're the ones who took the time to figure out where AI actually fits in their workflow. They tested different approaches, paid attention to what worked, and built processes around specific use cases rather than trying to replace their entire job with prompts.

What We've Been Working On at Kick Point
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How We Migrated 200+ Franchise Sites Without Losing Traffic

Over on the new Kick Point website, we added a detailed case study on our work with Bin There Dump That. They’re a dumpster rental franchise with over 200 locations across the U.S. and Canada. This was one of the most complex site migrations we've ever tackled, and I wanted to share it because it's a perfect example of why the discovery phase matters so much.

We spent weeks mapping the situation. We built a full URL inventory covering around 6,000 unique URLs. We catalogued every redirect, chain, and piece of duplicate content. We conducted keyword research for both national and franchise-specific demand.

The result? Zero traffic drop after migration. I am so proud of the work our team did on this one.

​Read the full case study →​

I Was on Edge of the Web!

I recently joined the Edge of the Web podcast for Episode 778, where we talked about getting your analytics in shape for 2026 and my Analytics Maturity Model framework. If you're trying to figure out where your organization sits on the analytics maturity spectrum (and where to focus your energy next), this conversation might help.

​Listen to the episode →​

That's it for this edition of The Huddle. As always, if you have questions or want to share what you're working on, just hit reply!

Want more? You got it!