Let’s clear something up first about Search Visibility
When you see “1,000% growth” in marketing, your first instinct should be skepticism. Most of the time, it is either cherry-picked data or a one-off spike that never repeats.
AEO in 2026: Increase in Search Visibility Happened
This was neither. For Exact Housing, the increase in visibility came from fixing problems that had been ignored for years. No hacks. No trends. Just removing friction that was quietly killing performance.
The interesting part is that none of this was complicated. It was just uncomfortable work that most agencies avoid.
Google Was Not Seeing Most of the Site
This is the part business owners usually do not want to hear. Your content can be fine and still be invisible.
In this case, important pages were buried deep. Five clicks. Sometimes more. Internal links were inconsistent. Some pages were linked, some were not. Redirects went nowhere useful.
From Google’s side, the site was expensive to crawl.
Google does not keep crawling forever. It scans, evaluates effort versus value, and moves on. When that happens, pages simply do not get indexed properly.
- So we flattened the structure.
- Nothing fancy. No redesign drama.
We pulled key pages closer to the homepage. We removed paths that served no purpose. We made it easier for a bot to understand what actually mattered.
About two weeks later, indexed pages jumped by roughly 40 percent.
That alone told us how much was being ignored before.
Speed Was the Silent Problem No One wanted to Touch
- On the desktop, the site looked fine. On mobile, it felt slow.
- Not broken. Just slow enough to annoy people.
- Largest Contentful Paint was close to five seconds.
- That number kills trust. Users leave. Google notices. Rankings slide quietly over time.
Most agencies avoid fixing this because it is technical and time-consuming. It is easier to write another blog post. We stripped the site back.
- Heavy images were replaced.
- Scripts that did nothing useful were removed.
- The way pages loaded was rebuilt so content appeared immediately instead of inching in.
- LCP dropped to around 1.1 seconds.
That is when impressions started growing. Slowly at first. Then consistently. For months.
Nothing else changed during that period. Speed was the switch.
Chasing Big Keywords would have been a Mistake
There is always pressure to rank for large, obvious terms. They look good in reports. They rarely bring buyers. We ignored them.
Instead, we focused on combinations that reflected real intent. Property type plus location plus action. The kind of searches people make when they are actually considering a decision.
Individually, those keywords look small. Together, they add up fast.
Hundreds of small, intent-driven searches beat one massive, vague term every time.
We used the same logic earlier with Omaha Fares. Same result there, too. When content matches intent, SEO stops being a guessing game.
Authority was the Final Unlock
Even with structure and speed fixed, there was still a ceiling. That is Authority.
For Aqualine Saunas, competing nationally meant Google needed stronger trust signals. That does not come from cheap backlinks.
So we created material that other sites actually wanted to reference. Data. Analysis. Breakdowns based on real work.
- Over time, links stacked up. More than eleven thousand of them. Domain authority increased by about twenty-four percent.
- After that, everything moved faster.
- New pages ranked quicker. Existing pages climbed with less effort. Work started compounding instead of resetting every month.
This is the part people underestimate. Authority turns effort into leverage.
If SEO is “Not Working,” This is where to Look
Forget reports. Look at basics.
- Are important pages indexed or quietly excluded
- Does Google clearly understand what the business sells
- How fast the site loads on a real phone
- Whether internal links support revenue pages
- Whether visitors actually stay and engage
If your agency cannot answer those cleanly, they are guessing.
One Honest Conclusion
A 1,000% visibility increase does not come from creativity, vibes, or volume. It comes from removing friction that should not exist in the first place.
Most websites are not failing because of effort. They are failing because they are structurally weak.
At LeftCliq, we fix systems. Not slides. That is the reality.
The real question is simple.
Is your website helping people reach you, or quietly pushing them to someone else?