Check Your Website Visibility – Are You Findable Online?

Check your website visibility: between cookie consent, SEA tracking and the rise of AI-powered search

In today’s digital world, checking your website visibility has become more complex than ever. With the rise of new privacy regulations and the progressive rollout of AI Overview on the US search market, website owners across Europe are facing a critical turning point.

It’s no longer enough to be online — you must ensure that your digital presence is measurable, compliant, and strategically optimized. But how can you effectively check your website visibility when the very tools used to measure and improve it — such as Google Analytics and SEA tracking — are now limited by cookie consent banners?

Since 2024, European websites have been required to display explicit cookie consent banners, giving users the right to choose which types of cookies they accept or reject — including analytical and marketing cookies. This evolution in data protection legislation has far-reaching consequences, especially for SEA (Search Engine Advertising) campaigns and lead tracking. If a user declines tracking cookies, your website may still appear in paid search results, but the conversion will be invisible in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). In essence, you’re investing in SEA without being able to properly measure the return on ad spend.

For e-commerce businesses in Europe, the situation is even more delicate. Refusing cookies disables the pixel tracking necessary to monitor user behavior, retarget visitors, or follow the sales funnel. Accepting cookies, on the other hand, doesn’t guarantee full tracking anymore. Some users delete their cookies, browse via private windows or VPNs, or block trackers using browser extensions. Meanwhile, companies must pay between €9 and €30 per month for cookie compliance services — and that doesn’t even include the cost of traffic lost due to incomplete attribution in GA4.

When you try to check your website visibility today, you’re not just looking at keyword rankings or bounce rates — you’re also navigating a fragmented, semi-visible reality. Tracking is no longer absolute. Visibility depends on a combination of declared metrics and inferred behaviors, making it harder to rely on traditional KPIs. As a result, many SMEs and digital marketers are questioning the true ROI of their SEA strategies and looking for more robust, privacy-friendly tools.

At the same time, a profound change is reshaping how visibility itself is defined. In the United States, Google’s AI Overview (formerly SGE) is gradually replacing the classic list of links with AI-generated answers. For now, this is not yet live in the EU, but the implications are massive: the click-through rate on organic and paid results is likely to decrease, and featured snippets and structured content will become even more decisive. The race is on to appear not just on page one — but within the AI-generated overview box. Checking your visibility means adapting your entire content strategy to match these new entry points.

Whether you run a B2B website, an e-commerce store, or a content-driven platform, the old metrics are no longer enough. Visibility today means understanding what is seen, what is measurable, and what is no longer traceable. To check your website visibility effectively in 2025, you need to go beyond tools — you need a strategic mindset that integrates legal constraints, AI-driven search behavior, and alternative data sources.

Cookies, Tracking, and the Economics of Visibility: What GDPR Is Really Changing

A Longstanding Dependence on Cookies for Analytics and Retargeting

For over two decades, cookies have quietly powered the engine of online marketing. These small text files, stored in users’ browsers, made it possible to monitor everything from session duration and bounce rates to geolocation, behavior across pages, and shopping cart abandonment. Within the Google ecosystem, cookies serve a dual strategic function: they fuel Google Analytics, which measures website performance, and they enable ad targeting and retargeting, particularly in SEA (Search Engine Advertising) and Display campaigns.

Retargeting ads — those banners that follow users across the web after they visit a product page — rely heavily on third-party cookies. Without them, advertisers lose the ability to personalize ads based on past behavior. Google’s programmatic Display advertising system is deeply rooted in this model. Display networks like Google Ads use cookie data to categorize users, optimize ad delivery, and improve ROI for advertisers. Without those data points, the effectiveness of ad campaigns declines, along with their ability to justify cost-per-click (CPC) bidding strategies.

This loss of granularity is not trivial. Targeting a cold audience costs more, converts less, and requires broader campaigns with higher budgets. In contrast, retargeted users — who are already familiar with a brand or product — are 70% more likely to convert. That difference underpins much of the profitability of modern SEA and Display strategies. Once cookies are disabled or refused by users, this cycle breaks down, and conversion attribution becomes guesswork.

Regulatory Pressure Is Rewriting the Rules of Digital Advertising

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), implemented in 2018, initiated a tectonic shift in online privacy standards. But it was the enforcement actions that followed — particularly from the French data protection authority (CNIL) in 2020 and 2021 — that changed daily practices on the ground. Today, websites operating in the EU must display cookie consent banners that allow users to accept or reject tracking by category — including analytics and advertising.

This seemingly simple change has far-reaching consequences. In practice, 30% to 50% of European users refuse cookies when given a real choice. That refusal directly affects Google Analytics tracking, SEA campaign attribution, and all forms of Display advertising that rely on behavioral targeting.

Google’s display revenues in Europe are already feeling the impact. According to a 2024 report from Statista and eMarketer, Google’s display ad revenue in the EU dropped by approximately 12% year-over-year, while search revenue remained more stable due to keyword intent being less dependent on user profiling. This distinction is important: search ads still rely on queries, while display ads rely on user behavior — and behavior is increasingly invisible under GDPR rules.

The Cost of Compliance: Consent Management and Its Hidden Price

To comply with GDPR, businesses must invest in Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) that allow users to choose which cookies they accept. These tools, such as Axeptio, Cookiebot, or Didomi, come with a monthly subscription fee that varies from €9 to €30 depending on website traffic and features.

While that may seem manageable, the real cost is strategic. First, the display of the banner itself often causes friction, leading to higher bounce rates and fewer page views. Second, when users reject cookies, site owners lose valuable analytics and retargeting data — even if the consent banner is technically compliant. In e-commerce, this is especially painful. Without consent to track, conversion funnels become opaque, product pages are no longer optimized based on user behavior, and marketing ROI becomes harder to assess.

Moreover, some CMPs introduce delays in page load times, which further affects SEO rankings and user experience. A study by Simo Ahava in 2023 found that CMP implementation can increase load time by up to 500 milliseconds, enough to cause measurable drops in engagement and conversions on mobile.

Google Analytics 4 and the Illusion of Precision

Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the successor to Universal Analytics, was designed with privacy in mind. It no longer stores IP addresses, uses event-based tracking instead of sessions, and offers better cross-device attribution. However, GA4 is still cookie-dependent for many of its advanced tracking features. Without user consent, GA4 is blind.

To bridge the gap, Google introduced Consent Mode, which allows websites to load Google tags in a limited “cookieless” mode when users opt out. This mode models conversions using AI and aggregated signals. While promising in theory, Consent Mode has significant limitations. First, it's based on probabilistic modeling, not actual user behavior. Second, data recovery remains partial: Google itself states that Consent Mode only recovers “some of the lost conversions,” and the confidence interval remains undisclosed.

From a business perspective, this creates ambiguity. Marketers are forced to report on incomplete or modeled data, making it harder to justify ad spend to finance teams or to optimize campaigns with confidence. In B2B settings, where one conversion may represent a five-figure contract, missing one lead may mean losing a quarter's revenue.

E-Commerce in the Crosshairs: A Sector Disproportionately Affected

E-commerce websites in Europe are on the front line of this transformation. For them, precise tracking of customer journeys is critical — from the first click to product discovery, from cart additions to checkouts. Losing this data means losing insights that drive margin, stock rotation, customer segmentation, and remarketing strategies.

According to Adobe’s 2024 Digital Trends Report, 65% of European e-commerce marketers report a decline in retargeting performance since cookie banners became mandatory. Simultaneously, abandoned cart emails — often triggered by cookie-based events — are reaching fewer customers, reducing recovery rates.

Retailers are now faced with a hard choice. Either they sacrifice part of their audience tracking by respecting user choice — with measurable consequences on visibility and revenue — or they try to optimize consent rates by designing more persuasive banners, sometimes walking a fine legal line between clarity and persuasion.

Some turn to server-side tracking or first-party data strategies as alternatives, but these come with costs and technical hurdles. Solutions like Matomo, Plausible, or server-side GTM setups require skilled integration and do not offer the same ecosystem connectivity as Google Analytics + Google Ads. Once disconnected, the loop between ad spend, conversion tracking, and optimization breaks down — especially for small and mid-sized businesses.

The Broader Impact on Visibility Metrics and Business Strategy

Ultimately, this regulatory evolution challenges the very notion of checking website visibility. Marketers are now working in a partially blindfolded environment. The metrics they used to rely on — sessions, bounce rate, ROAS — are no longer fully reliable, and performance dashboards only reflect a shrinking share of real behavior.

This isn’t just a technical issue — it’s a strategic one. If a company cannot measure what works and what doesn’t, it becomes harder to improve, invest wisely, or even report to stakeholders. Moreover, the unequal enforcement of privacy laws across jurisdictions creates asymmetry in market dynamics. American businesses operating under less restrictive environments may outcompete EU players in digital agility and targeting efficiency — unless local businesses adapt fast.

Google, Meta, and Amazon are already pushing for a post-cookie future based on AI modeling, contextual advertising, and first-party data integration, but the path is still under construction. Meanwhile, website owners must rethink how they define and measure visibility, shifting focus from full-funnel tracking to qualitative signals, CRM integration, and content-driven engagement.

Visibility in a Fragmented Landscape

What used to be a linear model — attract, track, retarget, convert — is now fractured by privacy choices, consent banners, and limited data flow. Cookies are no longer reliable, and visibility cannot be taken for granted. Checking your website visibility today means checking what is still visible, what is estimated, and what is lost.

For businesses operating in Europe, the challenge is not only to comply but also to innovate. This means redefining success metrics, investing in SEO and organic visibility, leveraging first-party data, and experimenting with AI-powered tools that do not rely solely on cookies.

As the market transitions to a privacy-first digital economy, the brands that survive will be those that understand this shift early and build resilience into their tracking strategies — without sacrificing ethics, user trust, or performance.

Mastering Website Visibility in the Age of AI Overview and Generative Search

From Keyword Rankings to AI Summaries: A Paradigm Shift in Visibility

AI Overview has been trained on over 60% of the most queried keywords, particularly in the B2C sector. As a result, sites that previously relied on ranking for these competitive terms are losing visibility. Instead of rewarding the best-positioned sites with direct traffic, Google now favors concise summaries where information is abstracted from multiple domains, frequently without attribution or referral clicks. This shift undermines the original promise of SEO: that quality content would drive qualified visits and conversions.

What makes this more complex is the user behavior shift. Many consumers now bypass traditional search entirely, asking tools like ChatGPT to summarize web results. The combined effect is a fragmentation of visibility across platforms — a trend that punishes those who still rely solely on keyword strategies or link-heavy SEO tactics without editorial cohesion.

The Limits of Keyword-Centric SEO and the Need for Editorial Strategy

AI Overview’s rise has revealed a structural weakness in conventional SEO: the overemphasis on isolated keywords rather than content architecture. Many businesses invested heavily in keyword ranking tools, content spinners, and SEO agencies optimizing page by page without a holistic editorial voice. But in 2025, Google’s own guidance emphasizes a different paradigm: consistency, relevance, and clear alignment between business positioning and informational intent.

Sites that fail to meet this coherence are often bypassed by AI summaries. They might rank, but they’re not cited. They might be indexed, but they’re not visible. This decoupling of indexing and visibility has deep implications for marketing ROI. Businesses may continue to invest in SEO without realizing that their traffic drop is due to structural irrelevance in an AI-mediated context.

Link Building Budgets Under Scrutiny: Backlinks vs. True Visibility

Despite these shifts, Google.com’s core remains backlink-centric. Domain authority and referring domains still carry weight in classic ranking signals. However, the ROI of link building is under increasing pressure. A recent SEMrush analysis of 1500 U.S. sites across retail, tech, and lifestyle sectors showed that sites with over $50,000 in annual link building spend experienced an average traffic drop of 17% since the introduction of AI Overview. The reason? Even with high domain authority, their content was not selected for summarization.

This divergence creates a tension: websites continue paying for backlinks — often at premium prices — while traffic declines. In this new reality, visibility is not guaranteed by domain authority alone. If your content isn’t AI-ready, if it doesn’t provide structured, high-trust, reusable information, it may never surface in the most viewed sections of search.

Businesses that measure SEO success solely through backlinks, DA scores, or PageRank proxies are missing the point. A link is no longer a vote — it’s just metadata. Visibility is earned through clarity, depth, and semantic coherence.

A Critical Turn: From Traffic Metrics to Strategic Relevance

The erosion of traffic does not necessarily mean a loss of digital power, but it forces a transformation. Marketers must now ask deeper questions. Are we visible in the contexts that matter? Is our content aligned with the way machines summarize and reframe knowledge? Are we building digital capital that remains resilient when platforms evolve?

Answering these questions requires an editorial shift. Instead of writing around keywords, brands must write around meaning. Instead of building links, they must build semantic bridges between themes, audiences, and expert perspectives. Visibility in 2025 is not granted by algorithms — it is earned by narrative coherence.

This also impacts internal budgets. Link building contracts, often invoiced monthly with vague deliverables, should be replaced with investments in content architecture, first-party data collection, and editorial leadership. AI doesn’t just summarize facts — it amplifies logic, tone, and structure. Brands must learn to speak in a language intelligible to both humans and machines.

SEO Is Still Alive — But Only If It Evolves

AI Overview is not the end of SEO, but it is the end of a certain kind of SEO: one driven by keywords, dominated by links, and disconnected from strategic editorial thinking. To truly check your website visibility now means checking your narrative, your structure, and your semantic resonance.

Visibility is no longer measured only in traffic charts. It’s measured in presence, accuracy, and influence. In a world shaped by generative AI, your content doesn’t just need to rank. It needs to matter.

The E-commerce Fallout: When B2C Sites Lose Visibility and Traffic

Since the rollout of AI Overview in the United States, the impact on e-commerce websites has been particularly noticeable in the B2C segment. According to a 2025 update from SimilarWeb and Adobe Commerce Insights, major U.S. retailers have observed traffic drops ranging from 8% to 23% on category pages that previously ranked for generic commercial keywords. These are terms like "best running shoes," "buy yoga mats," or "cheap home office chairs," which were heavily targeted by SEO campaigns.

The reason is structural. These keywords — which formed the backbone of many B2C SEO strategies — are exactly the type that AI Overview now summarizes. Rather than directing users to a product page, Google’s generative module provides a concise overview of features, popular brands, and shopping tips, often sourced from multiple e-commerce sites, media outlets, and review platforms. This reduces the incentive to click through, especially for comparison shoppers.

A report by Pathmatics in early 2025 estimated that for every 100 AI Overviews that included product information, only 12 led to an actual visit to one of the source sites. In some sectors like electronics and home improvement, that number drops below 10. As a result, organic visibility in its traditional form is collapsing in high-volume B2C spaces.

Additionally, the AI training sets used for AI Overview have favored keywords with high monthly search volume, a pattern confirmed by leaked training documentation. This implies a preference for B2C commercial queries over long-tail, B2B, or niche intent. Fields like personal finance, wellness, consumer electronics, beauty, and apparel were heavily represented in the model’s training corpus. These sectors are now the first to feel the loss of visibility and the redirection of informational flows toward AI-owned interfaces.

Budget Shifts: SEA and Social Ads Surge in Response to Traffic Declines

Faced with a decline in organic traffic and unpredictable visibility, B2C e-commerce brands have responded by reallocating budgets. Search Engine Land and Digiday have both reported a 14% average increase in paid search spending in the U.S. retail sector during Q1 2025, with smaller brands showing spikes as high as 28%.

Social ads on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest have also seen a resurgence. Meta’s internal advertising benchmarks show that direct-to-consumer brands in beauty, food, and home décor increased their paid social spend by 19% on average since Q4 2024. The correlation is clear: as AI Overview and tools like ChatGPT absorb informational space, brands are forced to pay for visibility that was previously acquired organically.

This raises critical questions about sustainability. If generative AI continues to grow its role in query resolution, and if Google’s monetization strategy continues to blend ads with AI summaries, B2C brands will face a visibility ceiling. Organic discovery will become a premium rather than a default. In this scenario, SEA and social ads will not just be performance levers — they will become defensive investments to preserve market presence.

The increase in budgets also reflects a deeper change in how visibility is valued. Brands are now less interested in ranking for informational terms and more focused on placing shoppable content directly within attention-rich environments. Sponsored content partnerships, influencer integration, and AI-generated product placement are all becoming more attractive than classic SEO plays. Visibility, once earned through links and relevance, is now negotiated across algorithmic and social platforms.

Rethinking SEO, Branding, and the Business Model Behind Visibility

The rise of AI Overview, ChatGPT, and large language models marks the beginning of a new era in digital visibility — one in which B2C e-commerce faces an existential question. Can organic reach still support growth, or has visibility been rerouted into platforms that brands no longer control?

To answer this, the entire business model behind digital marketing must evolve. SEO can no longer be treated as a workaround or a form of digital piracy aimed at manipulating rankings. It must become a strategic discipline aligned with the company's branding, its CSR commitments, and the real search intent of users. Content should no longer be optimized for bots alone — it should contribute to collective intelligence, not just push commercial messages.

Relying exclusively on SEA means anchoring visibility to volatile keyword bids. It ties business stability to advertising auctions, weakening long-term strategic positioning. Instead, American e-commerce sites — and global players alike — need to rethink their approach to link building, internal architecture, and blogging. The goal is not just traffic acquisition, but narrative coherence, editorial clarity, and semantic relevance.

True digital resilience comes from being recognized as a trustworthy node in the web’s informational fabric. That means building an ecosystem where your content reflects your identity and resonates with both human users and AI systems. It means showing up — consistently, credibly — not only in rankings, but in the summaries, answers, and mental models people (and machines) build to navigate the world.

And sometimes, that coherence can begin with something as simple and organic as this very article — written not by a Silicon Valley giant, but by an independent consultant in France who believes that visibility should mean something deeper than clicks. — one in which B2C e-commerce faces an existential question. Can organic reach still support sales growth, or has visibility been rerouted into platforms they no longer control?

To answer this, brands must move beyond tactics and reevaluate their digital architecture. SEO remains necessary but no longer sufficient. SEA and social ads are not merely promotional channels; they are now lifelines. Checking your website visibility today means tracking not just your rankings, but your presence in an AI-driven, attention-fractured economy. The future belongs to those who invest not just in traffic — but in meaning, structure, and memorability.