Verification and Outcomes

When a decision is approved, its plan fixes what will be measured: the primary metric, such as clicks to the changed pages, the guardrails, the smallest effect that counts, the loss that would make it a rollback candidate, and the days of the first and final reads. Fixing it before the result is known means the method cannot be picked to suit the result.

The window starts the day after the change goes live. Depending on the kind of change, the final read comes 28 to 90 days later; a change aimed at AI answers is read over weekly checks instead of days.

Each outcome names its method, so you can see how strong the result can be.

A split test compares like with like at the same time, so a site-wide trend or a Google update moves both groups and cancels out. A method whose backtests have not passed shows at most Monitoring.

While a change is measured, its status reads Measuring, with the day of the window. An interim read is an estimate on the way: it is shown so a large loss can be caught early, and Successful, No Effect and Failed wait for the final read. If the data of a read is not complete yet, such as a day Search Console has not finished, the read waits for it.

What Else Happened lists the confounders found in the window, such as a Google update or another change on the same page, breaking ones first. Technical Checks confirm the change is live as approved and was recrawled by Google.

When another change landed on the same page in the window, the result is joint: it belongs to both decisions, says so, and neither has an Incremental figure of its own. Every outcome keeps all its reads; a later read never rewrites an earlier one.

An outcome page shows the search result first, then the AI search result where the change aimed at AI answers, then the business result: the revenue of the page, on two lines, never folded into one. The difference against the modeled baseline is incremental revenue, and it is labelled Incremental, apart from Known revenue from your store and from Modeled figures.

Open an outcome from its decision or its change. What This Teaches counts how the verified changes of the same type on the site have turned out so far.