Jess Atkinson, Organic Director at Embryo, spoke at BrightonSEO earlier this month with her talk, “SERP Psychology: From WHAT people search to HOW they search”, in front of a very busy main stage audience.
For years, search marketers have focused on what audiences type into Google. Jess’s talk looked at what happens next: the few seconds after the results load, when people decide what to click, who to trust and what to ignore.
With more than 40 SERP features now competing for attention, and AI Overviews, social search and LLMs changing how people find brands, ranking first doesn’t guarantee being chosen anymore. Jess argued that marketers need to stop optimising only for the page people land on. Instead, they should optimise for the decision people make before they click.
At the centre of the talk was Embryo’s Decision Stack. It’s a five-step framework that explains how people subconsciously judge every result on a page:
- Attention: did I even see you?
- Relevance: do you look like what I’m after?
- Confidence: do I believe you?
- Effort: how much work is this going to be?
- Risk: what happens if you’re wrong?
Jess also explored the cognitive biases behind clicks, including anchoring, authority, urgency, social proof and choice overload. She looked at how brands like TRIP, Who Gives A Crap and Medicube have used relentless consistency to become the mental shortcut audiences reach for.
Jess has said: “I’ve become a little obsessed over the past few years around audience behaviour and how this impacts us as Organic marketers, so I’m excited to be able to dive deeper into this & hopefully provide some useful insights!”
Download the resource
Want to apply the Decision Stack to your own SERPs? Download Jess’s full SERP Psychology resource, including the five-step audit framework.
