Most SEO mistakes are not caused by bad SEOs. They are caused by organizations that do not have the systems in place to support them.
This is the argument Ash Nallawalla has built across five books and over 24 years of SEO experience for businesses in Australia. As a visibility governance consultant based in Melbourne, Ash has worked internally for some of Australia’s biggest brands and has seen first-hand what happens when no one above the SEO team understands what they do or why it matters.
In my opinion, I spoke to Ash about why he believes visibility needs to be addressed at the board level, how his maturity model works, and why the rise of AI-powered discovery makes this more urgent than ever.
“Governance is not an obstacle to speed. The lack of governance is.”
If no one owns it, everything falls apart
Most SEO mistakes are structural in nature. This means that it was not the team that failed, but the system. And the damage could be disproportionate to the cause. A governance gap of several weeks could lead to a months-long recovery. And governance is not a speed limit. However, governance is lacking.
Ash gave an example that shows how catastrophic a governance gap can be.
At one organization, he discovered 22 million pages in Google Search Console as “not currently indexed.” When Australia only has a population of 25 million, he knew something had gone seriously wrong.
This was because in the past someone internally decided that it was a good idea to create a page for each combination of facets.
“It was 10 trillion pages. And if you’ve never heard that number before, it’s a one followed by 18 zeros,” Ash explained. “We calculated that if Googlebot could read a thousand URLs per second, it would take 310 billion years to crawl them all.”
Despite this, the site still ranked well and received 5 million Googlebot visits daily. The problem was invisible to anyone above the SEO or product manager level.
“This place had no governance because no one above the SEO level or the product manager level recognized the problem. All they knew was that someone was doing SEO, and yes, we get a lot of traffic.”
This type of structural failure is why Ash wrote his first book, Accidental SEO Manager, in 2022. As he put it, “The reality is that most people start out with no background in SEO, and that includes the managers who handle enterprise SEO.”
A maturity model for visibility governance
Ash has since developed what is known as the Visibility Governance Maturity Model (VGMM), based on the Carnegie Mellon Capability Maturity Framework, which is used in software development. It maps governance across seven domains, SEO (including local and international), content, site performance, accessibility and AI governance, into five levels, expressed as a percentage score.
“The C-suite is learning that our visibility governance is at 80% or 20% or 30%, whatever it is, and that’s five levels.”
“Some of these questions are single points of failure. And if you say ‘not applicable’ to any of them, it doesn’t matter what your actual score is, you’re capped at level two.” Ash explained.
A single point of failure (SPOF) could be something as basic as questioning whether someone is responsible for robots.txt. In some companies, Ash says, they don’t even know what robots.txt is.
Selling governance to skeptics
When boards balk at the need for governance, Ash makes three arguments.
First, system testing: “If things work great this month, can we guarantee that things will work great next month and the month after that? And if not, then there’s a problem we need to investigate.”
Secondly, the rework costs. Fixing a visibility error after the fact is far more expensive than preventing it, especially if the error affects AI systems.
“If ChatGPT suddenly stops recommending your brand, you may not notice it. Your traffic is up. Your rankings are at the same level. It’s not effective, but your competitors are doing better than you.”
And third, for the skeptics who fear that governance slows things down: “With governance you move faster than without it, because you may have these big problems and it may take untold time to fix them.”
What to say to a board who has never heard of visibility governance
When Ash first addresses a panel, he recommends starting with money and then reframing SEO as infrastructure.
“Organic search visibility, traditional SEO, is an infrastructure. It’s not just a marketing effort. It’s an asset with a return.”
He describes AI-mediated discovery as a new category of risk that boards are already familiar with from other contexts. Brand visibility can disappear silently without triggering an alert, and traditional controls won’t detect this.
“If their paid costs are starting to go up, it’s not always because the search engine is charging more. It’s also because they need to advertise more. And that’s one of the first indications that there could be an external system that’s brewing and taking customers away, and that’s the AI-mediated search that their potential customers are starting to use and that’s taking them in other directions.”
So the second thing I tell you is that the visibility risk profile has changed over the last two years and your traditional controls don’t detect that.”
Ash shared a real-life example where his CIO once asked why Bing Chat was recommending competitors but not their own brand. The cause turned out to be a blocked Common Crawl Bot (CCBot), which Bing Chat had relied on during its learning phase. “We unblocked CCBot and within a few months it started recommending our brand.”
There is also a reputation dimension. When customers leave bad reviews on platforms the company doesn’t monitor, big language models learn from that feeling and quietly remove the brand from their recommendations.
“If you share responsibility without ownership, governance will fail.”
Ash recommends boards ask four questions:
- Who is responsible for visibility performance at a strategic level?
- Is this person older enough to have influence?
- Does visibility reporting reach the board in a way that differentiates between good performance today and structural soundness tomorrow?
- Do we treat AI-mediated visibility as a governance matter or as a technological novelty that someone in marketing is keeping an eye on?
The leadership test
Ash concluded with what he calls the leadership test, a challenge for any organization that relies on individual heroism rather than systems.
“If your SEO depends on individuals bucking the system, their skills will gradually disappear as they leave the system.”
He advocates internal wikis, documented insights, and hiring based on skills rather than cultural fit. The aim is to reduce dependence on individuals and to build structures that can withstand personnel changes.
“I tell boards: Put visibility on the agenda at every meeting, even if it’s just one sentence from the person in charge: ‘Visibility is fine’ or whatever they want to report, but it reminds the board at every meeting that SEO and now external visibility are both very important infrastructure matters.”
Visibility governance is not just for companies
Although governance is obviously a corporate concern, the principles apply across the board. Smaller companies are just as vulnerable to silent visibility erosion, perhaps even more so because they have fewer resources to detect or recover from it.
As AI systems transform the way brands are discovered, the organizations that view visibility as a governance matter rather than a marketing exercise will be those most likely to survive the change.
Watch the full interview with Ash Nallawalla here:
Many thanks to Ash Nallawalla for giving me his insights and being my guest with me in my opinion. For more information about the Visibility Governance Maturity Model, see the Managing SEO book series.
Additional resources:
This post was originally published on Shelley Edits.
Featured Image: Shelley Walsh/Search Engine Journal
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