Conductor 2025 State of SEO — 91% of digital experts say SEO positively impacted website performance

Claim: Conductor 2025 State of SEO (survey of 350 digital experts) — 91% of respondents reported that SEO positively impacted website performance and marketing goals in 2024, rising to 97% among the most mature programs.

Source: Conductor (SEO software vendor).

Caveat: Vendor — sells SEO platform. Incentive to portray SEO as valuable. Quarantined as directional.

Confidence: Single-source / Directional (the direction — owned digital matters — is solid; magnitudes are vendor).

Why this matters for Candid: Adoption evidence for owned-digital spend. Even with vendor incentive, the direction (mature SEO programs report higher returns) is plausible and consistent with Ahrefs May 2025 — only 1.74% of newly published pages reach top 10 within a year (vendor) showing the difficulty has risen alongside the perceived value.