In the Pit with Cody Schneider · 2025-12-29 · 4 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
41 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Cody Schneider argues that branded search volume is the primary metric B2B founders and marketers should optimize for in 2026, replacing the traditional focus on channels like SEO and paid search. He observes that while organic social media has become a major discovery channel, it's nearly impossible to measure ROI directly - so instead, he treats branded search as a trailing indicator of successful social-driven awareness. When prospects discover a product on social, their first instinct is to Google the brand name, making Google Search Console data the truest measure of whether marketing activities are driving real consideration. Schneider emphasizes that branded search creates defensibility: competitors can only access this audience by bidding on your brand in ads, establishing a sustainable moat. He demonstrates how to track this metric using Graph.com and AI-powered tools to extract branded impression data from Google Search Console, creating a simple KPI for internal reporting. This guidance is directly applicable to B2B SaaS founders evaluating marketing ROI and allocating resources across social, content, and paid channels.
Track branded search volume month-over-month using Google Search Console data as a trailing indicator. When prospects discover your product on social, they typically Google the brand name first, making branded search impressions the true measure of social-driven awareness and consideration.
Focus exclusively on increasing branded search volume over time. This metric is defensible against competitors (who must pay to bid on your brand), creates a sustainable moat, and directly reflects the effectiveness of all discovery channels including organic social.
Organic social ROI is extremely hard to quantify, while branded search provides concrete, measurable data in Google Search Console. Branded search also reveals that the activities you're doing on social are actually creating new organic search demand.
Use Google Search Console data to build a chart showing total impressions for queries containing your brand name. Cody demonstrates using Graph.com and AI tools to automatically extract and visualize this data as a reportable KPI.
Add a required 'How did you hear about us?' field to your signup form. This reveals a major gap between what analytics shows and actual discovery sources - most responses now indicate social media rather than traditional search or SEO channels.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
Contains one genuinely useful idea - using branded search as a trailing indicator for hard-to-measure organic social ROI - but it's stretched across a short episode with repetition and a how-to demo rather than multiple dense insights.
this transition from these old channels like search or SEO to these new channels like organic social, it's really hard to put an ROI number on organic social
this is the trailing indicator that the activities that we're doing on social is creating new organic search
The framing of branded search as a defensible moat and proxy for social discovery is a moderately fresh angle, though the underlying observation (social drives branded search) is increasingly common talk.
It's very hard for your competitors and the incumbents to take away the branded search that you've developed
this has quickly evolved over the last 6 months into being the only thing that I'm starting to care about
Solo monologue with no guest; the host is a practicing founder/marketer which lends some operator credibility, but there is no external expertise to assess.
For this demonstration, I'm just going to use Graph.com, which is my company
This is a tactic that I've used for years
Mentions concrete tactics (the 'how did you hear about us' field, Google Search Console, a chart-building demo) but offers no actual data, numbers, dollar figures, or named case results to support the claims.
put a required field within your signup form of how did you hear about us
build a chart showing total impressions over time for queries containing Graph
Pure solo monologue with no interviewer, no questions, no follow-ups, and no challenge to any claim; ends with subscribe prompts and self-promotion.
hopefully I've convinced you that this is the strategy that you need to be thinking about
subscribe now. It's what keeps the lights on here
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
Your “source of truth” for customer acquisition isn’t GA4. It’s what people tell you when they sign up - and right now, that story is changing fast. In this episode, we unpack a simple but brutally effective tactic: adding a required “How did you hear about us?” field to your signup form - and using that data to understand where real discovery is happening. The surprise? More and more B2B customers are saying social media , even when analytics tools claim otherwise. But here’s the deeper shift: organic social is hard to measure… unless you track the right trailing indicator. That indicator is branded search. You’ll learn how to use Google Search Console to track brand-name impressions over time, why it’s becoming the only KPI that matters for modern founder-led marketing, and how branded search creates a defensible moat competitors can’t easily steal. If you’re planning your marketing strategy for 2026, this is the measurement system you need.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
One of the easiest ways to understand how new customers are finding your software company is to just put a required field within your signup form of how did you hear about us? This is a tactic that I've used for years, and it's always shocking to me to look at this data versus the analytics data that we are seeing. And the big learning or the big shift that's happened in the last like year and a half that I've noticed within all the data that I've seen is people are putting the source of the discovery as being social media.
There's a massive contrast even like 3 years ago. And again, I work in the B2B space, so there's always a delay coming from what's happening in direct-to-consumer to B2B. But with this in mind, this transition from these old channels like search or SEO to these new channels like organic social, it's really hard to put an ROI number on organic social as a channel, whether that's founder-led marketing or you going and sponsoring creators. But how I'm personally starting to think about this as the measurement of success is the branded search that's happening over time.
So when people discover a new product on social, the first thing that they go do is they go and Google that product. And when they search that brand name, we can actually see that with within our Google Search Console data. And so for me, this is basically the trailing indicator for a new discovery that's occurred for the product. And this has quickly evolved over the last 6 months into being the only thing that I'm starting to care about - is branded search going up month over month for the company?
And again, just to hammer home this idea why this is so important and why I'm focusing on this is because it's the trailing indicator that the activities that we're doing on social is creating new organic search. There's also a very defensible thing for you to do. It's very hard for your competitors and the incumbents to take away the branded search that you've developed, that you've created, that you've cultivated over the last X amount of years. They're going to have to bid on that branding.
That's really the only way that they can take that from you. And so it creates this moat, this defensibility. And this is why it's a really good investment when you're thinking about how you're allocating your marketing resources, which is time, money, and mental energy. All right, so hopefully I've convinced you that this is the strategy that you need to be thinking about when you're coming into 2026.
It's basically, how can I increase organic searches for the brand name? But finally, what I want to show you is how to actually track this. You can actually see this data and you can show this within your analytics. So it can be a KPI that you're tracking and reporting on internally within the company that you're working at, or for the company that you're working on if you're a founder.
All right, so to track these branded searches over time, what we're going to do is build this chart that basically is taking your Google Search Console data and then it's extracting impressions that contain your brand name in any format. So this is super easy to do. For this demonstration, I'm just going to use Graph.com, which is my company.
Now we're going to rebuild this chart. So let's go do that real fast. So the first thing I'm going to do is just select the data source as the Google Search Console, and then I'm going to prompt, build a chart showing total impressions over time for queries containing Graph. I'm going to put that in quotations.
Now for whatever brand that you're working with, you can just do this variation. Now I'm gonna hit send message. So the agent's now working. It's basically just building that chart out in the background and writing the code that's necessary.
All right, it's a couple seconds later and that chart's now built. So I'm just going to click into that. That's That's how easy it is to create this reporting to track those impressions over time. And then your job, your goal is basically how do I increase those branded searches over time through whatever levers I have available to me?
And I hope you found this content valuable. If you're on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, subscribe now. It's what keeps the lights on here. And if you have questions about this, please comment below in the YouTube video or DM me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
I'd love to learn your thoughts or your questions around this. All right. That's it for today. It's just a short one.
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