CRO is no longer conversion rate optimisation the way we talked about it back in 2013, including in my interview with Search Engine Journal. The discipline has changed underneath the name.
The tactics have been commoditised
AI can do the mechanical part now. Connect a model to your data, give it a URL, point it at your competitors, and it will produce a genuinely decent report of CRO tactics in minutes. Work that used to justify a retainer is now close to free.
That is not a reason to panic, it is a reason to move up the stack. It is the same shift I described in what survives as AI takes agency work: the commodity output goes to the machine, the judgment stays human.
Why the conversion rate itself is now a weak metric
Conversion rate treats every order as equal. It is not. A store can raise conversion by discounting into unprofitability, by pushing low-margin products, or by attracting buyers who never return. The number goes up and the business gets worse.
The metrics that matter are revenue and profit per visitor, margin, and repeat rate. That is why the first question I ask is whether your conversion rate is even bad for your industry before anyone spends a penny trying to lift it.
It also does not help that many stores are optimising against numbers that are wrong to begin with, whether from client-side tracking gaps or ghost traffic inflating sessions.
From CRO expert to Chief Revenue Officer
The useful reframe is to stop being a conversion rate expert and start thinking like a chief revenue officer: own the whole path from spend to profit rather than one percentage on one page. We will be discussing exactly this on a panel at Meet Magento UK.
The underlying work does not disappear. Small compounding changes still win, the way ten changes took a rate from 0.2% to 1.2%, and testing still beats opinion. What changes is which number you hold yourself to.
If you want to measure your store on profit rather than a vanity percentage, book a call.