Understand service performance
How users find your service
- Part of
- Product management collection
- Last reviewed
- 30 September 2026
Understanding how users find your service helps you improve access, reach and user journeys.
User behaviour, search technology and digital channels continue to evolve. As a product manager, it's your responsibility to make sure your team reviews how users find your service regularly, to make sure your measures reflect current behaviour.
Why it matters
Understanding how users find your service can help you answer questions such as:
- How are users arriving at the service?
- Which channels are most effective?
- Are users finding the service at the right point in their journey?
- Which content or campaigns are generating demand?
- Are changes in user behaviour affecting how users access information?
Measures should help teams understand and improve access to services rather than simply maximise traffic.
Traditional measures
Many teams already use measures that help them understand how users find and access services.
Examples include:
- organic search traffic
- referral traffic
- email traffic
- direct traffic
- campaign traffic
- search rankings
- search impressions
- click-through rates
- landing pages
- navigation paths
These measures provide valuable insight into user behaviour and can help explain changes in service demand or engagement.
How people find services is changing
Users increasingly access information through AI-assisted search experiences and answer engines as well as traditional search results.
Some teams are supplementing established measures with indicators such as:
- Generative AI (GenAI) impressions
- AI citations or references
- Share of Authority
- visibility within AI-generated responses
These measures can provide additional evidence about how users find information through emerging channels. Use them alongside established measures rather than in place of them.
Case study: Online Safety campaign
Example: using AI visibility measures alongside existing performance measures.
The DfE Online Safety team introduced Generative AI impressions, citations and Share of Authority alongside existing campaign and engagement measures to understand how users find Online Safety content through AI-assisted search experiences.
During the reporting period the team recorded:
- 10.9k Generative AI impressions
- 44.3k citations
- 11.3% Share of Authority
The team continued to monitor established measures such as sessions, engagement and search performance alongside these newer indicators.
The recommendation was to use AI visibility measures as supplementary strategic indicators rather than primary measures of success.
AI visibility measures can help teams understand changing patterns in how users find information, but they do not directly measure user success, policy outcomes or service quality.
Choosing measures
The measures you use should reflect the nature of your service.
| Service type | Measures you may use |
|---|---|
| Transactional services | Search traffic, referrals, navigation routes, completion journeys |
| Information services | Search visibility, page views, engagement, referrals, AI visibility measures |
| Campaign services | Reach, impressions, engagement, conversions, referrals, AI visibility measures |
Avoid common mistakes
Things to avoid include:
- treating visibility as a measure of success
- assuming more traffic always means better outcomes
- focusing on impressions without understanding user behaviour
- using AI visibility measures as direct measures of user success
- optimising for reach at the expense of user needs
For most services, outcomes, user success and service quality remain the most important indicators of performance.
Measures about how users find your service are most useful when they help explain changes in demand, engagement or outcomes.
Review your approach regularly
How users find services will continue to change.
New technologies, platforms and behaviours may create new routes into your service and reduce the importance of others.
Teams should regularly review whether their measures continue to reflect how users actually find and access information.
A useful framework should help teams answer:
- How do users find our service today?
- How is that changing?
- Which channels are most effective?
- What barriers prevent users finding us?
- What evidence supports our next decision?