LSEG.com: what a redirect strategy did to a decade-flat search profile
A closer look at lseg.com's organic trajectory from 2020 through 2026: the flat baseline I inherited, the redirect-driven inflection in 2024, the post-peak consolidation, and a postscript on where the domain stands in AI search visibility today.
Coming into 2020, lseg.com's organic profile had been essentially flat for years. Traffic held in a narrow, low band through 2020 and 2021 with only small fluctuations. Keywords sat on a modest plateau, roughly 70K to 90K ranking terms, and actually dipped through 2022 before recovering slightly in 2023. Paid and branded traffic were both negligible. Real institutional authority, no compounding organic growth to show for it. That flat, multi-year line is the baseline the rest of this piece is measured against.
The 2024 inflection
In February 2021, following LSEG's acquisition of Refinitiv, I joined as SEO lead with a specific mandate: consolidate Refinitiv onto the LSEG domain without losing years of accumulated search equity. Every legacy URL needed a deliberate, accurate destination, or rankings and traffic would collapse in the transition. I led the redirect mapping for that consolidation.
The rollout landed in January 2024, and both charts below break from a decade of pattern at once. That's not organic drift. It's the signature of a structural event: a sudden, dated step change tied directly to the redirect rollout, not a gradual, content-driven climb.
Where it stands now
Traffic climbed several multiples above the 2020–2023 baseline within months, eventually peaking near 446.2K monthly visits in early-to-mid 2025. Keywords spiked even harder, from the roughly 70K–90K range up to a peak near 261K ranking terms in the same window. I left LSEG shortly after this peak, so what follows for 2025 and 2026 is shown for context, not as part of my engagement.
Source: SEMrush Domain Overview, lseg.com. Reconstructed to match the shape and timing of the underlying chart; exact monthly values are approximate. Windowed to Jan 2020 onward to reflect the period spanning my engagement and its aftermath.
Since the 2025 peak, traffic and keywords have diverged in a telling way: traffic pulled back only modestly and stabilized in a roughly 300K–400K band, currently 378.2K per month, up 1.7% recently. Keywords fell much further, down to 65.2K, down 4.6% and still trending down. Losing the majority of peak keyword volume while traffic holds near its elevated post-2024 level isn't a ranking collapse, it reads as consolidation: fewer keywords, held traffic, a healthier ratio of traffic per ranking term than the site has had at any point in this window.
Independent analysis, not part of my 2021–2024 engagement. AI Overviews didn't exist as a meaningful SERP feature when my work at LSEG concluded. Pulling current SEMrush data shows what that layer looks like on the domain today.
84.7% of lseg.com's Google positions are still traditional organic listings, with 8.6% now going to AI Overviews. In that same topic space, lseg.com is cited 1,200 times by AI answer engines, with yahoo.com (997) and youtube.com (850) close behind, a general news portal and a video platform each pulling near-equal citation share to LSEG itself. Owning the SERP and owning the answer aren't the same fight, and this is a gap that opened up after my time on the account.
Source: SEMrush Domain Overview and AI Search Visibility, lseg.com, pulled August 23, 2026. Independent analysis; not affiliated with or endorsed by LSEG.
The takeaway
A decade-flat organic profile, a redirect strategy that produced a 5x-plus traffic spike and a 3x-plus keyword spike within months, and a post-peak correction that reads as consolidation rather than decline: that's the arc my work covers. What's opened up since, the gap between owning the SERP and owning the AI-generated answer, is the next problem for whoever picks this up. It didn't exist when the original strategy was built, and it won't close on its own.
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