If you’re spending most of your time optimizing landing pages, forms, and checkout flows, you need to hear this: You’re missing out on a crucial new part of your job.
I don’t say this to be dramatic. I say it because I’ve been doing conversion optimization for over a decade, and what I’m seeing right now is the biggest shift in how our work needs to be done since I started.
Here’s the short version:
CRO used to mean optimizing what you owned and controlled. Landing pages, forms, checkout, emails.
You ran tests, improved conversion rates, reported results. That was the job.
What changed: Buying decisions have moved.
Your prospects are now making critical trust decisions in places you don’t own, can’t control, and probably aren’t watching. Reddit threads, ChatGPT answers, YouTube reviews, Slack communities, competitor comparison pages they find through search, Substack, Discord, WhatsApp, you name it.
Your website still needs to persuade and help prospects see the value you deliver. That hasn’t changed.
But your website has also become a validation and confirmation space for your prospects who are arriving with beliefs, expectations, and emotions they formed somewhere else.
If you’re not currently optimizing every space your prospects use to build trust for consistency and emotional resonance, not even the best experiments will increase your conversions.
Table of Contents
The funnel we’ve all been optimizing for years, no longer exists.
Optimization used to be mostly straightforward. Someone landed on your page, read the page, filled out a form and converted. Or they didn’t, so you ran an experiment.
The customer journey was linear: Awareness → Consideration → Decision
You optimized each step, measured the results and reported the work.
But that’s not how people buy anymore, and honestly, it hasn’t been for a while.
According to Google’s recent study, people don’t convert after a single interaction anymore. On average, buyers need 7 hours of engagement, across 11 touchpoints, on at least 4 different platforms before they feel confident enough to make a decision.
That means your prospects aren’t just visiting your website and converting, they’re watching videos, reading reviews, scrolling social, opening emails, asking AI tools, and comparing options across multiple environments.
Essentially, trust isn’t built in one place, it’s accumulated over time, across a distributed journey.
Building on that, Sparktoro recently analyzed search behavior across 41 major platforms and highlighted something many teams are still ignoring: Search happens everywhere.
It’s not just Google, Bing, or ChatGPT. While 80% of searches still happen on traditional engines, a meaningful share now happens on platforms like Amazon, YouTube, and social networks.
Bottom line: your prospects aren’t just going to your website or using Google, they’re building trust across an entire ecosystem.
Here’s what we’re seeing at Getuplift for all our clients: After someone discovers your brand (through an ad, an organic post, a recommendation, or an LLM answer) they leave and go to the places they actually trust and start asking:
- “Am I about to make a mistake?”
- “Will this make me look bad to my team?”
- “Will this actually work for someone like me?”
They search “[your brand] Reddit.”
They ask ChatGPT “Is [your product] worth it?”
…They find YouTube reviews. Read comparison threads in Slack communities. They’ll ask a friend who works in the same industry.
And then (maybe) they come back to your website to take the next steps.
And here’s the part that should make you pay even more attention: Everything those prospects find online (every review, Reddit comment, frustrated tweet, AI summary) gets aggregated into a single signal.
That signal is trust, telling everyone online if they can trust you or not. If they should buy from you or a competitor.
Your prospect is no longer getting your carefully crafted website message. They’re getting the internet’s verdict about you.
That trust is being determined in public. Not on your website. Not in your sales deck. In public. In places you don’t own.
Bottom line,
Trust is what drives the conversion. Without trust, there are no conversions.
Trust is the new conversion rate.
Trust, in this context, is the perceived probability that choosing you won’t end in regret. That’s it. That’s what every buyer is calculating (consciously or not) across every touchpoint they encounter.
And most of those touchpoints aren’t on your website.
And because trust is being built (or broken) off your website, then it’s time we expanded our role as optimizers and optimize beyond the website and our controlled assets.
If you’re only optimizing your website and the pages you own, you’re leaving the majority of the decision-making process untouched and room for conversions to go down.
Trust = the perceived probability that choosing you won’t end in regret.
Optimizing for the new customer journey on and off your website
The website still needs compelling headlines, strong value propositions, clear CTAs and a user experience that reduces friction. That work hasn’t gone away and it’s not going to.
But your website now has a second job it didn’t use to have: confirmation.
By the time someone lands on your site, they’ve often already formed an opinion. They’ve read reviews, asked an AI, scrolled through Reddit threads, watched competitors’ YouTube videos.
They arrive with beliefs, expectations and emotions already in play.
Your website still needs to persuade them. But it also needs to confirm what they’ve already learned.
And if those two jobs are pulling in different directions (if your website says one thing and their pre-existing beliefs say another) you lose.
Think about it in terms of two different moments in the customer journey:
Role 1 – The First Visit: Validation + Persuasion
They’re checking whether you’re even in the running. Pricing, features, integrations, offers. They’re reviewing their mental shopping list. Your job here is to make sure ALL the information they care about is visible, findable, and clear, AND to make a compelling case for why you’re the right choice.
The persuasion role is fully active here. If they can’t find what they need, if they don’t see themselves on the page and clearly see how you solve the particular challenge they’re facing, they’ll go somewhere else to find it.
Role 2 – The Return Visit: Confirmation + Conversion
They’ve been off-site doing research. Now they’re back. And what they need is for your website to confirm what they’ve already learned. The messaging has to align with what they’ve read and heard elsewhere. It has to feel right emotionally. It has to build safety and confidence. Your persuasion still matters here (you’re still making the case) but if your message contradicts what they picked up off-site, no amount of persuasion will overcome that dissonance.
If what your website says doesn’t match what the rest of the internet says about you, they don’t convert. It’s that simple. Your persuasion and their pre-existing beliefs have to pull in the same direction.
You can’t do either job if you don’t know what people showed up believing and feeling, and if you don’t know what’s already in their head.
If you don’t know what your prospects read on Reddit before they landed on your pricing page, you’re guessing at your messaging. If you don’t know what ChatGPT tells people when they ask about your category, you’re optimizing with a blindfold on. If you don’t know what emotions they’re carrying (the fears, the hopes, the skepticism) when they arrive, then every A/B test you run is testing surface-level details while the real conversion decision was shaped somewhere else entirely.
This is why so many optimization programs feel like they’ve plateaued. The tests keep running but the wins keep getting smaller.
And this is why emotional targeting has to come first. Not your A/B testing program. Or your new AI tool.
The emotional targeting foundation – understanding how your customers make decisions, what they feel during the process, and what they need to believe before they’ll act – is the only thing that lets you do both jobs.
Persuade AND confirm. On your website and off of it.
Understanding how your customers make decisions, what they feel during the process, and what they need to believe before they’ll act – is the only thing that lets you do both jobs.
Emotional targeting is the only foundation that works everywhere
Right now, most teams are trying to solve a conversion problem with more. More content. More channels. More SEO. More A/B tests. More campaigns. More AI tools. More, more, more.
But the problem isn’t quantity. In fact, doing more, producing more is making it worse.
It feels like work, it feels productive, but it’s just creating noise and blocking you from doing the job you actually need to do.
The real problem is trust.
Here’s what I’m seeing most teams do (and I mean smart teams, teams with good people and real budgets). Everyone wants to start at the top:
#1 Channels & tactics
Social, paid media, new tools, new AI tactics, new channels. That’s the fun stuff. The visible stuff. The stuff that feels like progress because you can point to it in a meeting and say “we’re doing things.” But this is also where most teams lose. Because without a meaningful strategy underneath, this layer just creates noise and more work.
#2 Metrics & attribution
We think these create clarity. Right now, marketers are all collecting so much data we don’t really know what to do with it. In fact, according to Gartner’s 2025 Marketing Data Confidence Survey – 82% of marketers have no confidence in their ability to analyze or use their data. Being data-driven has become the go-to advice, but it isn’t actually what’s happening. We’re collecting data like pokemons, but have no idea how to use it.
#3 CRO, SEO, email, content
Then you have conversion optimization, SEO foundations, email marketing and content marketing. Additional execution layers that without a good foundation, just keep you on the hamster wheel – running tests, publishing content, sending emails, with no clear signal about what’s actually working and why.
#4 Audits
A good audit is supposed to help you surface the real problems and challenges you need to solve in your customer journey. However, most audits remain generic and too tactical. Heuristic reviews, UX audits, analytics deep-dives, all focused on elements of a page, not the people you’re selling to and how they buy. These audits tell you what is broken and where it’s broken. But they don’t tell you why. And the why is the only thing that leads to a fix that lasts.
None of the above will give you the results you need. You HAVE to start at the bottom and build your way up.
#5 The Emotional Targeting foundation
Strategy before tactics.
Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, there’s a foundation that everything else depends on, and that foundation is emotional targeting. Here’s what I mean by emotional targeting, for anyone hearing this term for the first time:
Emotional targeting is a research-first methodology for understanding how your customers actually make decisions — not what they say they want, but what they feel when they’re deciding. It uncovers the fears, desires, hesitations and beliefs that drive (or block) buying behavior. It’s the difference between knowing someone needs project management software and knowing they’re terrified of looking incompetent in front of their team if they pick the wrong one.
Once you understand this foundation (how people buy, how they make decisions, what emotions drive those decisions) then you can optimize everything else. Then you know what to say, to whom, when to say it, AND where to say it. Your persuasion gets sharper because it’s built on real insight. Your confirmation gets easier because you know what people expect to find.
Without this foundation, you’re not doing CRO… you’re doing CR-hope.
Without emotional targeting: Your messaging is generic → your content doesn’t resonate → your reviews don’t reinforce the right narrative → you sound like everyone else → you don’t stand out → you don’t convert.
With emotional targeting, you can: differentiate from every competitor in your space, survive in a market that’s getting noisier by the day, and avoid blending into the wall of AI-generated content that all sounds the same.
THIS is how you optimize everywhere.
And the teams that start working on this now, will pull ahead faster and own their market.
Here’s an example of how this works in the real world:
One of our clients, one of the largest moving companies in the U.S. was doing everything “right.” They were running constant A/B tests, optimizing landing pages, and investing heavily in campaigns just like their competitors.
However, we started seeing a shift in their market. The biggest competitors had all adjusted their positioning to focus on pricing. Specifically, being the most cost-saving option. Most landing pages, ads, and campaigns were focused on lower prices, special deals, and getting a quote quickly and easily.
On the surface, it felt like the obvious move for our client too… but our research painted a different picture.
People cared about price… but what they really worried about was whether their entire life and all their possessions would arrive in one piece. They were concerned about broken furniture, damaged items, and not being able to trust the people handling everything they own.
So instead of joining the competition for the cheapest moving services, we decided to double down on our client’s premium offering: We doubled down on trust, safety, and confidence.
We highlighted their white-glove service, full value protection and leaned heavily into proof: decades of experience, millions of moves and real human support.
The result was 14% lift in conversions.
This is what emotional targeting does: it moves you from optimizing what’s visible to addressing what actually drives decisions, everywhere (on and off the website).
How to actually do this: A framework for optimizing everywhere
To get started, here’s what we’ve seen work for our clients:
Step 1: Audit your narrative outside your website
Before you optimize anything, you need to know what people believe about you without ever visiting your site. This is usually the moment when teams realize how big the gap is.
Go search for yourself the way your prospects do:
- Ask ChatGPT: “Is [your brand] worth it?”
- Search Google: “[your brand] Reddit”
- Search YouTube: “[your brand] review”
What comes up? Is it accurate? Is it flattering? Is it even about you or is there nothing there at all? Both are challenges that need solving.
The question you’re trying to answer is:
What would someone believe about us without ever visiting our site?
If the answer makes you nervous, good. Now you know where the work begins.
Step 2: Map your trust ecosystem
Find out where your buyers actually go to make decisions. Where do they ask questions? Where do they validate their choices? Where do they share their experiences after buying?
This is different for every industry and every product. For some, it’s Reddit and G2. For others, it’s Slack communities and YouTube. For B2B enterprise, it might be analyst reports and peer conversations at events.
Identify the communities, influencers and platforms. This is your trust ecosystem, and it’s where your conversion rate is actually being determined.
Step 3: Do emotional targeting research
This is the foundational step. And it’s often the step most teams skip because it feels slow compared to running another test. Surveys, interviews, review mining, social listening – the goal is to uncover the emotional drivers behind buying decisions.
But this isn’t just “talking to customers.” We analyze patterns across multiple sources: customer interviews, open-text survey responses, support tickets, sales call transcripts, reviews, and conversations happening in places like Reddit or G2. The goal is to identify how people actually think and feel and the language they use, the fears they repeat, the objections they don’t always say out loud.
What this reveals (and what most teams miss) is that the obvious problem isn’t the real problem.
Pricing isn’t the real objection. Features aren’t the real differentiator. Underneath, there are emotional drivers: Fear of failure, risk, wasted time, looking bad to others, making the wrong decision. And until you understand those, you’re optimizing based on assumptions instead of reality.
This is the difference between a tactical optimization program… and a strategic one.
Want to learn more about Emotional Targeting? Grab my book and its workbook here
Step 4: Align your on-site experience
Now (and only now) you optimize your website and additional assets.
Your website should help people find what they need. Meet them where they are emotionally. Confirm they can trust you. And persuade them that you’re the right choice – using language that aligns with what they already believe, not language that contradicts it.
Lead with value, solve real pains, make conversion easy, help users find information without friction.
Include the information they actually care about.
Armed with all your research, you know the fears you need to address, the beliefs you need to confirm, and the exact objections the internet already put in their head. So your messaging, UX, social proof, CTAs are all stronger because they’re informed.
Step 5: Show up where decisions are happening
As mentioned, our optimization scope has expanded. You have to be present where trust is being built.
Your website, yes. But also LLM outputs, reviews, communities, social content and even sales conversations. Show up where buying decisions are happening and participate. Reduce fear. Answer questions. Shape perception. Engage your audience on social. Participate in community discussions.
Yes, that means showing up on Reddit too (even if it scares you).
Your goal across all of these touchpoints is consistency and emotional resonance.
What your website says and what the internet says about you need to align and if what the web is saying about you isn’t positive, you need to optimize and shape that.
Step 6: Own your narrative
If you don’t control your narrative, the internet will.
Assign someone (a real person, not a tool) to monitor your trust narrative monthly. Reviews. Community conversations. LLM outputs.
What are people saying about you in the places where trust is built? Is it accurate? Is it aligned with your messaging? Where are the gaps?
This should be a permanent part of your optimization program (not a one-time project). Because the customer journey doesn’t stop moving, and the internet doesn’t stop talking.
The future of CRO
CRO isn’t dead. It hasn’t been replaced by AI. And it hasn’t been made irrelevant by all the changes in how people buy.
If anything, your role is BIGGER than it’s ever been.
But it’s different. CRO now means optimizing on-site and off-site. It means understanding the full customer journey, not just the part that you own. It means going deeper into customer research so every touchpoint, every channel, every message is built on the same foundation.
It’s harder… I won’t pretend it’s not.
But if you do it right, if you start with the emotional targeting foundation and build everything from there, you don’t just optimize your website…you optimize everything.
Your content will resonate because it’s built on emotional insights. Your ads work because they speak to your customers’ fears and desires. Your website converts because it both persuades and confirms. Your community presence builds trust instead of eroding it.
Strategy over tools. Emotion over everything
The best teams I’m working with right now aren’t rushing to adopt every new AI tool. They’re stopping.
They’re adjusting their strategy, not their tools. Because the strategy is what matters. Your customers are what matters. That’s where emotional targeting comes in.
And when you do emotional targeting, you can optimize everywhere.
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