---
name: honest-organic-forecast
description: Use when asked to forecast organic traffic or revenue for a budget round or a business case.
---

# Honest Organic Forecasting

The standard method - keyword volume times an assumed position-one CTR - produces numbers that are wrong by an order of magnitude and destroys trust when the year closes. Organic has a long, variable lag and depends on things outside your control. A defensible forecast is built from your own historical response to your own work, with the assumptions stated so they can be argued with.

## What you need first

- at least 13 months of your own organic history
- historical lag between publishing or fixing and measurable movement on this site
- the delivery capacity you are actually committing to

## Method

1. Establish the baseline as a trend line, not last year's number. Forecast the incremental effect on top of the baseline and show both lines separately.
2. Derive lag empirically from your own site: take past batches of published or optimised pages and measure weeks to peak. New-domain lag and established-domain lag differ enough that borrowed benchmarks are useless.
3. Model in three cases and label them by assumption, not optimism. Say "assumes 8 pages a month shipped and no template regression", not "best case".
4. Tie the forecast to delivery volume so it fails visibly if delivery slips. A forecast that stays true when nothing ships is not a forecast.
5. Apply a decay assumption to existing content. Flat performance is a choice that costs effort; forecasting the baseline as flat and free is the most common inflation in these models.
6. Write down the three assumptions most likely to break it and the date each becomes checkable, then diarise those check dates.

## What this produces

A three-case forecast with stated assumptions, an empirical lag curve, and dated checkpoints for revision.

## Where this goes wrong

- Using third-party search volume as the input - it is smoothed, rounded and often out by a factor of two or more for anything below a few thousand a month
- Forecasting a straight line from a period that contained a one-off spike such as a viral post or a competitor outage
- Refusing to give any number when pressed, which does not read as rigour and simply hands the forecast to someone with less information

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From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/honest-organic-forecast