What Happens When You Follow a Marketing Claim?
An email landed in my inbox with a case study and a result that immediately caught my attention:
21,392% more new keywords ranking.
The case study described how NP Digital helped Stratos Jet Charters recover from a Google algorithm update and prepare for another before it arrived. I wanted to know how they did it.
That question sent me down a path I wasn't expecting.
An Impressive Result
On September 28, 2026, I received a marketing email from NP Digital about its work with Stratos Jet Charters.
The email talked about how quickly search can change when Google rolls out an algorithm update and how businesses can be affected when they aren't prepared. Stratos Jet Charters was presented as an example.
NP Digital described studying the algorithm update, analyzing the site's performance, monitoring its competitors, and developing a plan around what the data revealed. The results included:
119% more page-one keywords
40% average traffic growth across top location pages
21,392% more new keywords ranking
That last number stopped me. 21,392% of what? I wasn't questioning whether the result happened.
I wanted to understand what happened. And there was another part of the story that interested me even more.
NP Digital said its work gave Stratos a three-month head start to prepare for an upcoming Google algorithm update while competitors struggled to adapt. What did they see coming?
Looking for the Algorithm Update
I opened the Stratos Jet Charters case study expecting to learn more about the Google algorithm update and the three-month head start. The case study explained that Stratos had already experienced a significant loss in organic traffic after an earlier algorithm update.
NP Digital then described monitoring algorithm updates, analyzing what was happening across the site, and paying attention to what competitors were doing. One observation stood out.
Some Stratos pages that had not been updated were improving, while some of the pages that had been updated were not. That gave the team something to investigate.
The case study says they learned that refreshing content and adding helpful information helped protect Stratos from subsequent algorithm updates. But I was still looking for the answer to my original question:
Which upcoming Google algorithm update had they prepared for three months in advance?
The case study didn't name it. So I went looking for it.
Then I Found the Date
As I searched for the Google algorithm update NP Digital had prepared Stratos for, I needed to establish when the work had taken place. That was when I discovered the Stratos Jet Charters case study had been published in 2022.
I stopped. The email that brought me to the case study had arrived on September 28, 2026. I had been reading the story as something presented to me today, while trying to connect it to the changes happening in search today.
Instead, I was following work documented roughly four years earlier. That didn't make the results less interesting. But it changed my question. Why was this particular case study being sent to me now?
And if it was being presented as evidence of what NP Digital could do for a business today, I wanted to see what had happened since.
What Would I Find Today?
I searched Google for Stratos Jet Charters. A sponsored Stratos result appeared, and I clicked it. That brought me to a landing page designed around one primary action: booking a private jet charter.
The page kept distractions to a minimum. There wasn't a traditional navigation menu pulling me toward other areas of the website. That made sense for a conversion-focused landing page. But I had a question.
Where is Stratos Jet Charters located? I couldn't readily find the answer on the page. And that small unanswered question changed my path. Instead of continuing toward the booking form, I went back to Google to find the answer.
That put me back on the search results page, where Stratos was no longer the only business in front of me.
The landing page had earned my click, but my search wasn't over.
One Question Reopened the Competition
I searched for Stratos Jet Charters to find the answer I hadn't been able to readily find on the landing page. Stratos Jet Charters is based in Orlando, Florida. I had found the answer to my question. That might have been the end of my search if the landing page had answered the question.
I continued looking through the search results and the information each company presented. As I scrolled back up the page, two sponsored results with images of jets in flight came back into view. I noticed that Mercury Jets appealed to me.
That made me stop and question my own reaction. Mercury Jets was positioned prominently at the top of the search results, but it also had something Stratos didn't: a thumbnail image showing a jet in flight.
Was I responding to Mercury because of its position, the image, or some combination of both?
I couldn't separate those influences from my own experience. But noticing my reaction made me look at Stratos differently. For a company competing for prominence in private jet charter, I would have liked to see that visual representation alongside its search result too. That didn't mean an image would have caused me to choose Stratos.
It meant that while I was comparing the businesses presented to me, the absence of one had become noticeable. And none of this comparison would have happened if I hadn't returned to Google looking for an answer to a question I couldn't readily find on the Stratos landing page.
One unanswered question had reopened the competition. The landing page had earned my click. It hadn't ended my search. Getting the click isn't the end of the search journey.
From the Landing Page to the Website
My search eventually brought me to the main Stratos Jet Charters website. This was different from the conversion-focused landing page I had entered through the sponsored result. Here, I had the normal navigation and could explore the business more freely.
By this point, I had already followed Stratos from a marketing email to a case study, from Google to a paid landing page, back to the search results, through its Business Profile, and finally to its main website. And I had another question.
The original NP Digital email had specifically described analyzing the site's performance as part of the work with Stratos. Website performance is something I regularly check with Chrome DevTools and Lighthouse.
So I pressed F12. I wanted to see how the Stratos website performed today.
The Score Wasn't the Finding
The first Lighthouse report on the Stratos homepage returned:
Performance: 75
Accessibility: 79
Best Practices: 73
SEO: 77
I ran it again in Incognito. The Performance score changed to 69, while Accessibility and SEO remained at 79 and 77. Later, Performance reached 92. That variation mattered. A Lighthouse score is a snapshot taken under a particular set of testing conditions. The changing Performance score wasn't enough for me to conclude that the website simply performed poorly.
So I looked underneath the scores. Lighthouse identified missing alternative text on images, links without descriptive text, an unnamed phone link, an uncrawlable link, image aspect-ratio issues, a missing web manifest, and other items worth investigating.
Some findings were more meaningful than others. Some could be influenced by third-party code or the conditions of the test. The score wasn't the finding. It was showing me where to look. And once I started looking, I found something Lighthouse hadn't told me.
Some of the website's underlying pieces appeared to have been there for quite a while.
Some Things Had Been Left Behind
Once Lighthouse gave me places to look, I started examining the website more closely. The site was clearly active. Advertising was running. Tracking tools were present. Content existed.
This wasn't a website that had simply been abandoned. But underneath that activity were signs that some pieces had been left behind.
In the site's Organization structured data, I found a link to Google+, a service Google shut down for consumers years ago. The same markup included older versions of other social links, and the browser console showed Meta Pixel unable to parse the JSON-LD it encountered.
Elsewhere, I found commented-out font code, a missing web manifest, repeated preload warnings, and other remnants that appeared to come from different stages of the website's life.
None of those things alone told me there was a larger business problem. Together, they raised a different question. When was the last time someone went back through the website to see what was still needed, what was still current, and what could be retired?
A website can continue operating while pieces underneath it quietly age. And a successful website isn't exempt from that. Success needs tending too.
A Technical Finding Became a Customer Question
One of the Lighthouse findings led me into the forms on the Stratos website. Rather than assuming there was a problem based on the audit alone, I tested them. The charter form worked. Its airport selectors opened, the calendars worked, and I could interact with the fields.
Then I opened Jet Membership. The popup invited me to “Learn more about how our private jet membership program works.” I tested that form too. Submitting it without entering information produced validation messages, so the form was responding as intended. But while testing it, something else caught my attention.
The popup invited me to “Learn more about how our private jet membership program works.” But it didn't introduce the membership. Before explaining what the service was, how it worked, or what a prospective customer would receive, Stratos asked for a first name, last name, email address, and phone number.
They were asking for the customer's credentials before introducing the service. That creates another possible path. A visitor who is curious about the membership may not want to provide their contact information simply to find out what it is. They may also hesitate because providing a phone number and email address can mean opening the door to follow-up calls and emails before they've decided whether the service even interests them.
If the visitor leaves the page instead, Stratos may never know why. There is no submitted form. There is no lead for the sales team to follow up with. There may only be a visitor who came looking for information, didn't find it, and continued looking elsewhere. That made me curious about the other private jet companies I had already encountered during my search. Did they offer jet memberships too? And if they did, did they introduce the service before asking the prospective customer for their information?
So I went looking.
What Did They Explain First?
I started with the other private jet companies I had encountered while searching for Stratos. I wasn't looking at their rankings this time. I wanted to know whether they offered something comparable to a jet membership and, if they did, what a prospective customer could learn before being asked for their contact information.
The approaches weren't identical. Some offered memberships or jet-card programs. Others operated differently. But where comparable programs were available, I could begin learning about them without first identifying myself. I could find information about how the program worked, what it included, the types of aircraft or travel it was designed around, and some of the benefits a prospective customer could evaluate before deciding whether to make contact.
That gave me something Stratos hadn't. Context before the contact form. The comparison wasn't about deciding which company had the better membership program. I didn't have enough information to make that judgment. What I could compare was the path each business gave a prospective customer for understanding what it offered.
And that brought me back to something from the original NP Digital case study. NP Digital had said it monitored Stratos's competitors as part of its work. I had now followed those competitors myself. But what had NP Digital found when it monitored them? I went back to the case study.
What Did They Find?
I returned to the NP Digital case study with a different question. NP Digital said it had monitored Stratos's competitors as part of its work. By now, I had seen how easily a prospective customer could move from Stratos back into the search results and begin comparing those competitors for themselves. So I wanted to know what NP Digital's competitive analysis had revealed.
Which competitors had they monitored? What were those competitors doing differently? What had the data shown? The case study didn't identify the competitors or provide the findings from that analysis. It did include a statement from Stratos CEO Joel Thomas describing competitors as later being hit hard by the algorithm update while Stratos was prepared.
But I couldn't find the competitor data behind that comparison. No names. No before-and-after rankings or visibility. No traffic figures. No examples of the pages that were affected. And still no identification of the Google algorithm update itself.
I had followed another part of the claim as far as the public evidence would take me. The case study told me that competitors had been monitored. It didn't show me what that monitoring found. And that brought me back to the number that had started this entire investigation:
21,392% more new keywords ranking.
21,392% of What?
The number that originally stopped me was still waiting for an answer. 21,392% more new keywords ranking. A percentage that large sounds extraordinary. But a percentage only tells part of the story. To understand the magnitude of the result, I needed to know where Stratos had started.
How many new keywords were ranking before the increase? How many were ranking afterward? Over what period was the change measured? Which pages produced the growth? And what did those additional rankings contribute to the business? I went back through the case study looking for the baseline behind the percentage.
I couldn't find it. The case study reported the 21,392% increase, along with 119% more page-one keywords and 40% average traffic growth across top location pages. But it didn't provide the underlying numbers I would need to reconstruct the 21,392% result. That doesn't mean the increase didn't happen.
It means I couldn't independently understand its scale from the information provided. And that distinction mattered. A result isn't the same thing as evidence of a result. The email had given me an impressive number.
Following it had taken me through the algorithm claim, the timeline, Stratos's search results, its landing page, its website, its customer path, and its competitors. But there was still one more website in this trail.
The one that had sent me down it in the first place.
Following the Trail Back to NP Digital
The original email had described several things NP Digital did for Stratos. It studied the algorithm update. It analyzed the site's performance. It monitored competitors. And it used the data to develop a plan. By this point, I had followed each of those ideas much farther than I expected when I opened the email.
Then I realized something. I had been examining the performance of the website featured in the case study. What about the website presenting the case study? So I opened Chrome DevTools on NP Digital's Stratos Jet Charters case study and ran Lighthouse. The first report returned:
Performance: 40
Accessibility: 90
Best Practices: 54
SEO: 92
I ran it again in Incognito. Performance came back at 36, Best Practices changed to 77, and SEO to 85. Just as I had with Stratos, I wasn't going to treat a Lighthouse score as the finding.
I wanted to know what was underneath it.
So I opened the Performance audit. And this time, the tunnel got considerably deeper.
The Website Was Carrying a Lot
The Performance audit gave me considerably more than a score. The page was carrying scripts and services from multiple sources, including Google Tag Manager, Chili Piper, Facebook, HubSpot, Microsoft Clarity, LinkedIn, Cookie-Script, Cloudflare, and Trustpilot.
Lighthouse also identified render-blocking resources, unused JavaScript and CSS, long main-thread tasks, image-delivery opportunities, and resources with inefficient cache lifetimes. The page transferred roughly 4.5 MB during the test. Lighthouse estimated about 673 KB of unused JavaScript and recorded 20 long tasks.
JavaScript execution occupied about 4.5 seconds of CPU time, while total main-thread work reached approximately 7.4 seconds. This wasn't one obvious thing I could point to and say, “There's the problem.” It was a collection of things. Some belonged to NP Digital's own site. Others came from third-party tools supporting analytics, advertising, scheduling, consent, chat, and other functions.
And many of those tools may have perfectly legitimate reasons for being there. The audit alone couldn't tell me which of those tools were necessary, which were producing value, or why each one had been added.
It raised questions instead. What was each tool doing? Was it still needed? Did it need to load on this particular page? Were different tools performing overlapping functions? How much of what I was seeing had accumulated as the website changed over time?
Those aren't questions a Lighthouse score can answer. The audit could show me what was loading and where performance opportunities existed. Understanding why all of it was there would require looking at the website as a business system.
I had gone into Lighthouse investigating website performance. What I found gave me another trail to follow. Was this complexity particular to an older case study page? Or would I find something similar on NP Digital's main website today? So I went to the homepage.
Was It Just the Case Study?
The Stratos case study was an older page. That gave me a reasonable question to test. Was the complexity I had found particular to that page? I opened the NP Digital homepage and ran Lighthouse there. The Performance score came back at 33. This time, the audit identified an estimated 3.8 seconds of render-blocking savings, about 707 KB of unused JavaScript, and approximately 7.9 seconds of main-thread work.
The page transferred roughly 5.9 MB during the test. The same broader collection of marketing and website tools appeared again, including Google Tag Manager, HubSpot, Microsoft Clarity, Facebook, Chili Piper, LinkedIn, Cookie-Script, Cloudflare, and Trustpilot.
But the homepage also had its own first-party weight. Lighthouse identified image-delivery opportunities, numerous stylesheets, unused CSS and JavaScript, and a page containing more than 1,600 DOM elements. Now I had found similar complexity on the current homepage.
That still didn't tell me that any particular tool shouldn't be there. And it didn't tell me whether the business value produced by those tools outweighed their effect on the page. It told me there was something worth understanding.
How had the website accumulated this much? What had been deliberately added because the business needed it? What was still being used? What might overlap with something else? And what might simply have remained as the website evolved?
I had started with a marketing email telling me that NP Digital had analyzed a client's site performance. Four years after the case study was published, that same statement had led me to analyze the performance of the website presenting it.
The trail had come all the way back to the source.
The Questions Changed as I Followed Them
I hadn't opened the email intending to investigate NP Digital or Stratos Jet Charters. I was interested in how NP Digital had achieved the results it presented. That was the starting point. But every answer seemed to create another question.
The 21,392% increase made me look for the baseline. The three-month head start made me look for the algorithm update. The date of the case study made me wonder why it was being presented to me in 2026. Searching for Stratos led me into its current customer journey.
One unanswered question on the landing page sent me back to Google and put its competitors in front of me again.
A Lighthouse finding led me into the forms. The Jet Membership form made me wonder what competitors told prospective customers before asking for their information.
The claim that NP Digital monitored competitors sent me back to the case study looking for what that analysis had found. And the statement that NP Digital analyzed website performance eventually sent me into NP Digital's own website.
None of that was the investigation I expected to conduct when I opened the email. I simply kept following the evidence. And somewhere along the way, the original question changed.
It was no longer just: How did they achieve 21,392% more new keywords ranking?
It had become: Can I follow the evidence from the claim to the result?
A Result Isn't the Same as Evidence of a Result
Nothing I found proved that the results reported in the case study didn't happen. That wasn't what I was trying to establish. I wanted to understand how they happened. There is a difference. A percentage tells me the size of a reported change. A baseline tells me what changed. A timeline tells me when it changed.
The pages, rankings, traffic, and competitor data could have provided the context behind the results. With that information, I could have seen where Stratos started, what changed, and how the reported increases were measured.
But the email and case study gave me the percentages without the underlying data. That became especially important because I hadn't discovered this case study while searching through NP Digital's archives.
It had been sent to me in a marketing email on September 28, 2026. The work may have been historical.
The decision to put it in front of me was current.
And once a historical success story is brought into a current conversation, the path it sends someone down becomes part of that conversation too.
I followed that path. It took me much farther than the percentage that started it.
Why Send Me This Now?
The subject line of the email read:
“40% more traffic even after an algorithm update”
That was the invitation into the story. The case study it led me to documented work published in 2022. The email arrived on September 28, 2026. That four-year distance became part of what I was investigating.
A historical case study can still demonstrate work a company has done and results it has achieved. But this wasn't simply an older case study sitting in an archive. It had been brought forward and presented to me in a current marketing email. So I wanted to understand why this particular story was relevant now.
What made the Stratos results the example NP Digital chose to put in front of businesses in 2026? I had opened the email because its subject line made me curious about what NP Digital had done to achieve those results.
Following that question had taken me through the case study, Stratos's current search presence, its website and customer path, its competitors, and eventually NP Digital's own website.
The case study was historical. The invitation to evaluate it was current. And that left me with a different question than the one I started with:
Why was this the evidence chosen to persuade me in 2026?