By now, we are all aware that search engine optimization and the traffic it provides has dropped off the cliff. Many have seen a 50% or more decline in search volume this year. This is a scary proposition for many companies who have relied on search engine optimization for site traffic over the past decade.
AI is clearly the culprit here. The changes to Google and the migration from Google Search to Perplexity, ChatGPT and others essentially have changed the game. Here is a highly unpopular opinion…that traffic is gone and not ever coming back. But…the traffic that you do get can and should be more qualified than ever. Meaning that we need to change the way that we think about SEO and our content planning.
Here is the thing…the primary goal of any search by a consumer was to get an answer. Google/Bing/Yahoo! searches became popular because they were essentially our best option to get closer to those answers than ever before. These companies essentially set out to catalog the internet so that they could present to you the right places to go get those answers. But now, AI makes these tools “Answer Engines” not “Search Engines.” If the consumer get’s their answer without going to the site, they have no need to follow the links.
Yes, that means that your site traffic is gone. It also means that SEO has fundamentally changed and it is not coming back. I get into conversations all of the time about what people need to do to restore SEO, which is the wrong question to be asking. The right question is what can I do now to find qualified traffic and get it to my website.
Bottom line, we need a new way of thinking. Finding the highest searched keywords and peppering our content with that information is no longer the right way to manage your marketing. But, here are some actionable steps to take.
- Make sure that your site is viewable to AI Bots in your Robot.txt file. Many corporations, as a directive from either IT or Legal, made the change to not be seen by AI bots. Make sure that GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended are all set to ‘Allow’ in this file. Otherwise you’ll never get seen.
- Your content strategy should shift to Mid-Funnel and Low-Funnel activities rather than Top of Funnel. In short, stop educating the market on “what your business is” and start writing more about “why you are better at solving the problem” or specific buyer objections.
- Bing is now more important than ever. Yes, I said that. ChatGPT and Microsoft have a $13 BN relationship, what search results to you think that GPT is trained on?
- Get on lists and make sure that you are rated highly on ratings sites. A lot of highly qualified AI searches are going to be something like, give me a list of the top 10 [insert solution here]. AI is going to be pulling that information
- Be generous with your content. Under SEO rules, duplicate content used to penalize your results. Under SEO rules, if your content was pulled by another site, it created competition. But in AI search, it’s a huge benefit. Now your twice as likely to get your answer out there because it’s been said by more than you.
To me, the best part of marketing is that it is constantly evolving. While this is clearly a massive change and will create major changes to the SEO world, it is just one more evolution to the marketing world. You can recover, but make sure that you are solving for the right problem. Stop trying to regain position in your SEO and start skating to where the puck is going. Revamp your strategies now.