AI-driven search is upending traditional information pathways and putting the heat on businesses and organizations facing a web traffic free-fall.
Survival instincts have companies scrambling to shift their web strategies — perhaps ending the days of the open internet as we know it.
After decades of pursuing web-optimization strategies that encouraged high-volume content generation, many businesses are now feeling that their content-marketing strategies might be backfiring.
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Cut out of the deal
The high-value, high-authority content that used to promise better page rankings on Google, Bing or Brave has now been used to train the respective artificial intelligence models (Gemini, ChatGPT, Anthropic, etc.).
Businesses are feeling cut out of the deal — and their web traffic is evidence that those feelings aren't misguided.
Following the release of Google's Search Generative Experience two years ago, websites saw their web traffic dip by as much as 56%, according to Search Engine Land, while others reported figures as high as 60%.
Meanwhile, the number of news-related searches on ChatGPT grew by 212% in the last 18 months, according to a Similarweb report.
Without the incentive of web clicks and ad revenue to drive content creation, the foundation of the web as a free and open entity is called into question.
The websites, organizations, news outlets and businesses that have been creating the content and information that users seek have less reason to open the gates of their content to the AI models that seem to exploit them.
Taking a new look at web strategies
Companies that have seen a collapse of web traffic are re-evaluating their web strategy. How do they survive in a world in which AI use is both increasing and seemingly driving away their traffic?
Two things can be true at once:
- To opt out of the AI economy entirely would be disastrous for businesses
- Companies that freely feed the AI beast might be contributing to their own demise
It's a Catch-22. If companies firewall themselves off from AI, they miss out on the opportunity for AI to be aware of them and serve up their content and services.
If they do nothing, these large language models (LLMs) can continue to cannibalize their expertise without the companies seeing any upside.
The tension of this dynamic is likely to alter the structure and fundamental economics of the internet as we know it.
Given what we know about the internet, about capitalism and about how some of the major companies are handling this fallout, there are three content futures for which companies can start to prepare.
1. The microtransaction/compensation model
According to a CNBC report, while media companies such as The New York Times, Axios and Vanity Fair have been able to establish financial partnerships with AI companies that allow them to train and utilize their reporting for users, such partnerships aren't being offered to every content creator on the internet.
It's why a company such as Cloudflare recently announced it would block AI crawlers until the company was fairly compensated — a move that could turn AI into a microtransaction-dominated space, allowing companies to be paid every time their content is fed to a user.
2. The walled-garden internet
Alternatively, companies could choose to shut everything down, killing the oxygen that feeds LLMs to force paid interaction.
It's not a new concept: Industry groups have long used gated materials as a sales tool for their memberships.
By offering a sample of their content for free, companies might still be able to train AI, while capturing a more cost-effective audience in the process.
3. A winner-takes-all AI landscape
Finally, there's a simple winner-takes-all future, in which the AI platforms eliminate all ambiguity from their responses and offer only specific partner sites to their users.
It's a pay-for-play model that favors larger companies, and it's not dissimilar to the dynamic that's taken over Google search results in recent years.
The key for businesses to understand is that the AI future is still very much unfolding around us.
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As disconcerting as a collapse in web traffic might be, click-through rates and web visitors are no longer the indicators of success they once were. In most cases, a smaller number of users make up a larger portion of successful transactions for businesses.
What businesses can do
The old user numbers are gone. They're never coming back — and there's very little that business owners can do about that.
Instead, businesses should focus on controlling the things they can control and avoid falling into the trap of believing that any one AI web solution will be the definite right one or the only one.
The best AI business plan for the future is one that is nimble and unafraid of trying, failing, adapting and trying again.
Here's what business owners can do:
- Test specific queries and prompts across each LLM monthly and see how your business ranks. Tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs and others can help with this.
- Adjust your content between each benchmark to see what is helping and hurting. Remember not to base too much on any one instance, since AI does not provide the same answer every time.
- If/when you rank well, don't assume you always will. As we've learned with SEO, it is constantly evolving. Your No. 1 rank today doesn't promise a No. 1 rank tomorrow.
- Share and repurpose your content. Put it in front of people where they are, parse it out and share it across various channels — partners, social media, directories, etc. If you're part of an association or a chamber of commerce, those can be solid channels to publish to as well.
To reach customers without relying on search results, you can double down on the channels you own — your website, your email list, text messaging, streaming, events and direct interaction with your customers.
You have the opportunity to build direct relationships at a greater level of scale than ever before. Don't give that up to AI or other intermediary channels.
Beware of trend waves and hype bubbles
AI, like everything else today, is susceptible to trend waves and hype bubbles. As an example, consider the role of the "prompt engineer" — the supposed AI-proof job that we were told everyone would be hiring for two years ago. Now, those roles are essentially gone, if they ever existed.
It's the same thing today: 82% of companies are expected to adopt agentic AI in the next few years, according to a report by the Capgemini Research Instiutute, but that doesn't mean that every website should be reoriented to agentic standards.
Understanding what a fully optimized AI-future might look like should give businesses testing frameworks to bounce ideas off of. They could test what works and what doesn't — without missing out on what's happening right now.
Nothing is certain — preparing for multiple directions and having contingency plans will help businesses succeed regardless of what's ahead.
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