AI Has Killed Website Traffic: The NEW Way To Drive Leads

If your website's traffic isn't where you want it to be, you're not alone. The SEO world is completely changing, especially with AI, and thankfully it's changing in a way that actually gives you a stronger advantage than you might realize. So today I'm going to show you steps to not just survive but level up your website traffic in a world of changing search and marketing trends. I've been in the SEO space for 15+ years helping small enterprise companies grow their traffic, and I can tell you this is unprecedented time with a lot of change still to come. Google usage is continuing to increase over time, but the reality is you won't find a single SEO expert that will say that site traffic is skyrocketing. And I talked to a lot of SEO founders, I talked to a lot of SEO experts out there. All of our traffic is either flatlined or it is going down. When I think about SEO 15 years ago, SEO was very much organic reach. Instagram back in the day, YouTube, all those things— SEO was the only game in town. And here's the thing, the reason I want you to watch this video is I want you to understand that SEO is not going to die overnight. Website traffic is going down, sure. I'm going to show you how to win and how to make the most of this, because while everyone is giving up, they're running for the doors, you don't have to do that if you watch this to the very end. So let's start first by talking about keyword research strategies. It no longer makes sense to target the highest volume keywords in your niche. That used to be the game in town. Let's find all the high volume keywords that seem to be high intent, they're relevant, let's go after all those, right? That's not the game anymore. What matters more than anything now is topical authority. And the way I think about this is when I think about looking at my YouTube channel, for example. If I start talking about too many different things, YouTube starts to ding me for that. It's no different than your website. You have to focus on one topic first. It's not just focusing on keywords. That's how you're gonna win. And another thing that you could do is programmatic SEO. And programmatic SEO is a great way to target high-intent keywords and provide a stronger user experience to searchers on your site. Let me give you an example of this. So when you think about visiting Expedia, they have millions of these pages, fun things to do in Japan, fun things to do in Rome. TripAdvisor does the same thing. They have so many of these high-intent pages. That they create, and that's why they rank for tens of millions, hundreds of millions of keywords, and that's why they're so big as companies, right? PSEO, programmatic SEO, is still a great way, and now it's available to people like you and me. I've been talking about this for the last couple years. What you're going to have to do is you are going to have to design the templates for these pages, and then you have to figure out what you want for each section on these pages. I'll give you an example. For our website, we have these programmatic SEO pages or programmatic CRO service pages, and we'll have AI scan the pages and figure out what content we want to recommend, which client logos we want to put on there, and how we want to adjust the call to action. And then that directly affects our conversion rates. PSEO is something that you can use and you don't have to build millions of pages or even thousands of pages. Even if you do a couple hundred or so, it should help your business. You should generate more conversions that way. So as I mentioned earlier, AI has made it way easier to move faster with SEO. We've also built products ourselves. So we have one called ClickFlow. And what ClickFlow does is it will help you do a lot of the rote SEO tasks that you don't like doing. So for example, finding internal links, hundreds of internal links. Nobody wants to do that, right? It takes forever to find internal links. What about consolidating content? What about updating content? Those are all that work in SEO today. Well, what if you can create an agentic workflow that allows you to do that, or you can create higher quality content at scale? What I mentioned earlier was the trend of clicks that are going down over time on your website. So again, I want to reinforce that I believe website traffic is going to continue to decrease over time. But Uncle Warren Buffett has always said that there are still good businesses out there. You think of them as cigar butts. They might have a few puffs left. We used to pick up a lot of soggy cigar butts, and I had a portfolio full of them, uh, and there were free puffs in them. I made money out of that. That's how I look at website traffic. Over the next decade or so. Website traffic is going down. Part of the reason it's likely due to AI overviews. An example of this, Ahrefs, which is an SEO product, they actually released a case study. That case study reports that website clicks are going down at least 34% due to AI overviews. And AI overviews, if you search on Google, when you're searching for any keyword, you'll see this AI-generated search result and that occupies a lot of real estate and then that pushes everything else down. That actually decreases website traffic because they get the answer that they want there. So There is a shift now to optimizing for AI overviews, and Google is favoring these AI overviews. And so what I want to talk about is how you can actually optimize for them. So one big thing that you can do is think about how these search engines rank things. And Gemini is operated by Google. And a lot of these LLMs, you think about, let's say Claude or Perplexity, for example, there's a lot of these products out there. They actually look at Google's results. ChatGPT is a little different. They're partnered with Microsoft, so they look at the Bing results and they're a little more diversified, I would say. What you still want to optimize for today is citations. And what I mean by citations would be maybe the number of times that you're mentioned, maybe the number of pages that you have, maybe the number of reviews that you have. These things all matter at the end of the day because there is a lot more compute that is going into these LLMs. But also there's a lot more power that's going into these search engines where they can crawl a lot more things faster and they can quickly find out who you are. The more time you spend creating content, the more time you spend creating a product or service that is loved by a lot of people, you're going to get a lot more citations. And those are all little mini signals that go a long way. Not only that, but when you think about optimizing, you're not just optimizing for keywords anymore. But you're optimizing for different types of keywords. So longer tail phrases like I mentioned earlier, people that are searching for these questions, these phrases, if you can occupy the answers for those, that's going to help you be cited for these AI overviews, right? So you want to have the best answers at the end of the day because what's Google's mission? Google's mission still today is to organize the world's information. So you want to make sure that you have the best information out there. And if you have the best information out there, AI or not, whatever innovations come in the future, you should still have a good shot at doing well. So we just talked about links. And another great way to get more links towards your website is by creating linkable assets that are actually helpful to your visitors. And what I mean by that is I just mentioned ClickFlow earlier. So ClickFlow is our SEO product. We have another product called Karat, which is account-based marketing software. But we look at it as what are the features can we give away for free? Because if we give a lot of features away for free, people will come in and use these and they'll talk about it to their friends if they get delighted by the product. If the word of mouth starts to spread, what happens is more people are going to link to it because People want to look good. They want to link to resources that they want to be helpful to their audiences and they want to find the best resources out there. So if you can create assets out there and you can just give them away for free, even calculators, you can vibe code a calculator using Replit or Cursor and you can just give it away. Or you can have a PDF that's created for you. You can just give it away. Or maybe you have a guide that you can give away. These are all linkable assets. By creating these linkable assets that are actually helpful to your visitors, again, you're going to get more links coming to your website, but I guarantee you, you're going to create a lot of goodwill too. And that's going to come back to you in the form of traffic and conversions for your business. If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Karrot, it allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're gonna have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you wanna learn more, just go to karrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's Karrot, K-A-R-R-O-T.ai, and we'll see you on the other side. Attention is shorter than ever. So if you want to make sure that your blog content is actually interesting, yes, your blog content, still relevant. Again, cigar butt website's not dead yet, right? But if you want your blog content to stand out, you've got to think about how you can have unique data or a unique perspective that you can put out there. But not only that, you got to make sure that your blog looks interesting. You can use ChatGPT Images. ChatGPT Images will generate interesting images that you can put on your blog. And you can have ChatGPT take a doc of whatever your blog post is, and ask it to generate images for relevant sections for your blog. Have it do the work for you, right? The other piece is you can leverage Gemini. Gemini allows you to create interactive bubble charts and you can say, hey, create an interactive bubble chart for me showing me how ad spend has evolved over time. It used to be Google and then it evolved to including Meta, to including Amazon, to including Pinterest. And it shows you over time you can create this interactive bubble chart, right? And then if you have really interesting data, you can put your data in there and have Gemini make that bubble chart for you. And then what you can do is you can not only put it on your blog, you can share it on LinkedIn, you can share it on X, wherever there's good organic reach. To be sharing it there too. So then you can be doubling down because what you ultimately care about is not— you're not beholden to just Google, but you are looking at things from a larger perspective, which actually leads me to my next point, which is search everywhere optimization. So SEO used to be called SEO for search engine optimization. You have to think about it now as search everywhere optimization. The only game in town is no longer just Google. It's Instagram. It's Amazon, it's App Store optimization, it's Gemini, it's ChatGPT. There's so many different channels to optimize for because attention is so fragmented today. What that means is you've got to evolve your strategies. It's a lot more than just Google now. And what that means for us, for example, me creating this right now, you might be listening to this on a podcast, but you might be also watching this on YouTube, or you might even be watching this on LinkedIn. So we think about posting all this content natively to other platforms. Again, we're not holding anything to be too sacred. Wherever there's organic reach, you have to take advantage and you have to play natively for each platform. So you can't just take this and just repost it and just hope it does well. You have to play every channel according to the most optimized strategy. So this is also known as the meta, not Meta the company, but the meta, right? There's always an optimized way to play for each channel. And that's how you have to think about it. You gotta be dynamic. And I'll tell you this, being an SEO for over 15 years, I've seen the same SEOs continue to struggle because all they do is they specialize in one channel. You actually do have to put your eggs in multiple baskets here and then you have to watch them like a hawk. It can't just be one basket. The harsh reality is traditional SEO is dying, but it's not completely dead. And if you want to continue to de-risk yourself, bringing your conversion rates up also matters more than you think. And so what I mean by that is SEO and CRO, so conversion rate optimization, they go hand in hand. And the example I gave you earlier from PSEO, so we've created hundreds and thousands of pages for our clients, but also for ourselves as well. And so we have a lot of these pages. Again, I mentioned, let's say we might have e-commerce agency in Los Angeles. Or digital social agency in New York. Those are examples of long-tail, high-intent keyword services pages that we're trying to optimize for, for my ad agency, Single Grain. We have to think about how we can make them unique at a scalable level. And so what we do is we have AI scan all of these pages. Instead of saying get a free consultation for our conversion rate optimization page, it might say optimize my conversions, and they'll click on that call to action. When we do programmatic conversion rate optimization, it's a form of conversion rate optimization. Optimization, our conversions go up by 50%. And so what I'm saying here is if you're going to optimize a lot of these pages, you're going to try to bring traffic up, you also have to be looking at conversion rates. And so that doesn't mean just for your website traffic, that means for all your other channels too. And a lot of this stuff that we haven't gotten to in this video, and maybe we'll get into another video, is how good is your offer? How good are you optimizing, playing natively for these different platforms? And that's what it is ultimately. So traffic trends are shifting and they'll continue to shift over time. And as long as you continue to adapt as a marketer, It's not going to matter. You just got to make sure that you adapt. And so if you're interested in continuing to learn and adapt, you can check out this video over here on how to rank number 1 on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity fast.