Which page is your homepage? All of them.

So here's a question for you. Do you know which page on your website a new buyer sees first? When I ask that question to business owners or people who think they're marketers— not actual marketers, notice, but people who think they're marketers— most of them say, "Yes, of course I do." But then when we dig into it, what they actually know is which page they want buyers to see first, which of course is a completely different thing, right? Simply wanting to be— wanting something to be true doesn't make it true, right? The whole architecture of most businesses' websites are built around a sequence. The visitor lands on the homepage, gets oriented, follows the journey we've laid out for them, and eventually ends up somewhere that prompts them to get in touch. Everything on the page— the copy, the structure, the way one section leads to the next— is built around that basic presumption of journey. It's a guided tour, and it works fine as long as everybody walks in through the front door, the homepage, right? The thing is, search engines, AI, whatever, they don't use the front door. And when somebody types a query into Google or an AI platform, the algorithm goes off looking across the entire site for whichever page most closely matches what that person needs. You know, it could be a blog article that we wrote 2 years ago that goes into depth about a question that they had, but it's something so deep in the site that we've forgotten it was still there. But the visitor lands there directly There's no preamble, right? There's no foreplay. We're straight in there, and we've got no say in it. Now, that's been true for as long as it's been search, but still most businesses haven't factored this into their information architecture maps or sitemaps or, or content strategy. Another red flag to show that somebody's not really paying attention is when a business owner says, well, our search engine visibility is excellent. We rank number one on Google and every AI platform out there. So 'You know, we're fine.' But then when we dig a little deeper and I ask what search terms they're actually entering in the box, I find out it's their company name. But, you know, appearing at the top of Google as an AI result when somebody searches for your own business name doesn't exactly signal anything more than they know you exist, right? It means nothing. I mean, to be honest, if you didn't appear as the first result when somebody searched for your name, I'd be wondering what on earth you're doing. But most searches aren't searching for brands, they're searching for solutions. A person in Chicago looking for piano lessons isn't typing in The Better Note Music Academy into their search box, right? They probably have no idea The Better Note Music Academy exists, right? They're typing in piano lessons Chicago, piano lessons near me, or some permutation around that. Ahrefs analyzed around 14 billion web pages and found out that 96% of them get zero organic traffic from Google. Most of the time, the content simply doesn't match how real buyers look for solutions. So if the words on our website reflect how we describe our own work internally, rather than how buyers describe the problem they're trying to solve, we're effectively functionally, functionally invisible, right? The site can look wonderful, superly beautiful, the copy can be clever, and none of it matters if we're speaking a language that nobody's searching for. Now AI is adding even more complexity to all of this. Pew Research concluded that Google AI overviews, you know, those summaries that now appear at the top of search results, before the organic links, right? They've halved click-through rates for the queries where they appear. So around 60% of searches now end without anyone clicking through to a website at all, okay? What we call zero-click searches. You know, we got the answer in the search result page. We didn't need to click on a link. We got our answer already, so we've gone off and moved on, okay? There are cases out there where high-traffic websites have lost 50% or more of their traffic over the last 6 months or a year as a result of zero-click searches and the combination of that and AI. I mean, AI in particular is sending a— okay, currently small but fast-growing stream of visitors to websites, and these visitors are converting at a significantly higher rate than the ones sent from organic search traffic. Now, okay, currently the numbers are small in the bigger scheme of things, about 1% of total web traffic globally, but that's already a big number, and it's growing fast enough that it's getting serious attention. Where those AI-referred visitors actually land is also worth paying attention to, because when AI tools cite a source and send somebody to a website, They almost never send them to the homepage, right? BrightEdge did some research across millions of AI citations, and they found that over 80% of them link to deep internal pages. That's content sitting 2 or more clicks away from the homepage. You know, pages that were created to answer specific questions rather than, you know, introduce our brand. So we have traditional search and AI both doing the same thing simultaneously. Okay, sending visitors directly to interior pages that were never designed to receive them as a first impression. If you open up Google Analytics on any site with decent organic traffic and look at the Pages report, I'll bet you that the home page accounts for a fraction of the total sessions. Everything else lands on services pages, blog posts, about pages, You know, pages that were designed to be the third or the fourth thing that somebody would read after the home page has already done the work of establishing who we are and why we matter. But search engines, uh, search engines and AIs, they skip all of that. They land cold on an interior page because it answers a particular question the searcher had, you know, the search intent. Whether we make an impression on this prospective buyer totally depends on whether that particular page works as a standalone piece of communication with no context from anywhere else on the site to bolster its validity. Most pages on most websites can't do that. They're written as chapters of a story that you were supposed to start with at page 1. But you know, if somebody picks up the book and opens it at chapter 7, they won't be able to work out what's going on, so they'll go off and do something else, probably fire up a game of Call of Duty. You know, it's worth testing this out yourself. Pick up any page that isn't the home page and imagine it's the first thing that a new buyer sees. You know, does it make clear who we are within a few seconds? Can they reach the Contact Us page from a single click, or is there a CTA on that page? Does it address a problem in the way that the buyer would describe it, or is it addressed and described the way that we describe it internally, which more often than not we'd like to admit is actually a totally different thing? So what this requires is a rethink of what each page is supposed to accomplish on its own terms. When a page appears in a search result or gets cited by an AI tool, it's made an implicit promise to the person who's clicked on it. The page has to make good on that quickly without asking them to figure out who's talking to them. Contact options and navigation, you know, basic signals of who we are— none of that should live exclusively on the homepage. If the only page, a page that a visitor can orient themselves is the homepage, then every door that search or AI opens up leads to a room that wasn't designed to receive anyone. In effect, our homepage isn't just the homepage. Every page is the homepage. The customer relationship starts before we're aware of it. The first impression our brand makes might have nothing to do with the page we spent months arguing over in a brand meeting. Search accounts for around a third of all website traffic across most industries. But search engines and AI platforms are deciding which page on our website acts as the front door for any given visitor. And both are consistently choosing interior pages that we probably didn't design with that in mind. Pulling up the organic search data and seeing which pages are actually receiving visitors will take you about 5 minutes. And the gap between the pages we intended to represent our brand and the pages that are actually doing the heavy lifting of receiving strangers tends to be a bit of an eye-opener. And not always in a good way. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, please pass it on. I'm not saying I'm right, I'm saying many out there are wrong. Please subscribe, share, comment, whatever works for you. Find out more at kexino.com. That's K-E-X-I-N-O. Hope to see you again here soon.