@tjrobertson52

Google's AI responses are eating all of your website traffic. And that's not a bad thing.

For about a year now, SEOs have been panicking because Google's AI overviews now just provide the answer that people used to have to go to your website to find. And as a result, a lot of websites are getting far less traffic from Google search. And at first this just sounds objectively bad for those website owners.

And for some it will be devastating, at least short term. But in the end I think we'll realize we don't actually need the traffic, at least not from humans.

There are two primary reasons you might care about traffic to your website. One is if you sell an actual product or service. Before AI responses, people would go to Google searching for the problems they have that your product or service solve.

They would click through to your website to read your content, and some percentage of them would convert into a customer.

Today, more and more of these questions can be answered directly in Google's AI response. However, as long as that AI response recommends your product or service, it doesn't really matter that they went to your website. In fact, more people are using Google to make product decisions than ever before.

And people are much more likely to take the recommendation of the AI response than they ever were to just go with position one on Google.

The second reason you might care about traffic to your website is if you're actually monetizing that traffic. In other words, if you're showing ads on your website or selling products as an affiliate, in this case, your product is influence. You're influencing the purchase behaviour of humans.

Now, if this is the situation you're in right now, you're probably hurting. A loss in direct traffic translates directly to a loss in revenue. However, I also think you're sitting on top of a gold mine.

This is because any website that could influence the purchase behaviour of humans in the past, we'll almost certainly be able to influence the product and service recommendations of AI in this new future.

And based on what we're seeing so far, I think that's gonna be more valuable. If you have an affiliate website, you might have listicles of top products in different categories. And you're paid by the creators of these products to sell them on your website.

When you lose your human traffic, you stop making those affiliate sales. But these listicles are still just as valuable, if not more valuable, to the creator of those products.

So my prediction is in twenty twenty six, we're gonna see a lot of these publishers that were making money from ads and affiliate sales start to sell recommendations. If your website is being cited by AI search and you're recommending a specific product or service, you can have a huge influence on whether or not the AI recommends that product or service