I’ve been doing this for years and I’ve ridden the ups and downs. You learn the rules, the rules shift, you learn them again. Over time I got pretty good at the whole dance. Then the traffic started to change.
Not all at once, and not in a way that set off alarms at first. Just a shift in the shape of it.
What does a shift in shape look like?
Nothing dramatic enough to act on. That’s the problem.
Total numbers that haven’t collapsed. A different mix underneath them. Queries that used to arrive and no longer do. A slow change in which pages bring in the traffic. None of it triggers anything, because there’s no line on any dashboard that says the mechanism has changed. That’s how nearly everybody experiences this. Not a crash. A gradual alteration in the composition of something you were only watching in aggregate. So I did what I always do when something changes. I started reading.
The book on this: The Day Your Website Died is forty-two chapters on how answer engines decide who gets named, assembled because I went looking for a clear account and couldn’t find one.
Where did website readers go after AI search?
I started reading about AI, and from there about answer engine optimization, and I found a whole different world.
That was the point at which this stopped being a traffic problem and became a subject. The mechanism by which an AI system decides whose work to name when somebody asks it a question isn’t the mechanism by which a search engine decides what to rank, and I had been assuming, without examining it, that the second would carry over into the first.
It doesn’t. The signals are different, the structures are different, and the results arrive by a different route. Anybody selling AEO as SEO with a new label either hasn’t looked at how it works or is hoping you won’t.
What surprised you most?
The thing most likely to throw you, so I set the expectation before anything else in the book.
This isn’t like SEO. With SEO there is, eventually, a kind of big bang. A day arrives when Google decides to rank you, and the traffic shows up. You can point at it. There’s a before and an after. AEO doesn’t work that way. There’s no single moment, no flip of a switch.
That absence is psychologically brutal and it’s the reason most people abandon the work. Everything you know about optimization was learned in a system that eventually confirms you. This one doesn’t confirm you. It accumulates slowly, and the evidence arrives as somebody mentioning that a machine recommended you. I think that’s hardest on small businesses. A big company can keep paying for work that shows nothing on a dashboard for a year. A one-person practice watching every hour can’t afford that patience for long, and those are the people who quit first.
Books work the same way. I had a client who expected his book to take off the day it came out, with no promotion at all. I told him all through the project that it doesn’t work that way: throw a launch party, push it on your social media, maybe hire a PR agency. He did none of it. The book came out and got almost nothing, very few sales and very little impact, and then he just went away. You have to promote a book or it goes nowhere.
Why write down an SEO strategy that works slowly?
I wrote it because I went looking for a clear account of how this works and couldn’t find one, so I assembled the one I wish I had been handed at the start.
That’s nearly always why I write anything. The material existed in fragments, scattered across posts by people with something to sell, most of them describing tactics without the model underneath. What was missing was somebody laying out the mechanism plainly enough that you could reason about it yourself.
It’s been a long and twisty road, and an interesting one, and so far a successful one.
Does SEO stop mattering?
It hasn’t stopped mattering and it’s stopped being sufficient, a more awkward position than either extreme.
Both systems are running. They reward overlapping but different things, and a great deal of effort that helps one does very little for the other. That means the work roughly doubles, and it means some of what you’ve been doing for years is now maintenance instead of growth. Nobody wants that answer. The clean versions, that SEO is dead or that nothing has changed, are both more comfortable and both wrong. The same comfort-seeking shows up with AI writing tools. People want either a machine that does the whole job or a reason to ignore it. Used as a tool, it’ll save you hours. Hand it your thinking and you’ll publish pages no answer engine has any reason to cite. Some of what works for Google does nothing at all for AEO. The AI crawlers will visit your site and look it over all the time, and sometimes you get hammered by them. That’s normal.
What should you do while you wait for AEO to pay off?
Watch the shape, not the total. The total moves last and by then you’ve lost a year. AI won’t send you a lot of traffic. The traffic it does send is more convertible.
Don’t wait for the big bang. It’s not coming, and waiting for it is how people conclude this doesn’t work. I think of promotion as digging a trench more than climbing a hill. You keep digging and keep digging, and eventually you hit oil.
Learn the mechanism instead of the tactics. Tactics go stale in months. The model behind them doesn’t.
Expect the evidence to be anecdotal at first. Somebody telling you a machine recommended you is a real signal even though it’s not a chart.
Assume both systems are live. The work doubles.
I got pretty good at the old dance over a lot of years. What I didn’t expect was that the useful skill would turn out to be the reading instead of the dancing, and that it would all start with a change too small to alarm anybody.
What bothers me is how many people will read that silence as failure and walk away from the work that’s going to matter most over the next few years. The machines are already deciding whose names come up when someone asks a question, and plenty of the people being named aren’t any better at the work than the ones who gave up.
