Website Traffic Dropping Due to AI?

Your traffic decline isn’t what you think it is.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, your website traffic has probably dropped as AI has become more popular. We’re past the “the sky is falling” moment, and it’s started to become clear that traffic is not the cause of demand for what you provide, even though, until recently, it was correlated with demand. 

So, why is this shifting? 

As Ray and I discussed in a recent (free) UST course, AI is now answering high volume/low engagement queries directly in the AI interface, instead of sending them to your website like a traditional search engine. However, just because you’re not seeing these queries land on your site as early stage traffic doesn’t mean interest in what you have to offer has dissipated.

In fact, if you play your hand right, AI can be your greatest ally. 

Across our clientele, we’ve found AI referred traffic is more engaged, and more likely to convert than other referral sources. Search Engine Land recently shared that ChatGPT ecommerce traffic converts at a 31% higher rate than non-branded organic search.

How to make AI work with you

While AI is still a small slice of most organizations’ website traffic, it’s also the fastest growing segment. That means you still have time to get ahead of this!

The first step is to understand how your organization and popular AI models align in terms of business interest. Basically, how can you help one another? 

The answer is simple: The same way you align yourself with any audience. You first have to put yourself in their shoes. 

Treating AI like an audience

In order to help our clients better understand (and benefit from) AI, we’ve started introducing AI specific personas. These aren’t personas that talk about how human audiences use AI, but instead, they treat AI like a direct audience. Here’s an example:

This process helps you think about how your goals and AI’s goals can be aligned. It makes it much easier to understand how to optimize your content, both strategically and technically, to be more easily accessed, understood, referenced, and cited by tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others. 

Jared and I also talked through this in a Yoko Co Live if you want to know more (or see when I clearly need a hair cut 😛). We’re also happy to answer questions if you have them.

We hope this helps!

Mahalo,

Chris & the Yoko Co team

PS – The ADA website accessibility deadline, which was to be next week, has been pushed back a year. Of course they waited until the last second, but at least you have some additional time to get everything in order.

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What’s Good?

Right now we’re psyched to see our friends at Oceanic Society share an update on Green Sea Turtle’s long road to recovery (which is working!) and that despite how fractured things can seem between our states and political parties, we can still work together, as the National Association of Attorneys General bipartisan coalition shared support for the Kids Online Safety Act Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), S. 1748 which will help provide recourse against a lot of the aggressive and predatory action of social media platforms, games, etc.

(We love good news, so if you have some, please contact us and use the form to share it with me!)