This article is going to tackle a big but very important topic.  If it feels a little overwhelming, don’t worry. The overall strategy is simple. But there are a lot of moving parts, and you don’t have to address them all at once. The first step is to understand what’s changed in the marketplace, then you can begin retooling your marketing program one piece at a time.

Let’s get started!

If you pay attention to your website metrics, you’ve probably noticed that fewer and fewer people are visiting your website—and this decline has likely been happening for a year or longer.

Source: Similarweb, as reported by Digiday

The reason for this decline, as some of you already know, is because of a fundamental change in the way search results are delivered. According to one ongoing study, over half of Google searches provide an “AI overview”—a detailed AI-generated answer to a search query (Google launched this feature in May of 2024). And this percentage is only going to grow larger.

Most searchers find the answers in these AI overviews sufficient and never click on a website link. This behavior is a leading driver of traffic declines across the internet. Today, two out of three Google searches end without a single click.

In fact, the situation is a lot worse than it appears. Half of your traffic isn’t real people at all! It’s bots, many of which are scraping the internet for fresh content to train the AI engines and feed generative AI results, including AI overviews.

Earlier this month, things got interesting. Cloudflare—a company that provides infrastructure and security services to over 20% of the websites on the internet—announced it will begin blocking all AI bots by default on new websites. That means that AI engines won’t be able to read those websites at all unless the site owners specifically allow it. They will even allow some publishers to require bots to pay to index their pages. The robot wars begin!

If all this feels like the wild west, you’re right. The rules are changing fast, the bullets are flying and the dust is so thick it’s hard to know which way to turn.

So what does this mean for your content marketing program? And what can you do about this distressing and confusing situation?

If your answer is to double down and generate more search traffic, sorry—you are on a fool’s errand. That traffic is never coming back. And if you believe the folks at Google (you should at least take them seriously), sending search traffic to your website is a “necessary evil,” one they are actively working to eliminate.

Does this mean you should abandon SEO? Should you stop blogging?

The short answer is absolutely not. But…

It’s Time to Rethink Your Marketing

If you believe your blog is going to continue to reach and attract new audiences the way it used to, you are in for a heap of disappointment. Google isn’t playing that game anymore.

Now, you can still use traditional SEO to position a page at the top of Google’s search results. And these same techniques will even help your content be referenced in AI overviews.

But don’t get too excited. The return on ranking #1 in Google or Bing is diminishing. As organic search results are pushed further down the page, fewer people will even see those links, and even fewer will click on them. When it comes to AI overviews, your firm’s name will almost never be mentioned. Your content will be sampled, rewritten, anonymized and aggregated with relevant content passages from other websites. While you might get a reference link in the AI overview, almost nobody will click on it.

To make things worse, in May, Google added AI Mode to AI Overviews. AI Mode allows you to dive deep into the search query, as if you were typing it into Gemini, ChatGPT or another large-language-model chatbot. It takes your question and creates dozens of related synthetic queries, selects passages from hundreds of pages it believes are most authoritative and relevant, then constructs a detailed answer.

Similar to AI overviews, AI Mode provides scant reference links next to the answer. Beyond those few links, it provides no insight into what pages it visited. Nor are there any tools available today that will tell us what keywords or phrases people used to search in AI Mode (or ChatGPT, CoPilot, Perplexity or any other AI chatbots).

Google has made it clear that it considers AI Mode the future of search, and traditional search results links will become even less prominent—or superseded entirely:

“AI Mode is where we’ll first bring Gemini’s frontier capabilities, and it’s also a glimpse of what’s to come. As we get feedback, we’ll graduate many features and capabilities from AI Mode right into the core Search experience.”

And because Google is the dominant search platform today, it has a built-in advantage over competitors when it comes to driving AI-driven search.

Where Does This Leave Content Marketing?

All of these developments have significant implications for your content marketing program—and your entire marketing strategy.

Even a year ago, a combination of blogging and SEO could drive significant, dependable traffic to your website. Today, that’s still possible, albeit at a diminished scale. Many people don’t trust their answers. That means quite a few people are still using Google the old way and clicking on links.

So traditional content marketing still works, but a little less well each month. Between Google’s stated intentions, the rise of generative AI search and the erosion of search-generated website traffic, content marketing is entering a moment of crisis.

So what’s the answer?

A New Marketing Strategy for the AI-verse

Buyers in the professional services still want free access to expertise and thought leadership. They continue to need a way to find firms that can deliver the services they want—firms that can solve their business problems and will be a good fit for their culture. AI isn’t erasing those paths, it’s just delivering them in different ways. That means firms need to adapt their marketing strategy to fit the new roadmap.

Here’s a framework any firm can use to build a marketing program that not only works today, but will function efficiently tomorrow as AI search becomes more dominant.

  1. Stop worrying about web traffic as a solitary metric and start measuring quality, engagement and brand awareness. We have noticed that while overall traffic has declined for most businesses, the quality of visitors who reach their website is better than ever. In other words, the people who make the effort to click on links are much more likely to turn into leads and opportunities. Unfortunately, you aren’t able to tell where many of your visitors come from. But a few Google Analytics 4 metrics can help you get a general sense of your marketing program’s success and monitor engagement. These include metrics such as landing page visits, branded search and average engagement time. But a top goal of your marketing program should be to achieve exceptional brand visibility and awareness. Using tools such as Google Alerts, BuzzSumo and Meltwater, you can track brand mentions, engagement, influencers and more across multiple channels. The ultimate measures, of course, are the ones you can capture directly: high-quality leads, opportunities, new clients and revenue.
  2. Identify your audience’s interests and learning behavior. Determine where your audiences go to learn about the problems you solve—and what topics they are searching for. Audience research can answer many of these questions, including insights into their top business challenges, what publications they read and which social media platforms they use. A host of tools are also available that can help you see what topics they are interested in and where they are searching for them.
  3. Choose a few key issues that your firm will be known for. You increase the chances of your firm’s expertise being featured in AI answers if it addresses a relatively narrow range of issues. In our experience, three issues is the perfect number for most firms, though large enterprises with many practice areas may need more. Each issue should be broad enough that you can write dozens or hundreds of blog posts on subtopics that address the issue from different angles. At the same time these issues must be of deep interest to your clientele AND related to a service you offer. Use the information you gleaned in #2 to help you think about issues. The ultimate goal is to build a library of expertise that demonstrates experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). These are the attributes that AI Mode, ChatGPT and other AI tools look for when constructing their answers.
  4. Write your content for people… but don’t forget the bots. Use easy-to-understand language and short sentences. Summarize key points so that humans and AI bots can easily digest them. Consider including a key takeaways or FAQs section at the end. When possible, include video, charts or images in your content. If you can include original data, so much the better. Publishing and citing research of your own is one of the best ways to build authority—with Google and your prospects. Perhaps most importantly, feature your expertise. While it’s okay to use ChatGPT or Gemini to help you produce a better piece more quickly, be sure that your own thinking, opinions and perspectives shine through. Otherwise, you are just adding to the noise.
  5. Lean into video. Google can now “watch” and “understand” video content. And it is increasingly featuring video in its search results and AI overviews because so many people prefer to consume content that way. Ideally, whenever you write an important blog post, for instance, you would also produce a video that covers the same content. Each video can then be edited into medium- and short-format videos perfect for social media. Last but not least, set up a YouTube channel where people, and AI search, can find your videos and clips. In practice, producing video on a regular basis may be a challenge for many firms, especially those that have little video production experience. Whether you develop this expertise in-house, work with a video marketing firm or outsource some or all of the work to freelancers, video is an essential skillset in the modern marketing toolbox. Start developing your video chops now.
  6. Make your brand name more visible. Remember E-E-A-T? AI is looking for well-known, authoritative brands. Use digital PR to get your firm in front of the media. Issuing press releases isn’t enough. Enlist a PR professional to help you get quoted in the media, appear on well-known podcasts, and publish articles in publications your audience reads. Speak at conferences that your buyers attend. And if you conduct original research on the industries you serve, it can make you a lot more interesting to the world. Set up your Google Business Profile and ask your clients to recommend and rate you on Google. Engage with your audience where they are. Google is increasingly interested in community-style sites such as Reddit. See if there is a subreddit on your area of expertise. If so, join the conversation. If not, consider starting your own. Use your client research to determine where else you can converse with your audience. Wherever you engage people, always be helpful, not salesy. While it is okay occasionally to link to a relevant piece of content on your site, be very careful not to come across as self-serving. Finally, a classic—and still powerful—way to build both your visibility and reputation is to write the authoritative book on your area of expertise.

Expertise-driven firms like yours are a perfect fit for today’s new marketing paradigm. Your team has knowledge and original thinking to impart. You have prospects who are hungry for that knowledge. So make the most of that expertise and turn your experts into your biggest marketing asset.

Right now, most of your competitors either aren’t aware of these changes or have no idea how to adapt. That means there is a golden opportunity right now to build an advantage. It’s up to you to exploit it.

Change is never easy. And these days, it always seems to come at breakneck speed and with little warning. But to those willing to invest in change will go the spoils. Your time is now. Are you up to the challenge?

Happy marketing!