Will ‘Traffic become a limited resource’ due to AI? Yes, already!

Confession first — I am sorry to open with tough news. We marketers could potentially lose ‘informational’ traffic to answer engines. Informational traffic constitutes upto 80% of web traffic.

I take your social time again with another random AI article. But hey, its inevitable.

80% of any website traffic is ‘informational’. At least 30–40% of such traffic can be expected to be lost to answer engines.

What is answer engine optimisation (AEO)?

Nothing but a fancy new acronym doing the rounds. It’s a category name provided to aggregate the answer engines like Bard, Bing Chat, ChatGPT, open source ones and the many in the making.

At the ‘core’ of the AI movement is possibly the ‘user behavioral’ change.

Let’s do a Tl:dr —

1. Users seek instant information. Instant. Not 2000 worded blog. Instant.
2. Google’s latest ‘perspective’ snippet update — reinforces its commitment to ‘content creators’. Update includes answers to queries from — reddit, quora, tiktok, forums, videos & other instant short-form content formats.
3. The behavioral change of consuming vertical ‘tiktok’ style videos and getting bite sized information has brought down an average user engagement time for a content down to ‘less than 12 seconds’.

Google’s latest perspective snippet update is a reflection of the future. Reflection of how ‘landing pages’ and ‘blogs’ are past their prime.

Users ready. Search engines reinventing. Tools too many. Marketers ready?

Get hands-on, dear community. Hit it.

Yes, most of these updates are yet to hit outside the american mainland. But, many software aggregating websites have already reported traffic dips and losses to website, but an increase in their snippet rankings.

Let’s face it. Marketing is not changing. It is just evolving. Embrace it.

In simple words, the ‘keyword volumes’ or ‘prompts’ will manifold. It just won’t benefit your website and landing pages alone. It’ll will be distributed to other formats.

Here’s what we could focus our attention on —

1. Obsess. Obsess over users. Deliver information on other formats like short-form videos, podcasts, forums, featured snippets . . you get it right?
2. Since informational content consumption could see a behavioral change, CRO — conversion rate optimisation for users who land on your website will be paramount.

Remember the grand coronation for ‘growth hackers’ — well they’ll be back in the talent consideration for marketing.

In hindsight, it’s an ideal scenario. Businesses get more transactional on their webpages. Yeah, transactional without the pretence of an information portal. User experience & funnel management on a website will gather prominence.

So, will traffic be a limited resource? — Yes. But only to landing pages & blogs.

Conclusion — irony!! This is still a blog. Facepalm mich.