Your Site in the Age of AI

First published in November 2025, updated in October 2026.

Search behaviour is changing. Google traffic is down across most sites we look after, and more people are using ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's own AI Mode to find things. A year after we first wrote this, none of that has reversed.

This post covers what we're seeing, what seems to help, and what we've built into Craft to deal with it.

What's happening to search traffic

Google is increasingly a "zero-click" product. AI Overviews answer the question on the results page, and AI Mode, now available in the UK as well as the US, turns a search into a conversation that may never send anyone to a website at all.

The effect on most client sites is the same as last year: organic traffic is down, but the visitors who do arrive tend to convert better (more on that below).

How AI search works differently

AI search doesn't rank ten blue links. It writes an answer and cites the sources it drew from. Getting cited is the new ranking, and what gets cited isn't quite what Google has historically rewarded.

What seems to help:

Depth over breadth. Shallow overview pages don't get cited. Longer, specific answers to specific questions do. If you have a page that covers a topic properly, keep adding to it rather than spinning up thin posts on adjacent topics.

Clean metadata and structured data. Titles, descriptions and schema markup help crawlers work out what a page is about. FAQ markup no longer earns rich results in Google for most sites, but genuine questions and answers are exactly the shape AI answers take, so write them and mark them up.

A legible site structure. Logical navigation and URL hierarchy help crawlers, human and machine, understand how your content fits together.

Content crawlers can read. Gated content, text baked into images and pages that only appear once JavaScript has run are all hard for AI crawlers, and many of them don't run JavaScript at all. If lead capture is the goal, there are better places for the gate than your best content.

Knowing who's visiting. AI crawlers don't show up in Google Analytics, so most sites have no idea how often GPTBot or ClaudeBot are reading them. We've written about how to see which AI bots are reading your site.

Traffic goes down, quality goes up

Several clients have reported the same pattern: overall sessions down, but the visitors who do arrive are further along. They've already read a summary in an AI tool and clicked through deliberately, usually for something specific. Conversion rates on those sessions are higher than the Google baseline was.

That's not a consolation for the traffic drop, but it's worth knowing before you panic at the analytics.

What we've changed our minds on

Not everything we suggested has held up. We were keen on llms.txt files early on. Google has since said it doesn't use them for Search, so we now treat them as cheap insurance for other AI tools rather than something that moves rankings. We've looked at whether llms.txt files actually matter in more detail.

The thing AI can't do

AI content trained on AI content gets thinner over time. Original perspective, first-hand experience, and specific numbers from your own work are the things worth writing, because they're the things the models can't generate and the things they're most likely to cite.

What we've built into Craft

Most of this now lives in the Mutual One marketing platform, which comes with our Craft CMS support. The parts that matter most for AI search:

• Built-in analytics with AI crawler tracking, so you can see which bots are reading which pages, without a cookie banner. More on how that works.
• AI alt text generation, which writes descriptive alt text for uploaded images. That helps accessibility and gives crawlers something to read.
• AI summaries and an AI SEO keyword optimiser, inside the editor.
• llms.txt and WebMCP, generated and kept up to date automatically.

Where to start

A technical audit is usually the right first step. We look at:

• Existing schema markup and opportunities to extend it
• Metadata quality across key pages
• Site structure and internal linking
• Which crawlers are visiting, and anything stopping them reading the site

If you run a charity site, we've also written about what AI search means for charity websites. The ongoing work is what our SEO, GEO and growth retainers are for.