Control your AEO with your website
AI results have an undeniable impact on search traffic, which might make a web presence feel like a wasted effort, but the thing feeding every answer engine is still your website
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by North Star Inbound and Conductor
Paid subscribers can download this checklist to ensure that their website is customer-centric and has a higher likelihood of being cited by LLMs
The value of prompt tracking is declining with Google’s personalization in AI mode. Read this post from a few months ago (free for all readers) about this SEO apocalypse.
The panic over declining organic traffic is a distraction, and some are drawing the wrong conclusion: that the website itself no longer matters. The opposite is true: websites are now more valuable than ever, and the traffic panic is making them blind to why.
[Sponsored by Conductor]
AI search is changing how your audience finds information and interacts with your brand.
If your brand isn’t being cited, surfaced, or trusted by AI agents, you’re already falling behind.
On May 6, Conductor is hosting a free virtual summit on how to actually win in the agentic AEO era, where visibility depends on what AI chooses, not just what ranks.
Tune in to learn:
How to measure your AEO performance (beyond traditional SEO metrics)
What it takes to become a trusted source for AI answers
How leading teams are shifting from manual SEO to autonomous, agent-driven workflows
How to structure your data + content for maximum AI visibility
If you’re still thinking in keywords and rankings, you’re missing out on the future of search.
AI results have an undeniable impact on search traffic, which might make a web presence feel like a wasted effort, but the thing feeding every answer engine is still your website. The models train on your content products. The training (or scraping) is plainly parasitic if you are an ad-funded aggregator site, but if you are selling products and services, being scraped and cited is ideal.
When LLMs cite a source, it’s citing a URL. When AI summarizes your product category, it’s pulling from pages that actually exist somewhere on the web, and you don’t get cited if you don’t exist. However, social media conversations and snake oil GEO software salespeople treat declining traffic as proof that the website is broken, when the two have nothing to do with each other.
Declining traffic means distribution is changing
There’s also a customer-journey problem with the “websites are dead” argument: it assumes buying happens in a single step. Buying in AI sounded like a novel idea, but just like past attempts, it’s not working as expected. The website is the next step in the journey: ask AI, get an answer, buy a thing.
Someone evaluating a six-figure software contract is not skipping your website. Nor is someone just looking to buy the best gift for a significant other on an ecommerce website. There are downsides to both purchase cycles if the wrong decision is made; even if you can ultimately reverse the transaction, you still get dinged for the wrong first attempt.
LLMs surface a brand name, and the person immediately opens a tab to visit the actual site to see pictures, read the explanation, and decide whether this brand deserves their business. This is why direct traffic is exploding, which I call Dark SEO. AI gave them the brand name; your website closes the deal. The referral path just doesn't show up in your analytics.
Bad websites are a serious negative
A weak website at that point doesn’t just lose a conversion, it cancels out the AI recommendation entirely. If you have earned the mention, received the citation, and then your own site killed it, which is an entirely preventable failure that happens constantly because people have stopped treating their websites like assets worth maintaining.
Brands that write pages explaining things specifically and in plain language are going to get disproportionate credit in AI-generated answers because the models reward specificity over vagueness. Pages stuffed with adjectives and no concrete details get skipped over. Pages that explain exactly what the product does, who it’s for, and what makes it different are the ones getting pulled into citations and summaries. This is why sites with robust help documentation find that these support materials outrank their product landing pages.
Paid subscribers can grab this checklist to audit their content for LLM friendliness.
The support materials are intended to help customers, while the marketing pages are intended to impress them. Your website is the training document for the LLMs that will introduce you to future customers. If you write like a brochure, you miss the point.
(I am going to dedicate a full newsletter to this, but in January, I was at the CES show in Las Vegas, and my mind was blown when I met brands that do billions of dollars in sales, like Anker, Aukey, Ugreen, and Baseus, who consider SEO to be a complete afterthought. They spend all their marketing dollars on influencer marketing and let retailers own their channel sales. Their web presences and SEO leave so much to be desired. The upcoming post will deep dive into these failures, but if you have other brands I should look at for this post, please get in touch.)
Websites for local businesses are critical
For a long time, I have been of the opinion that local service-oriented businesses did not need to invest in a website because many of those sites were so bad that they lost the sale. There was a time when I was looking for a mover, and the pictures of the movers on the website left me convinced they wouldn't handle my furniture gently. Or another time, when I was looking for a plumber, the plumber's site had so many typos that I was afraid they would have the same level of attention to detail when it came to plumbing, too.
In both instances, had I only found their Google or Yelp pages, I might have called them, been impressed by what they said on the phone, and hired them based on that. Having a website gave me the wrong first impression.
AI changes that calculation completely. Google Business Profile still matters for local discovery, but it tells an LLM almost nothing useful about what you actually do, how you do it differently, who you serve best, or why someone should trust you with their problem. A profile is a directory listing rather than an explanation, so while the meta information like hours and location might show up in an LLM response, they won’t have the details on what you do.
LLMs develop recommendations for service providers in a given category are not reading your star rating and calling it a day; they are reading whatever written content exists about you on the web, and if the most detailed thing written about your business is a five-sentence “About” section you filled out four years ago in GBP, that is all they have to work with.
Owning the asset matters now in a way it simply didn’t before.
More importantly, for local businesses, your Google Business Profile or Yelp page can be suspended, and your social accounts can be restricted or hacked. A website you control, with content you wrote, hosted on a domain you own, is the only piece of digital real estate that can’t be taken from you. If you don’t own an asset that feeds the LLMs and you lose the other assets, you can be in deep trouble. This was always true, but AI just made the consequences of ignoring it much steeper.
There’s a version of this that gets lost in the traffic panic: the website was always the only place where you controlled the entire environment. Every other channel is someone else’s platform with someone else’s rules about what gets shown to whom. AI answers are no different because the model decides what to include, how to frame it, and whether to mention you at all.
You can influence the model by writing content worth pulling in, but you cannot control the results. The website is where control actually lives, and losing traffic to AI discovery doesn’t change that; it reinforces it, because now the website has to do more convincing in fewer visits.
What replaces the old traffic-heavy model is exactly what a website was supposed to be before SEO turned so much of it into a ranking-and-traffic game. Your website is still the only surface where you fully control what someone sees first, what they understand about you, and how the story gets told. Every other place your brand shows up, social media, AI answers, third-party coverage, someone else controls the environment, the context, and dials of visibility.
Giving up that control because organic traffic is down is like closing your brick-and-mortar store because foot traffic is down because of bad weather. Sales might not be as strong as before, but there are still deals to close.
With so many vibe-coding options to make a great website, there’s no excuse not to have a great one.
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