MAYBE THE GOAL WASN’T ‘HUGE’ TRAFFIC VOLUME AFTER ALL!
I’ve been quietly consuming everything I could on search and AI lately.
From Michael King‘s epic AI mode article, and thoughts from the OGs like Rand, Aleyda…
I’ve gotten into the weeds of vector embeddings, passage-level retrieval, and semantic centroids. I even started calculating cosine similarities at one point, to see if I still had it. (I didn’t. I had to dig myself out.)
The industry is disconcerted. We’ve been watching traffic shrink. Fewer clicks. Fewer visits. Less visibility in places we used to dominate.
And sooo many rage posts about how Google is killing creators.
But somewhere along the way, I started questioning the game entirely.
What’s the purpose of massive traffic anyway?
We celebrate it. We chase it. We open up GA4 and show our traffic charts like proud parents showing baby photos. “Look how much she’s grown.”
But then what? A 2-3 percent conversion rate? A handful of qualified leads? A few newsletter signups we’ll never hear from again?
What happens to the rest?
Some come to learn, get smarter, and bounce, enlightened but uninterested.
Some are bots. Some are interns. Some are your competitors stealing ideas for their next strategy meeting.
And yet we spend thousands trying to generate more of them.
More visits, pageviews, and more vanity metrics.
It’s like renting a stadium to find one good dinner date.
Maybe this is what Google’s been trying to tell us all along.
Maybe this shift toward AIO, direct answers, and zero-click journeys is a nudge rather than a death sentence.
A reminder to start building for the few who stay.
The ones who read all the way.
The ones who screenshot.
The ones who DM asking, “Hey, do you offer this as a service?”
The ones who send your link in their company Slack with a “👀”.
Maybe it’s not about volume anymore.
Maybe it never was…