Tag: AI Overviews

Posted on

The Traffic You Depend On Is Being Answered Without You

I’ve been staring at a traffic chart for the last three weeks that I can’t stop thinking about.

It’s Chegg’s chart. The online education platform lost 34% of its organic visitors in a matter of months. That’s a cliff. Their keyword footprint went from 11.1 million to 3.5 million.

And the culprit wasn’t a competitor outranking them or a Google algorithm update penalizing thin content. It was Google answering the questions before anyone ever clicked.

The Machine That Eats Your Top of Funnel

Google’s AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries that now appear at the top of search results, and they are fundamentally changing what it means to rank on Google. For years, the playbook was clear: create valuable content, optimize it for search, capture intent, convert visitors.

That model assumed one thing: that people would actually click through to your site.

AI Overviews break that assumption.

When someone searches “how to explain forgiveness to a congregation” or “best illustrations for an Easter sermon,” Google can now synthesize an answer from multiple sources and present it directly in the search results. No click required. No visit to your site. No entry into your funnel.

Tomasz Tunguz laid this out clearly in a recent analysis:

“Content dependency on organic search is no longer a sustainable acquisition model.”

That sentence should be pinned to the wall of every SaaS product leader who relies on organic traffic (understanding these shifts is a critical PM skill) to fill the top of their funnel.

Chegg Is the Preview

The pattern is showing up everywhere. Stack Overflow, the platform that essentially taught a generation of developers how to code (including me), is seeing the same erosion. Informational queries that used to drive millions of visits are now being answered inline by AI.

The New York Times is thriving. Why? How? A $100 million content licensing deal with Google. They’re feeding the AI, on their terms, for revenue.

Here’s what I think the data is telling us:

1. Q&A-style content is the most vulnerable. If your value proposition is answering questions that can be summarized in a paragraph, you’re in the blast radius.
2. Branded, premium, behind-the-paywall content is more defensible. AI Overviews can summarize a sermon topic, but they can’t replicate a full manuscript, a downloadable media pack, or an AI-powered sermon builder.
3. The winners will be the ones who stop treating Google as a given and start building direct relationships with their audience.

What This Means for SaaS Product Leaders

I run product and growth for a content platform that serves pastors. We have 245,000+ sermons and 50,000+ text illustrations, exactly the kind of content library that ranks well for long-tail informational queries.

For years, that library has been our primary discovery engine. Pastors search for sermon ideas, find us, browse free content, start a trial, and convert to paid.

That model still works today, but we’re down around that same 34% mark and from what I can tell so is everyone, across all industries. But I’d be naive to assume it’ll work the same way in 18 months.

Here’s the uncomfortable math: if organic traffic drops by even 20-30%, and organic is your dominant acquisition channel, no amount of conversion rate optimization saves you. You can have a best-in-class trial-to-paid flow and still miss your numbers because not enough people are entering the funnel in the first place.

It’s an exposure problem. And it requires a fundamentally different response than what most product teams are used to.

The Diagnostic Before the Panic

Before you restructure your entire growth strategy, there’s a critical diagnostic step that teams often skip. You need to know whether AI Overviews are actually appearing on YOUR highest-value queries.

Here’s the move:

  • Pull your top 50 keywords from Google Search Console. Look at click-through rate trends over the last 90 days, segmented by week.
  • The signature you’re looking for: stable or rising impressions, but declining CTR. That pattern means Google is showing your content in results, but users aren’t clicking because the AI Overview already gave them what they needed.
  • If your impressions are dropping, that’s a competitor or algorithm problem. If impressions are stable but clicks are falling, that’s AI Overview cannibalization. Different diagnosis, different treatment.

Most teams I talk to are just making this distinction. They’re looking at traffic declines and assuming it’s an SEO problem when it might be a platform shift problem. The difference matters.

Three Moves to Make Now

I’m not going to pretend I have the full playbook figured out. But here’s where my thinking is landing:

1. Shift discovery investment toward owned channels.
Email nurture sequences, community platforms, pastoral networks, partnerships with organizations that already have the audience. Organic search should be one of many channels, not the only one. Every dollar of effort I’m putting into SEO-driven top-of-funnel content I’m asking if that same effort in email or community would be more durable.

2. Make your paywall content genuinely irreplaceable.
AI can summarize a sermon outline. It cannot replicate a curated media pack, a professionally produced video series, or a workflow tool that saves someone three hours a week. The content that survives AI summarization is the content that requires depth, production value, or interactivity: things a search snippet can’t deliver.

3. Explore whether the threat is also an opportunity.
The NYT licensing deal tells us something important: Google is willing to pay for premium vertical content. If you’re the dominant content platform in your niche, there may be a deal to be made.

A licensing partnership could convert a traffic threat into a revenue stream while maintaining brand visibility inside AI-generated results. Worth exploring.

The Bigger Lesson

I keep coming back to something I’ve learned over the last few years leading product: the most dangerous risks are the ones that look like stability. Traffic holding steady today doesn’t mean the foundation isn’t shifting underneath.

Chegg’s team didn’t wake up one morning to a 34% traffic drop. It happened gradually, then suddenly. The chart looks normal until it doesn’t.

The product leaders who navigate this well will be the ones who diagnosed early, diversified before they had to, and built value that can’t be summarized in a paragraph. The ones who don’t will be staring at a chart they can’t explain and wondering where all the visitors went.

I’d rather be asking the hard questions now than explaining the traffic decline later.

Posted on

AI Just Walked Into Your Website Without Knocking

Last month I asked ChatGPT a question I’ve asked Google a thousand times: “What’s a good sermon illustration about forgiveness?”

It gave me a solid answer. Three illustrations, structured with context, application points, even a suggested closing line. It was genuinely useful.

And it never sent me to a single website.

That moment hit me differently than it would have two years ago. I run a platform with over 245,000 sermons and 50,000 illustrations. I didn’t just lose a click. I watched an AI system do what our product does, using content that likely came from sites like ours, and deliver it in a way that made visiting the source unnecessary.

That’s a revenue problem. (I wrote about the traffic implications of this shift recently.) (I wrote about the traffic implications of this shift recently.)

The Zero-Click Layer

Most product leaders I know are still thinking about AI as a feature to bolt onto their product: chatbots, smart search, AI-generated recommendations. And that matters. But there’s a bigger shift happening underneath that conversation.

AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity) are becoming the front door to the internet. They don’t just search. They visit your site, interpret your content, synthesize it, and serve it directly to the user. The user gets the answer. You get nothing.

Google’s featured snippets started this zero-click trend years ago. BUT what’s different now is the depth. A featured snippet pulls a paragraph. An AI answer engine can synthesize an entire page, or multiple pages, into a comprehensive response that genuinely satisfies the user’s intent.

If your business depends on organic traffic as a top-of-funnel engine, this should keep you up at night.

Your Content Library Is Both Your Greatest Asset and Your Biggest Vulnerability

Here’s the paradox I’ve been sitting with.

We spent years building one of the largest structured content libraries in our space. That library is what drives our organic traffic. It’s what Google indexes. It’s what pastors find when they search “sermon on grace” at 11pm on a Saturday night.

That same library is now what AI systems are ingesting to train their models and generate their answers. The very content that built our moat is being used to fill in the moat.

And here’s what makes it worse. The emerging AI-native competitors in our space don’t even need to win Google rankings. They ARE the AI tool. They’re built to live inside AI workflows, not compete for traditional search clicks.

I think this pattern applies to any SaaS company sitting on a large content asset. If you’ve built your growth engine on content that AI can summarize, you’re exposed.

AEO: A Genuinely Different Discipline

There’s a term gaining traction: AEO, or AI Engine Optimization. And I’ll be honest, my first reaction was skepticism. We don’t need another three-letter acronym.

But the more I’ve dug into it, the more I realize it represents a genuinely different discipline.

SEO optimizes for ranking. AEO optimizes for citation. The goal is to be the source that AI systems reference AND link back to. That requires a fundamentally different content strategy.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

  1. Structured data becomes non-negotiable. Schema markup, clear metadata, explicit problem-solution framing in your content. AI systems parse structure, not vibes. (Schema.org is the starting point.)
  2. Content architecture matters more than keyword density. How your content is organized (headers, relationships between pages, internal linking) determines how AI systems understand your authority on a topic.
  3. Gated content is a double-edged sword. If your best content is behind a login wall, AI crawlers can’t index it. You’re invisible to the answer engine. But if everything is open, you get summarized without a click. The play is in the middle: structured preview content that AI can cite, with depth that requires the visit.
  4. Domain-specific language is your moat. Generic content gets synthesized away. Content that uses the precise language of your audience (the way a pastor describes their Saturday night prep struggle, the specific vocabulary of sermon structure) is harder for AI to replace and more likely to be cited with attribution.

What I’m Doing About It

I’m not going to pretend I have this figured out. But here’s where my head is:

Audit how AI sees us. Before optimizing anything, we need to understand how our top pages render to AI crawlers. What structured data exists? What’s behind login walls that blocks indexing?

Treat AI referral as a distinct channel. We track direct traffic, organic search, paid. AI referral needs its own lane in our analytics. We can’t optimize what we can’t measure.

Build content AI can’t summarize away. The full sermon text? AI can handle that. But a pastor’s framework for adapting a sermon to their specific congregation? A diagnostic tool for matching an illustration to a particular emotional moment in a service? That’s interactive, personalized, and requires being on the platform.

Move faster than the AI-native competitors. They have the structural advantage of being built for AI workflows. We have the structural advantage of 20+ years of trusted content and relationships. The question is whether we can adapt our distribution before they build our depth.

The Strategies That Got You Here Won’t Sustain You

I keep coming back to this. The strategies that built organic growth over the last decade won’t sustain it over the next five years.

That’s a reason to move, not a reason to panic.

The companies that treat AI answer engines as a new channel will capture disproportionate share of the next era of discovery. The ones that keep optimizing for Google page one while AI summarizes their content into zero-click answers will watch their traffic erode and wonder what happened.

I’d rather be early and wrong about the tactics than late and right about the trend.

The AI just walked into your website. The question is whether it’s going to send people your way, or make visiting you unnecessary.