Where have our web visitors gone?

Has traffic started to decline on your site? - Then you are not alone! When search engines quickly give users the answer they are looking for directly on the search page, there's no reason to click on the link in the results list. More and more people no longer even use search engines, but instead ask an AI directly, which spits out the answer in a few seconds. The decrease in website traffic today is therefore not just a technical change at Google and Microsoft, but a whole new way of interacting with data and services on the internet.

In two articles, we will go through how you can think about optimizing your site for AI agents and thereby better reach your target audience. In this article, we focus more on the organizational part, and in the next article, we will delve deeper into technical details.

Briefly before we get started

Even if the use of AI has led to a decrease in clicks on links to your site, it may still be wise to double-check that nothing else is disrupting traffic:

• Verify that the entire site is up
• Perform an SEO analysis
• Perform a competitive analysis

A small dictionary

As always, when new technology is emerging, new words and concepts follow that we must remember. There are variations of these, and some will surely change or be replaced before they are fully established, but this is the list we are using today:

Zero-click – Achieving your goal without having to click on a link or button.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) – Optimizing your site for AI agents.
Agent experience (AX) – Helping AI agents reach available services.
Zero UI – A user flow where interactions in browsers/apps are rationalized away and AI agents can perform the task autonomously

Content is more important than ever

Even if all users no longer reach your site, there is still an opportunity to get your messages and offers out. When an AI selects which sender's message reaches the user instead of letting the user choose themselves, it should choose your site! It can therefore be a good idea to optimize the content for the AI agents that scan your site. This is in many respects similar to the SEO work you already do today. There are many different variants for what this is called, but we have chosen the one we think is most common today, and that is GEO.

Optimizing for AI agents

You get a lot for free by making your site accessible. This makes it easier for an AI agent to read and understand the content. Feel free to read our article on web accessibility.

A rule of thumb is that content that is easy for a human to read and understand is good for both SEO and GEO. This does not mean that texts should be simplified; instead, they should be formatted in an accessible way. Avoid long sentences with multiple subordinate clauses and triple negatives; these are difficult for both humans and AI agents to understand. Dividing the text into several clear paragraphs is also a good recommendation.

Unlike a search engine, an AI agent can handle images on your site. Therefore, it can be a good idea to test your images by uploading them to some AI services and see if they can identify what the images are intended to illustrate.

One way to incorporate this approach into daily work is to view the AI agent as a new non-human persona using your service; in this way, you naturally integrate the work into your current UX process.

Test your site

Just as with SEO, it is important to test your site so that it collaborates with AI agents. There are several different services online that scan the entire site and provide you with suggestions for improvements.

You can also ask some AI services directly and see what they think of your site. Try with slightly different formulations that you think your future customers would use:

• “Can you recommend a company that delivers service X in city Y?”.

• “What benefits do I get from joining this membership club?”.

Or why not ask an AI directly if a page is well adapted?

• “Is this page well adapted to be understood and recommended by an AI model”?

Next steps

As shown, quite a lot has already been gained with the accessibility adjustments and the SEO work you have already done. Some adjustments to the content may need to be made. The advantage of this work is that you can get direct answers from the services you are trying to optimize for.

In the next article, we will go into the more technical aspects of GEO. See you then!