Six months ago, I shared that our search-driven traffic had dropped 17% in the prior 6 months.
The root cause? AI.
It was driving me nuts.
SEO and especially non-branded terms had helped to drive 10X growth in website traffic since 2020
There seemed to be two significant factors behind this – both are AI-related.
- Search Generative AI (SGA) takes up half the real estate on the first page in many Google search results. SGA, aka AI Overviews in Google, took up half the first page of the first page of Search results. The other half were expanded paid results. So when HLP web pages ranked in the top 3, they were pushed to the second page of search results.
- Using AI to write content hurts search rankings. I had been using Claude a little too liberally to help write blog posts. Many SEO experts told me that Google is better at spotting when someone has used AI and penalized the rankings.
To counteract this, I did several things:
- Stopped using AI to write posts. While I use it in researching, analyzing, and creating outlines, I don’t use it to write anymore.
- Doubled down on social: Over the last six months, we have increased our presence on LinkedIn and YouTube and gone all out on the podcast.
- Focused on our Superpowers – Healthtech and ABM expertise. We have gone all in on creating educational content for healthtech marketing leaders with a big focus on strategy.
So what happened?
We have stopped the decline. It looks like our search-driven traffic is now flat.
It’s a bummer that SEO-driven traffic growth rates have not returned to pre-AI days, but I will take flat for now.
The good news is that:
Inbound opportunities continue to come in and continue to account for 1/2 our new account wins
And our content are appearing in Perplexity search results. We even had one new business meeting that originated from Perplexity.
Overall….
Progress not perfection.
What are you finding? Is AI impacting your SEO?