AI Visibility, GEO, and the Coming Drop in Organic Traffic

Darren and Mojtaba

AI answer engines are changing how content is discovered. This article explains why organic traffic is declining, how AI systems interpret content, and what companies need to do to stay visible.

What’s Happening

AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini — are becoming a primary discovery layer. They replace traditional search clicks with direct, aggregated responses. As this shifts user behaviour, brands are asking how their content becomes visible to AI systems, API agents, and LLM-driven assistants.

At the same time, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is emerging: preparing content so AI models can understand it, extract it, and represent it accurately in generated answers.

Why It Matters

Organic traffic is falling even when rankings stay stable, as recent reports and related studies show.

AI tools depend on structured, machine-readable content. Clear hierarchy, metadata, and predictable formatting shape how models interpret information — and whether it’s included in responses at all. Traditional SEO is no longer enough; AI visibility has become its own requirement.

How AI actually reads your content

Large language models don’t read webpages the way people do, and they don’t interpret content the way traditional search engines do either. They don’t see layout, design, or visual hierarchy. Instead, they process content as a stream of text and markup, broken down into smaller units and analyzed for patterns.

This means structure matters more than presentation. Clear headings, predictable formatting, and well-defined sections make it easier for AI systems to understand what a page is about and which parts are relevant. Content that feels obvious to a human reader can become ambiguous to a model if its structure doesn’t clearly signal meaning.

Modern AI answer engines also retrieve content before generating responses. Rather than ranking a single page, they pull information from multiple sources, synthesize it, and present an answer — sometimes without linking at all. In this context, being easy to retrieve and interpret is just as important as being discoverable.

That’s why AI visibility isn’t only about keywords or rankings. It’s about making sure your content can be correctly understood, extracted, and represented when AI systems generate answers.

What Companies Need to Do

AI visibility is early and evolving. The most effective approach today combines technical clarity, structured content, and small targeted experiments supported by tracking.

Make content easier for AI systems to crawl and interpret

Add an llms.txt file to signal which areas of the site are intended for AI crawlers and how they should be accessed.
Provide markdown versions of content (e.g., blogs, docs) using .md URL variants. Markdown is predictable and easy for LLMs to parse.
Use “Open in ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity” buttons or widgets so users — and models — can cleanly transfer content into AI assistants.

Make your site readable for AI systems

We built a free llms.txt generator to make this easy. It scans your content and produces a clean, structured file you can ship in minutes.

Learn more in Introducing our llms.txt generator.

Strengthen technical SEO foundations

Many classic SEO practices directly support AI visibility:

clear metadata and JSON-LD/schema
consistent, predictable URL patterns
server-rendered or statically available content
minimal JavaScript dependence for core text
logical headings and readable structure

If content is straightforward for traditional crawlers, AI systems benefit as well.

Track how AI agents interact with the site

Because LLM crawler behaviour is still emerging, tracking is essential:

monitor requests to llms.txt
track hits on .md versions
measure clicks on “Open in” widgets
observe traffic from AI-related user agents
identify which pages AI crawlers are trying to fetch

This reveals what’s actually being consumed — not what teams assume is being used.

How We Can Help

As discovery shifts from search engines to AI systems, brands need to make sure their websites remain visible, understandable, and accurately represented inside AI-generated answers.

We support teams through this transition by helping them adapt from traditional SEO to Generative Engine Optimization, without putting existing organic traffic at risk.

That includes:

strengthening how content is structured and exposed to AI systems
improving clarity so AI models interpret information correctly
supporting visibility across emerging AI answer engines
introducing practical tools and patterns that help teams stay ahead as this space evolves

The focus isn’t on rebuilding for the sake of change. It’s on ensuring your website continues to work as a discovery channel in an AI-first landscape.

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