Why everything and nothing will change when AI dominates the internet

I’ve been mulling over and reading about this for a while, and this is my first stab at articulating how I approach riding this wave. As the landscape changes, I’m sure my perspective and understanding will evolve rapidly. But this is a stake in the ground for mid-2025. Buckle up, it’s a big one.  

When I started my business at the beginning of 2020, the big challenge was COVID. Now, almost 6 years later, the major marketing/business disruption of this moment is AI. We have a situation in which digital marketing was built for Google 1.0, but that's not the playing field any longer. Google 1.0 was an internet where there was a bargain between Google and businesses in which, in exchange for jumping through all the SEO hoops, Google would send traffic to websites. Now, that deal is broken. Generative AI engines like Chat GPT and Claude came, and now Google is playing a different game with its AI overviews too. The landscape just shifted under our feet, big time. So we’re pivoting, again.

However, the biggest change isn’t so much how we write or what content we create, as what we measure, and what we consider "success". These are the two big things I want to explore because my understanding of this situation underpins my approach to my clients’ marketing as we all try to ride this wave.

Why human-first is still the best approach to AI-driven marketing

It used to be that you could game the SEO system and trick Google. People did things like link-stuffing, keyword-stuffing, and manipulating directories to inflate the number of backlinks. Tricks like that were never a good idea in the first place, and definitely don’t work anymore.

I believe we have reached peak digital, and in many ways, we’re getting back to the basics of human psychology as the driving force for marketing, without much of the digital sludge that has gummed up the internet over the past decade. It’s not a bad thing from a consumer’s perspective, but it does provide marketers and businesses with a whole new rule book to follow.

Marketing is about people

Ultimately, business is about people, so marketing is about people – getting people to do things. And all of the internet is about people, too. Google itself talks about its EEAT framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). EEAT helps Google determine if a website provides helpful, reliable, and trustworthy information to people. Google does this, not because it’s nice, but because it’s good business – if it can provide a helpful experience to searchers, it can capture eyeballs, and then sell those eyeballs to the highest bidder. However, the side effect of this is that Google wants to provide a good user experience for people and help them get the information they want as fast as possible. In 2025, that might mean providing the answer in an AI Overview, rather than sending someone to a website - but the AI Overview still needs to pull from somewhere.

Google and users want trustworthy answers to their questions so that’s what businesses and marketers need to provide, in whatever format. Even though the packaging may change (video, vs blog, vs social media post, vs infographic, etc), we still want to show that we are authoritative, experienced experts that our audience can trust. We’re writing for people. AI may be scraping our words, Google’s bots may be crawling our sites, but it’s all in service of the people who want this information, and who will hopefully eventually buy whatever we’re selling.

Keep the robots happy, but your audience happier.

If you want to thrive in the next tumultuous decade of marketing, keep in mind that your audience is people, not robots. The robots are the gatekeepers, and we need to keep them happy, but (at least until the AI singularity happens), ultimately, the robots serve the people. My overall message is: stay the course. If your business and your marketing is truly focused on what your audience wants from you, it will still work. There will be new hoops to jump through and new marketing tactics to try, but ultimately this game is about people so get to know your people.

There are some things we’ll need to change, though – and our definition of success is one of them.

Why we need to be careful what we measure

What you measure will determine your sense of success, so be careful. For a start, don’t worry so much about organic search and website traffic rising. The trends are unlikely to be the same in the future. Gartner predicts that by 2028, brands’ organic search traffic will decrease by 50% or more as consumers embrace generative AI-powered search. Clicks aren’t the indicator of success anymore. So, if Google isn’t sending people to your website, how can you get in front of them? This is where the rest of the internet ecosystem comes into play.

The new world of zero-click

It used to be that the whole point of using social media, etc, was to drive people to your website and convert them into leads from there. That’s unlikely to happen so much in the future. For a start, these other platforms’ algorithms are disincentivizing you from leaving their website. They certainly don’t want to drive traffic away. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a role to play; it’s just going to be harder to trace the impact on your business.

Social media, YouTube, etc, are still used to discover companies, and Google certainly shows them in search results. And people will interact with your content on these platforms, they just might not click on anything further. That doesn’t mean they don’t matter, though, because they’re still a puzzle piece in the trust you’re building with your audience. Also, because Google uses them to check the consistency of your message, and build trust, they're important for SEO.

Make every touchpoint matter

According to Focus Digital, the average number of touchpoints someone needs before they buy from you is 28.87 (depending on industry). This is an absurdly high number. Marketing folklore used to say it required 7 touches. Not anymore. If it’s going to need many more touchpoints before someone will buy, you need to be in more places, and the right places.

And if the platforms and Google aren’t going to send traffic to your website, then the content people see needs to be valuable in its own right, wherever it is. Reading a post on social media, is still a touchpoint and contributes to trust-building, even if it doesn't result in traffic.

Think creating awareness, establishing trust, and building business

The new world looks a lot like the old world, before we were able to track people perfectly across the internet and say that this Facebook post resulted in that campaign’s success. The world is becoming fuzzier again. We have to go back to the bigger picture metrics rather than focusing on the granular data we’ve had the luxury of analyzing for the last 15 years.

It’s increasingly hard to say precisely what aspect of a marketing system resulted in business success. Even if you ask clients where they heard of you/how they came to you, it’s unlikely to have been due to that one magical touchpoint. If it takes 28+ touchpoints for someone to want to work with you, then that LinkedIn ad probably just sealed the deal. They’ve probably been watching you for a while on a variety of platforms, and something triggered them to want to work with you now.

The trouble with no attribution

This is a frustrating reality for everyone. It’s frustrating for the business owner who wants to know where they should be spending (and cutting) their marketing budget. And it’s frustrating for marketers who want to be able to say THIS is the thing that worked. But people are messy, and marketing is messy. If you want, you can experiment with taking away parts of your marketing system and see what breaks – the DOGE approach, if you will. But not that many people want to take that risk, and when they do, the marketer inevitably gets it in the neck because they let the number of leads drop!

For me, it’s all about the business trends over time. It’s the impact on the business’s leads coming in, sales cycle length, customer retention, customer growth, etc. But those are long-term plays.

How to measure by proxy

At the marketing level, we may have to start satisfying ourselves with proxies rather than direct measurements. If people aren’t going to come to the website through keywords and organic search, how about we measure people looking for us specifically? If they’ve been pointed our way, it stands to reason that they’ll just type in the business name, rather than their search term.

Is the Direct traffic on your website growing? Is the referral traffic growing because other websites are linking to you? How is your Google Business Profile performing? If you are a business with a specific location, people may interact directly with that, rather than going to your website. How are your Google Search Console impressions performing? If you’re showing up related to what people are searching for, that’s good, even if they’re not coming to the website. All of those touchpoints add up, and when they’re ready, those people will get in touch. It might be a phone call out of the blue, or someone sends you a message on Facebook, but believe me, they will have seen another 28+ touchpoints from you somewhere.

Ultimately, exactly what we measure will change as technology changes but we want to be measuring things that are indicative of someone a) discovering you, b) learning more about you, c) gaining trust in you, and d) wanting to work with you. We just need to measure what we can to indicate someone is moving along their individual journey towards working with you. It’s know/like/trust, it’s the customer journey, it’s the steps every human takes before they want to commit to something. It’s not necessarily linear, it’s not necessarily quick, and it’s definitely messy – but it’s the reality of human behavior.