AI Answers Are Eating My Search Traffic: Six Months of Watching the Line Go Down
Tuesday morning, coffee, analytics tab. Same ritual for years. Lately I open it the way you open a bill you already know the number on.
The shape of the drop is the interesting part. It wasn’t everything at once. It was specific pages, and once I sorted them properly, the pattern was almost embarrassing.
Everything that answered a question in one paragraph is gone. Definitions. “What is X.” “How many Y in Z.” Those posts used to bring steady, boring, reliable traffic for years. They now bring almost nothing, because the answer sits at the top of the results page and nobody needs to click through to a stranger’s website to read one sentence they already have.
What survived: posts where I did something and reported back. Posts with my own photos in them. Posts with an opinion someone might want to argue with. Comparison posts where I actually owned both things. Anything with a number I generated myself instead of repeating.
That’s the whole lesson, really, and I keep circling it.
The stuff I tried that didn’t help
Rewriting old posts to be “more comprehensive.” Made them longer. Didn’t move anything. If the machine already has the answer, a longer version of the answer isn’t a reason to visit.
Adding FAQ blocks. Felt like feeding the thing that’s eating me.
Chasing the technical checklist. Schema, headings, internal links, all of it. Fine hygiene, zero rescue. My fastest, cleanest, best-structured pages died just as hard as the messy ones.
The stuff that did
Publishing things nobody else can publish. Sounds like a fortune cookie. In practice it means: my own photographs, my own screenshots, my own count of something I counted, my own account of a thing going wrong.
Being narrower. A post about a specific model of a specific thing, with the serial number quirks and the part that broke, still pulls people. The general overview doesn’t.
Writing like a person. I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it. The polished, hedged, five-paragraph register reads like the machine because the machine learned it from us. It offers a reader nothing they can’t get for free somewhere faster.
What I’m actually doing now
Fewer posts, more first-hand ones. I’d rather publish two things a week that only I could have written than ten that a model could generate on request.
I’m also treating search as one channel out of several instead of the channel. That’s less of a strategy and more of an adjustment to reality.
The honest part: I don’t think the old numbers come back. There was a period where being an early, careful, reasonably well-organised website was enough, and that period is over. Fine. It was a strange arrangement anyway.
I still open the tab on Tuesday. Habit.