How to Get Traffic from AI "Search Engines"

How AI decides who to cite

I don’t talk about AI much in this newsletter.

Part of the reason is that everyone won’t shut up about it. It’s annoying AF hearing everyone talk about the exact same thing over and over again (I keep clicking the “not interested in this” button on the AI hype vids on YT but the algo won’t stop showing them to me).

Another reason is because the discourse around AI is starting to seem mind virus-y, which never fails to give me existential thoughts about individualism and the nature of human consciousness, which always ends up freaking me out because I start thinking weird thoughts like “the only rational conclusion here is that I’m the only sentient human being on the planet and everyone else is just an avatar/NPC put on earth to see how I (i.e. the lone sentient creature) will react to them”.

People will be normal and then all of a sudden start talking like lunatics saying things like: “This is going to change everything bro. Wars will never be the same.”

I read this stuff and I’m like “brother you’re a 37yo cubicle jockey in an office park in the suburbs of Kansas City whose biggest accomplishment in life is negotiating a sweet benefits package (“I went in there and I told them I want a 7.5% match on my 401k and three weeks paid vacation or I walk”), how/when did you become an expert on warfare?”

It’s completely nuts.

Even if we narrow our focus down to the SEO/online marketing world; I’m still not seeing much of an impact.

Despite all the talk about “AI disrupting search”, the vast majority of my traffic comes from Google and other classic search engines (plus Reddit, which is of course all totally organic😉)

Here’s a screenshot from Analytics for one of my biggest sites.