
The way people find content online is fundamentally changing. What once worked reliably to bring visitors to your site is now being disrupted by artificial intelligence. The data tells the sobering story.
Nearly 60% of searches now end without anyone clicking to a website (SparkToro, 2024). On mobile, that figure jumps to 77%. When Google's AI Overviews appear at the top of results—which now happens for roughly 13% of queries—click-through rates plummet by nearly half. Users get their answer without ever leaving the search page, and your carefully crafted content becomes invisible training data.
The average website visitor spends just 54 seconds on a page before leaving. But when users engage with conversational AI like ChatGPT, average session times exceed 14 minutes—more than 15 times longer. People increasingly prefer the back-and-forth dialogue of an AI agent to the hunt-and-scroll experience of traditional web browsing. If your site can't capture attention in seconds, visitors are gone.
The long tail once meant opportunity—hundreds of specific questions your content could answer. Now, AI provides complete answers to those queries in a single generated paragraph. What used to drive steady discovery traffic has been replaced by zero-click summaries. Publishers across industries are seeing 10–40% traffic declines year-over-year, even when their rankings stay the same. The clicks that powered your content strategy simply aren't materializing anymore.
If you had a question, you'd ask a search engine, get the results, and look through them by visiting several websites to find the answer that best fit your needs.
When you have a question, you can ask a chat-based AI application, it searches through the results and compiles the answer neatly for you, presenting it in a friendly conversational manner.
When you join, your content is converted into three machine-readable formats within your Smart Directory profile. Our goal is not to game the algorithms, but to speak their language. The combination of clean Markdown, semantically-correct JSON-LD, and semantically-indexed expertise ensures you are understood, not overlooked.
As AI-powered search competes more with traditional SEO, these formats enable language models trained on structured data to accurately cite you and your services through the content they find on your Smart Directory profile. Premium members can bring this powerful new form of contextual engagement to their sites with the Smart Chat agent.
Sample code snippets to illustrate the technical concept. Not actual code.
AI search is evolving fast. By understanding how to structure your content now, you're taking the steps you need to prepare for:
ChatGPT Apps and other AI assistants
Google's AI Overviews
Voice assistants and conversational interfaces
Visitors ask questions in their own words
They get answers from YOUR content
They engage longer, understand more, trust your brand
They get to know you, not just skim and bounce