"Your website is no longer a magazine for humans to read. It is a structured database for machines to ingest." - Futurist Jim Carroll
Watch this video.
You need to understand why your Web traffic collapsing.
Essentially, fewer people will browse your Website. Machines will. You need to make it friendly for them.
Since this post is all about AI (and since I've got a tee time in 81 minutes!), I've had Claude AI summarize the video.
Tomorrow, I'll explain to you what to do about it.
There are two internets now: the one you browse, and the one AI crawls for facts it can confidently repeat. It doesn't care about your branding — only whether it can verify who you are.
That's Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). I rebuilt parts of my site around it:
Welcome mat — plain-text files (bio, client list, an llms.txt "table of contents") sitting right at the door, with AI crawlers explicitly let in.
Labels it can't misread — invisible tags marking job titles, verified quotes, and over a thousand videos, plus a direct line letting AI agents request specific info instead of reading whole pages.
Outside vouching — Wikipedia, Wikidata, and a verified Google Business Profile, so the proof doesn't just come from me.
Line all of it up, and AI stops guessing about you — it cites you instead.
So: is your site built for humans only, or for the machines reading it on their behalf too?
Futurist Jim Carroll was going to do a longer explainer post but there were thunderstorms overnight and so he slept in and he is going to keep faithful to his tee time.