Beyond Page Views: Adapting to an A.I.-Driven Web

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SEO seems like putting fires and stakeholder management a lot recently...

Search is changing because of AI features and bots, and everyone has valid concerns about traffic to informational content which has taken a hit (or a further hit 😄) in 2025:

But Google just came back for more by releasing the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) where searchers will be able to checkout directly in AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app.

So what does all of that mean? where is SEO heading? is it dead.... like finally dead? 😄

Nope... buckle up, and read on...

Traffic as a metric

For so long, all we cared about as SEOs was traffic, or for the biggest part of our reporting. A lot of businesses specifically publishers, bloggers, and news website also rely heavily on the traffic volume for their revenue model.

Don't get me wrong, we should continue to report on traffic, but as more features are introduced to search, and as user behavior generally changes on how they look and find information and products we need to adapt.

Traffic was always a flawed metric, because it treated all searchers as having equal business value, when in reality, they don’t. That’s the idea behind this newsletter’s hero image: a scale weighing apples and oranges as if they were the same, even though they clearly aren’t.

What we need to focus on is drums roll 🥁🥁🥁

Conversions/Business Value

Is anyone surprised?... the how is what so many people in this industry are trying to establish frameworks for, and so should you.

Takeaway 1: adapt your SEO metrics... beyond the page views and clicks

The Business Model...Poddle

Once upon a time, a website was very successful in search, but then came the winds of change and... they lost... sounds familiar?

Stack Over Flow has a similar story, they lost traffic... a lot of it, because of AI bots like chatgpt:

"Unlike Chegg and other knowledge hubs that have fallen victim to generative AI, Stack Overflow has found a way to monetize its enormous back catalog of content." [source]

They doubled their revenue to $115 million despite a drop in traffic.
While mass layoffs and cost-cutting played a role, the most decisive factor in their survival was something no amount of cuts alone could achieve: they adapted their business model.

They switched from being reliant on ad revenue from their forum page views to:

• Stack Overflow now primarily makes money from enterprise products like Stack Internal—a generative-AI add-on trained on the millions of questions and answers the site has built up over the years. This is now used by more than 25,000 companies around the world - bravo Stack Overflow 👏👏👏
• Licensing their data to AI companies. You know who else does this? Reddit.

You know what else kept them floating? Branded searches! Here's how their brand maintained searchers interest throughout 2025 (data via Google trends). The dip is due to the December Holidays.

Now compare this story to that of Tailwind CSS. They relied heavily on traffic to their documentation, which funneled users to purchase their commercial products. Their traffic went down by 40% because of AI platforms, which caused 80% drop in their revenue... that's massive.

It never feels good to point to other companies’ challenges as examples. But there are real lessons here for all of us. I wish them all the best while they navigate this situation....

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

I guess the lesson today is "adapt or die".... as harsh as it may sound there's no other way. Adapt your metrics, adapt your business model... just adapt.

Thanks for reading so far folks and see you next newsletter!

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Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.