what does everyone do when a channel you built your business on starts shifting under your feet
not being dramatic. genuinely asking.
built our customer acquisition around organic search over four years. good content, strong domain authority, decent rankings for the terms that matter. it worked. not perfectly but well enough to grow steadily.
then two things happened at the same time.
google started surfacing ai answers for a lot of our key queries. the clicks we used to get from ranking well started going somewhere else.
and our customers started using ai tools to research before they even reached google. so even when we ranked well we were sometimes being skipped because the customer had already formed a view from their ai research.
both of those things together have changed the economics of what we built.
organic search still works. it is not gone. but the margin for error is smaller and the channels sitting above it in the customer journey are ones we have not historically needed to think about.
so now i am thinking about them. 8% citation share in ai search. built it myself over five months. it is a start.