Something I have been watching recently is my SEO traffic dropping, which has had an obvious effect on sales. So I have been trying to figure out whether this is specific to me or part of a broader trend.

Tim Ferriss, the author of The 4-Hour Workweek, published a very interesting piece on how his how-to nonfiction sales have changed as AI tools became the first place people go for quick answers. His sales are down 50% year-over-year, two years in a row.

Something broader is happening here.

For years, the marketing funnel was pretty simple: someone searched Google, found a helpful article, learned to trust the person or business behind it, and maybe eventually bought something.

That was the deal. You created helpful content. Google sent people to it. Some of those people became customers. Potential customers could evaluate your paid products based on how helpful your free products were.

In the Google world, if your article helped answer the question, you had a decent chance of getting the click. In the AI world, your article may help answer the question without the person ever seeing your name, visiting your site, joining your email list, or buying your product.

Tim Soulo shared that Ahrefs has been analyzing more than 1 billion data points across 14 AI search optimization studies, and this finding jumped out: “ChatGPT only cites about 50% of the URLs it retrieves. It fetches dozens of pages per query but uses half as background context without attribution. This means that being retrieved and being cited are very different things.”

A big fear people have is that AI might replace what you sell, but I'm much more concerned with not getting to meet potential customers. Without reaching them, you're just building in the dark.

I do not have a clean solution to this yet. I’m still trying to understand it myself. But the thing I’m watching is not just whether AI can make better products or write better code. I’m watching where people go to get their problems solved. When AI can't solve a problem, where does the person go?

The search → article → trust → purchase funnel is breaking down, so it's time to start imagining different funnel structures and marketing channels.