Your website is still built for your customers. That part hasn't changed. What's changed is who shows up on your site representing that customer, especially the first few times. Increasingly, it's a bot. An AI crawler or assistant reads your pages on someone else's behalf and decides whether to cite your content, mention your brand, or send them your way at all. The bot isn't a new audience. It's a proxy for the one you've always had.
Akamai estimates that bots now account for up to 70% of all website traffic. Not spam bots, not scrapers looking to steal your pricing page. AI crawlers, agents, and assistants reading your site to answer someone else's question, somewhere else.
Few projected this happening so fast. Bot traffic overtaking human traffic on the open web was supposed to be a "someday" problem. But, it's a today problem.
And it gets worse for anyone still relying on search rankings to drive traffic their way. Forbes reports that nearly 60% of all searches now end without a click. Someone searches, gets their answer directly in the results or in a chat window, and moves on. They never see your homepage.
Your customers are getting answered without you
Here's the part that should actually keep you up at night. Your prospective customers are asking ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity the exact questions your website used to answer. If your brand isn't mentioned in that response, and if you're not cited as the source, you don't exist in that moment. It doesn't matter how good your site is if nobody ever gets sent to it or your company’s brand isn’t mentioned.
So the job isn't just "have a good website" anymore. It's two jobs.
Get your website optimized for bots.
This is a solvable, mostly technical problem at this point. Tools like Scrunch, Constructor, and Profound will show you exactly how AI platforms see your pages, whether you're being cited, and where you're losing ground to competitors. This is table stakes now, not a nice-to-have.
Example: AI visibility and citation performance across monitored prompts
Get optimized everywhere else too.
AI answers don't just pull from your website. They pull from YouTube, Wikipedia, Reddit, review sites, and forums. If your brand doesn't have a real, credible presence in those places, you're invisible in the answer even if your own site is flawless. Bot-optimizing your website solves one input. It doesn't solve the other four or five inputs the AI is actually weighing.
If you're thinking through this challenge, our latest perspective takes a deeper look at how AI search is changing brand visibility.
 | Winning Brand Visibility in the Age of AI: How AI Search Is Changing the Way Brands Are Discovered |