People tend to introduce me as someone who builds websites.
Fair enough, that’s the output. But most of what I’ve actually spent my career doing is sitting further upstream of that, in conversations with people who think they need a new website long before anyone’s touched a homepage. By the time a build actually happens, the real work is usually already done. The website is just where it becomes visible.
I mention that because it’s the lens I read everything through, including a great piece recently by Louise Cohen in her Cultural Content newsletter, “Goodbye to Google search as we know it – and what to do about it”. Worth your time. It sparked some thinking for me that went in a slightly different direction, which is usually the sign of a good article.
The framing I keep seeing generally is that Google is doing something to us. Rolling out an answer engine, killing organic traffic, forcing everyone to relearn SEO. All true, as far as it goes. But here’s a different way of looking at it. Google didn’t create this shift. We did. Google is just catching up to how impatient we’ve all become.
Why we ever clicked through in the first place
Think about why organic search worked for twenty years. You typed a question, Google handed you a page of links, and you clicked through to a website because that was, genuinely, the fastest and most reliable way to get your answer. The website visit wasn’t the point. It was the mechanism. Google sent you there because it served your interest to go.
That mechanism only survives as long as it’s the fastest option. It isn’t anymore. An AI answer is quicker than a click, a page load, and a scroll past a cookie banner to find the one sentence you actually wanted. It also removes a risk that clicking through never has: the risk of landing on a badly built site that wastes ten minutes of your life for nothing. We’ve all been there. Google’s own results didn’t fully solve that problem. AI answers, for a huge chunk of queries, effectively do.
So when people say “search traffic is dying,” what’s actually dying is our patience for anything that isn’t instant. I don’t need a study to tell me that, I hear it in almost every one of those upstream conversations I mentioned. Nobody says it in those words, but what they’re describing is always some version of wanting the answer now, not after a click.
“Our brains are being trained by finger snap speed. That’s not a Google product decision. That’s just what we’re like now, and Google is responding to it, not causing it.” Joe Perkins – MD @ Chaptr
What that actually demands of your content
If speed and trust are what’s winning, then the job changes in two very specific ways, and neither of them is about traffic volume.
First, your content needs to be built in a format that’s easy to lift and answer with. Clear structure, direct answers, information that doesn’t require three paragraphs of scene setting before it gets to the point. If an AI system is going to summarise your event, your programme, your organisation to someone who never visits your site, you want it summarising the right thing, accurately, because you made that easy rather than because it guessed well.
Second, and this is the bit I think gets skipped over: you actually need to know what questions people are asking. Not the keywords you assume they’re typing, the real questions, in their own words, about your programme. Most organisations I’ve worked with are still guessing at this rather than genuinely capturing it. That’s not a technology gap. It’s a research gap, and it’s one of the more overlooked opportunities in the whole conversation right now, because almost nobody is doing it properly yet.
Websites become more important, not less
Here’s the part I think the “traffic is dying” framing gets backwards entirely. If fewer people are landing on your site out of casual curiosity, and more are landing because they’ve already decided you’re relevant to them, then your website has just become a higher stakes destination, not a lower value one. Every visit now represents someone closer to a decision than the average visitor did five years ago. You’ve been handed a smaller room, but everyone left in it is worth more.
That’s the exact moment we spend most of our time on: the point where someone has landed on a specific event, a specific artist, a specific production, and is deciding whether it’s worth their evening. We’ve been quietly running a deeper piece of research into exactly this since, looking specifically at how organisations handle that browse to decide moment. It’s not published yet, but the early findings aren’t flattering, and I’ll be sharing more soon.
If that visitor arrives already close to booking and your event page still assumes it needs to sell them on the basics, who, what, when, why, and how to book, clearly, in the first screen, you’ve wasted the one advantage a high intent visitor gives you.
The gap that’s easiest to miss
Where I do think there’s a genuinely overlooked opportunity is in how an organisation’s programme actually connects to what a customer sees. In a lot of the CMS work we do, there’s rarely a straight line running from how the organisation thinks about its own programme, through to how that’s structured behind the scenes, through to the plain language a visitor reads on the What’s On page. Three different versions of the same information, evolved separately over time. Nobody did this on purpose. It’s just what happens when a site gets updated by whoever has time that month rather than by design.
That gap matters more now, not less, because a fragmented internal structure makes it harder for anything, human or AI, to represent your programme clearly. Closing it isn’t really a technology project. It’s an editorial and structural one, and it’s usually smaller and cheaper to fix than people assume once someone actually maps it.
The conversation that actually slows this down
If I’m honest, the hardest part of any of this rarely turns out to be technical. It’s getting a board to agree on what a website is actually worth. There’s often a real difference in how people around the same table think about it: some see it intuitively as core infrastructure, the thing that does the job of reaching and converting an audience, and others still file it mentally as a brochure they paid for once and would rather not think about again. You can make the sharpest possible case about intent and content structure and it won’t move the needle if that underlying disagreement about value hasn’t been resolved first.
Where I’d start
Not a rebuild. Three things, in order:
- Find out what people are actually asking. Real questions, in their own words, wherever you can capture them, rather than assumed keywords.
- Map the gap between how your programme runs internally and how it’s described publicly. An afternoon with a whiteboard usually reveals more than a technical audit does.
- Make every event page answer who, what, when, why, and how to book in the first screen. Assume the visitor already leaned toward yes before they arrived.
None of this is really about Google. It’s about you and me and what we expect. It’s about humans. Google is just trying to keep us happy. The discipline underneath it is the same as it’s always been: understand what someone actually needs from a page before deciding what goes on it. The difference now is that the visitors who reach you are fewer and worth considerably more, and there’s nowhere left to hide a page that doesn’t do its job.
If you want an outside view on how your own What’s On journey is handling this moment, that’s exactly the conversation our What’s On / Audience Builder Audit is built to start. Contact us.