The Horizon Commerce Team was recently invited to Optimizely’s Opticon where Shafqat Islam, President of Optimizely and Nazanin Ramezani, VP of Product, discussed an important conundrum many brands are facing with the rise of AI – More impressions, fewer clicks — it feels unfair, right? But here’s the truth: your website isn’t dying. It’s evolving .
What’s Going On?
AI has changed the rules of the internet. 42% of Google Search queries now have AI overviews making the need to find the information on your website less relevant to users.
- Zero-click is the new normal: Google and AI engines answer questions directly — no click needed.
- Trust has shifted: People believe AI summaries more than scrolling through your carefully designed pages.
- Bots are scraping like crazy: OpenAI and Anthropic crawl your site thousands of times before they ever send you a single visitor.
- Searches are longer, weirder, more human: “Best project management tools for a 5-person fully remote design agency with clients in Europe” — that’s the kind of query showing up now.
In short: AI engines are the new front door to your brand.
The Old Scoreboard Is Broken
Website traffic, engagement, rankings… they still matter, but they’re not the whole picture anymore.
The new scoreboard looks more like this:
- Do you show up in AI answers?
- Are bots scraping you more than they’re referring traffic back?
- Are you surfacing the right content to engage, even without a click?
And yes, conversions and sales are still the endgame. That hasn’t changed.
Your Website Has a New Job
It’s more important than ever that your site influences the path to conversion, not just serves as the destination. That’s increasingly a job to be done outside of your site: surfacing brand content and experiences natively in AI agents.
Doing that job right means optimizing website for two audiences: humans and AI agents.
For humans:
- Clean up your content inventory.
- Create experiences only you can deliver.
- Talk to people, not keywords.
- Stop hiding your best stuff behind gates (AI can’t see it, and people hate forms anyway).
For AI agents (and their human counterparts):
- Improve site speed and core web vitals for crawlers.
- Add structure: headers, schema, llms.txt, markdown.
- Show credibility: metadata, author info, EEAT.
- Write in natural language Q&A.
- Keep content fresh.
Think of it this way:speak to humans with authenticity,and speak to bots with clarity.
How to Get Ahead
This is where tools matter. Platforms like Optimizely, the host of Opticon, leading marketing technologies, and even Horizon Commerce are building solutions for this exact shift:
- Auto-generate Q&A and summaries that AI engines can actually use.
- Inject metadata and EEAT signals at scale.
- Track which LLMs are crawling your site — and whether they’re sending traffic back.
- Conduct chain of thought and web analysis to inform what content works best.
The Bottom Line
Your website isn’t fading into irrelevance. It’s just getting promoted — from brochure to brand validator, from keyword hub to content source for both humans and machines.
👉 Embrace the change.
👉 Structure for bots.
👉 Stay authentic for humans.
👉 Use the right tools to maximize visibility and effectiveness.
The companies that get this right won’t just survive the AI shift — they’ll lead it. Reach out see how your brand can partner with us and platforms like Optimizely to lead this shift.