Summarized by WRITER

• Publishers are experiencing dramatic traffic losses of 20-90% as users increasingly turn to AI chatbots for conversational search experiences instead of traditional keyword-based queries, fundamentally reshaping how content is discovered and consumed online.
• Search behavior has evolved from short keyword phrases like “best business mobile phones UK” to detailed conversational questions such as “what mobile phone solution would work best for a 50 person UK business that needs international calling?”
• WRITER’s AI agent playbook, developed by Head of Inbound Marketing Christian Westcott, can analyze hundreds of thousands of web pages and compare them against Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) best practices to identify improvement opportunities.
• The agent highlights critical gaps such as insufficient FAQ schema implementation—a structured format preferred by AI chatbot crawlers—and provides detailed strategic recommendations for optimizing content in the new conversational search landscape.

If hyperbolic claims about how technology is reshaping business and society are leaving you jaded, it’s understandable. But there’s no overstating the massive impact AI chatbots have had on the way people search the web and consume content. According to AdExchanger, an industry publication that has long tracked the health of companies publishing to the web:

“Publishers, typically a tight-lipped crowd, have been surprisingly candid about losing 20%, 30% and in some cases even as much as 90% of their traffic and revenue over the past year.”

In place of a search bar, users are having in-depth conversations with AI powered chatbots about how to plan their next vacation or what toy is right for a nature loving kid turning 12.

In this week’s video we feature a playbook for an agent that can analyze hundreds of thousands of web pages, compare them to the latest best practices for how to succeed in the world of AI search, and provide you with a detailed strategy for how to improve your rankings in the world of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

This playbook was built by Christian Westcott, Head of Inbound Marketing here at WRITER. Christian has decades of experience in the world of traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and used to work at an agency, advising clients how to get to the top of the 10 blue links served up by a company like Google.

In this example, WRITER’s AI Agent highlighted gaps like the minimal use of FAQ schema, a style which the crawlers from AI chatbots prefer. It’s strategy report also provided  information about the shift to natural language search with some examples. In traditional search, someone might have previously looked for “best business mobile phones UK” but now they’re asking “what mobile phone solution would work best for a 50 person UK business that needs international calling.”

If you want to learn more about how the playbook we built to run this agent, check out the video here.

If you want to learn more about how we use Playbooks or the suite of agentic solutions we’ve built for marketing teams.