They are looking for you, just not on Google

Watch how somebody under thirty searches. They do not open ten tabs: they ask the question in full, read the answer that comes back, and at most click one of the two sources cited underneath. They never see the rest of the first page at all. That is how search has changed, and it is not a forecast: it already happens on one search in four.

You used to climb a ranking. Now you get into an answer.

What actually changes

The difference is brutal: the ranking had ten places, the answer has two or three. Whoever gets in takes nearly everything, whoever stays out gets nothing, because nobody scrolls down to check any more.

The good news is that the rules for getting in look like the old ones, taken to the extreme: actually answer, be precise, be checkable.

The five things that matter

• The answer in the first lines. A machine summarising takes what it finds at the top. If your answer sits behind the corporate preamble, it does not find it.
• One fact per sentence. «We deliver in 48 hours across Italy» can be quoted, and it is the way of writing we recommend in say it like you would say it. «We stand out for our speed» cannot, because it says nothing.
• Numbers, dates, figures. These are what an automated answer cites most readily, because they are the hardest thing to invent.
• Questions written the way people ask them. Not «Website maintenance services», but «how much does it cost to maintain a website each year».
• A structure readable from outside. Real headings, FAQs, structured data. These are the rails the machine runs on.

What no longer works

Stuffing a page with repeated keywords was already useless before; now it is worse than useless: text that spins without saying anything contains nothing to quote, so it does not get quoted. Same fate for twin pages, the identical ones with only the town name swapped. A machine comparing sources spots that immediately!

And what about traffic?

Here is the uncomfortable part: people who get their answer inside the search engine often visit no website at all. Visits will fall, and there is no way of stopping it. What changes is the value of the ones left, because they come from people who already read the answer and came anyway — which means they want to talk to you.

The figure to watch is no longer how many visits you get: it is how many enquiries arrive per hundred visits. If visits fall and enquiries do not, it is working.

Where to start

With the questions people ask you on the phone. Write them down the way they ask them, answer in five blunt lines, and put them on the site one per page. It is the dullest thing to do and the most effective: they are exactly the questions people put to an artificial intelligence too. The groundwork is still getting found on Google. We handle it through lead generation.