TRS,
You are touching on an important topic that is not receiving adequate attention. Our small company has relied on Google key words the past fifteen years to bring search inquiries to our site. Instead of search inquiries that serve up paying web site links, today's inquiries are serving up AI interpretations and few or no links to sites. So far the AI players have not gotten around to providing a means for advertisers to pay to play. Ben Thompson of Stratechery spoke thoughtfully recently in a podcast about how the AI players are leaving tremendous potential revenues on the proverbial table by not incorporating an advertising path in their "products". He feels they will eventually go down this path because end users are not going to pay for premium AI services whereas advertisers like our company will jump at the opportunity to put marketing dollars to work to drive traffic to our sites.

In the meantime, we are back to doing the type of work from years before Google adwords made us lazy. We are creating content for the AI bots to read, analyze and put into their generated answers. Interestingly, our web site scores in the top percentiles on AI bot awareness. Despite a high score, it does not drive traffic anywhere close to what Google adwords did prior to mid-2025. It is a sea change and we are all adapting to the wind, waves and currents.

Uwharrie