For decades Google was the undisputed king of delivering traffic to your website. Along came social media, and the source of traffic diversified. With AI chatbot usage taking off, a new source of website traffic has emerged to compete with the traditional channels.
Does AI change your marketing strategy?
Short answer: Not really. If search engines are about keywords and links, and social media is about followers and personal connections, AI is about authority and expertise.
Before AI, generating content for search engines was a game of sprinkling just the right amount of keywords into your copy in hopes Google’s indexing bot would rank it favorably.
With the advent of AI, these new bots can understand the context of your content which makes creating compelling content more natural. Instead of robotic sounding copy with keywords stuffed into every nook and cranny, your content can instead inform the user in a very detailed and authentic way without sounding like a parrot repeating the same phrase.
What does this actually look like?
People interact with AI chat bots differently than Google. Instead searching for “blue shirt large cheap” they might instead ask their chatbot “What are the best natural fiber blue shirts for spring weather in the Northeast?” This is a much more detailed request, and your content should match this level of detail in order to be “cited” by AI and useful for the user.
Do keywords still matter?
Yes, keywords still matter and integrating them into your copy is still a smart and effective tactic. The takeaway is to move away from short, keyword based content and lean into highly detailed, longer pieces of content that will be ingested and summarized by AI.
How can COLEwebdev help?
Knowing what customers ask is a key factor. COLEwebdev has resources and tools to help you find these questions which can give you guidance for creating content in 2026.
