👊 🤺  Resisting and Controlling AI to Save Your Business

Do you feel negative about Artificial Intelligence and all the hyped-up generative AI tools and agents that are reshaping business and marketing? You’re not alone.

Small business owners in travel, real estate and ecommerce are watching their analytics and sales reports and are really not liking the traffic and lead trends. Students too are protesting the loss of employment opportunities, while creators fear being replaced by AI tools.  And in the office, the loss of white collar employees is rising every passing month.

AI-hypesters and experts have warned about the losses for small businesses and publishers in search engine traffic.  That traffic from Google is their major source, and it has the highest potential to convert to a customer because these are the highest intent consumers.  But with AI, the loss and damage to your business is beyond that.

Despite the trend data and falling revenues, some business owners aren’t doing something to help their plight. Silence won’t work.

That’s why I’m exploring the reaction here and making some suggestions on how you can get emotionally involved, proactive and start doing something to avoid massive damage to your company, or perhaps — bankruptcy.

It might surprise you though that it might not be AI itself that’s the villain, but rather big monopolies in every industry and how they’re using to reduce labor costs to zero. And in the process, they’ll make it impossible for small businesses to stay viable, whether in ecommerce, travel, real estate, finance or healthcare. AI answers don’t include references to small businesses nor create click throughs to SMB websites.

And AI answers will progress beyond top of funnel topics, to extend well into mid funnel to some decision making, to make most small companies completely invisible in search.

AI Chatbots Will Wipe Out your Traffic!

You may have heard GEO search engine enthusiasts talking joyfully about the bounty of mentions in AI search results and how it’s the future of search marketing. They’re currently becoming villainized as we speak. Some of the language is getting heated and blunt.

Because everyone’s finding out that the meagre visibility and traffic offered by AI engines such as Claude, ChatGPT and Google Gemini is minimal.  What’s left is not enough to power a small business. Worse, your lost traffic is going to a few fortunate competitors and to other big companies you compete with for consumers dollars.

They want more than marketshare; they want a big piece of the total consumer wallet. And AI could deliver that to them.

The AI search engines as I’m sure you know, are retaining users in their interface resulting in zero click throughs to websites. It means the open Web is being starved and SMB owners will need to look elsewhere for their traffic.

And for consumers, there is a big worry too. With SMB websites and publishers disappearing, there is a detachment from the real world – where the chatbots offer up canned perspectives and truths – pretending expertise and authority.  And ironically for the AI LLMs, fewer information and content sources will exist for the AI engines to train on and reference in answers. They’re destroying their own information sources.

It’s an issue they don’t feel like dealing with right now, because for them, proving their worth and winning the AI wars is all they want. Google for instance is making even more money from their advertising business, so as far as they’re concerned, there is no problem.

Substituting a Too Fast and Narrow Search Experience

AI engines are substituting an artificial search experience or buyer’s journey which is at a normal human pace.  This fast-track selling journey cuts out the broad awareness of suppliers and the consumer’s own common sense judgment.

AI engines are not primarily designed to send traffic. They’re designed to complete tasks and synthesize answers, overly focused on data/facts rather than the feelings of users. This makes company’s emotional-intent based marketing seem incorrect and a bad user experience.

AI engines don’t serve up a warm vibe for personal enjoyment, entertainment or to boost the consumer’s self-esteem (mood). It’s dry and unsatisfying, because it’s straight jacketed by its limitations and the AI developer’s priorities.

And in this process, consumers become less aware (myopia) and overly impressionable about AI-suggested suppliers/brands.  This limited focus actually reduces consumer intelligence and satisfaction in shopping (feeling of achievement that they solved their need).

For 28 years, Google’s search experience provided a wide array of real company websites, which provided their value proposition and product education. It was slow, but consumers enjoy a more human shopping journey that was natural.

The Losses Are Mounting

Across most industries, SMBs and most publishers are seeing:

• traffic losses ranging from 35% to 60% depending on the niche
• 30–60% CTR losses on informational queries
• ~60% declines in traditional search referrals while large publishers saw materially smaller losses.

Of course, if you’re suffering these losses, you can always buy your traffic in PPC and social advertising. Yet Google and Meta are charging very high and rising impression/click rates thus buying that same traffic would be out of your budget.

It’s not a great situation for small travel businesses, who thrive on the awareness and engagement phases of travelers buying journey. It was good for travelers since they were being exposed to real travel companies in the Google search results, instead of the AI slanted experience they get now.

Often, the websites cited in AI search results are not even present in the top 10 search results. This means AI engines are disregarding the top human-recommended businesses and content, and citing other companies. Already, AI is splitting the web into:

1. commodity informational content (AI consumes this for free)
2. high-trust authority ecosystems (AI cites them and money off of desperate advertisers who have nowhere else to get leads)

Informational and Consideration Stages Vitally Important for SMBs

Small businesses are more dependent on the discovery or awareness stage of consumer search. This is inspirational, informational, educational, and purchase orienting engagement. It’s where impact and emotional intent exist. Without these, it is harder to convert prospects later on (conversion rates drop).  In reality, with small business, content engagement takes place over time where intent, desire, and preference are slowly built (e.g., hiring a real estate agent, booking a European vacation). This slower process can create more comfort, trust, and lasting loyalty to brands and companies.

Worse, if consumers only interact via AI agents, they may not be aware of prospective businesses/suppliers at all. The agentic AI system does it all lightning fast, thus there is no dreaming, learning, impact, engagement, or persuasion. AI engines favor known, trusted brands thus new brands/companies are considered irrelevant, even risky. So they remain invisible and unreachable.

Using AI search engines, a consumer may end up selecting:

“the statistically recommended choice”
rather than
“the personally meaningful choice.”

Sectors that are impacted most include are emotionally driven sectors like:

• travel
• lifestyle
• luxury purchases
• real estate
• education
• wellness

It’s Understandable to Reject AI Outright

You can see the damage and that it’s going to get worse. Small business is dependent on Google and Facebook/Instagram and their AI is very selective, and there is a lot of AI slop ruining all user experiences. AI is choosing only a small portion of published material.

Monopoly might be the core problem. With monopolies, consumer choice is limited and their prices rise to maximize profit.  Google local business (via maps or local packs) in particular is the refuge of last resort for most small companies.  You may be enjoying good exposure and leads from it, but this source might be endangered as Google seeks to replace it with advertising. When that happens, small business owners will be sweating profusely.

It’s not AI that is destroying your business really. It’s big businesses/monopoly boardroom decisions about how they’ll use AI and how much power they have to monopolize a market. AI isn’t making the choice to irradicate your business, these big companies are, given license by governments.

What’s Your Plan of Action?

What can you possibly do about AI incursion into your business and your marketing?

Here are some tactics worth considering:

• Lobby your state and federal governments to enforce and strengthen anti-trust laws and competition in online search (Google has had its monopoly too long and change is needed)
• Lobby your state and federal government bodies to regulate AI chatbots to prevent them from unauthorized content scraping and utilization in their zero click environments. Force them to use human-recommended websites/businesses vs their AI algorithmic choices.
• Lobby your state and federal governments to enforce licensing agreements with content creators to pay them for using their content
• Build your own owned content platform and lead generation engine – own your audience instead of renting them
• Create content with the right vibes, emotional appeal, and self-esteem building effects as opposed to observing “clinical data compliant” copywriting and messaging that LLMs want.
• Make your content experience superb so you get more direct, return visits
• Ignore GEO, since AI engines will never show your content, cite your company, nor send you any traffic
• Keep your most valuable content behind firewalls to force everyone to send referrals to your website and engage with your staff to acquire it
• Protect insider information (expertise) and make it deliverable through your actual staff (e.g., travel advisors) and engagement with them (e.g., word of mouth and private conversations)
• Put more effort and funding into promoting your business (PR, outreach)
• Optimize your SMS and email nurturing campaigns to build loyalty
• Optimize your social engagement/postings for the experience of the moment, but communicate that visiting your site is where real satisfaction happens
• Utilize AI in your office/company and marketing to keep staffing costs under control
• Remind consumers that AI bias is unreliable, often unverified and overly reliant on limited sources – emphasize the risk of respecting and using AI output. Don’t bad mouth it, and instead demonstrate your human-friendly and emotionally meaningful customer relationship

It’s important to know more about AI systems strengths and where they’re heading to create further advantage for you against them. AI systems themselves might help you discover their weaknesses and your opportunity, (but then again you could be pulled into their psychological orbit).

Much of AI system’s power comes from politics – e.g., the legalized theft/usage of proprietary information, the trillions of Capex pouring into AI companies, and their monopoly on consumer audiences. Perhaps only the President of the US can intervene to save small business. That’s because AI and big tech are now centered in the US.

Because if the advantage of the AI tech companies continues to grow, without compensation for small business and publishers, the consequences described above will play out.

In summary, you could protect your proprietary assets from ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude who will likely never deliver anything of value to your company.

Your protest is smart, if it’s backed up with real action and strategy.