We’ve seen this pattern across B2B SaaS and ecommerce accounts since late 2023. Rankings hold. Clicks slip. Meanwhile, leadership’s awareness of why competitors appear in ChatGPT responses while your content doesn’t is crucial. That tension is the real story here. SEO still works, but the way people discover information is changing faster than most marketing teams are planning for.

This isn’t about panic. It’s about timing. And, the teams treating AI visibility as “next year’s problem” are already behind.

The uncomfortable truth about search right now

Google traffic hasn’t vanished. But user behavior has shifted in ways most dashboards don’t make obvious.

When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini a question, they often don’t click anything. They get an answer. Sometimes that answer cites sources. Sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, the discovery moment happens upstream from your website.

We see it first in qualitative feedback. Sales calls where prospects reference insights you’ve never published. Customers who clearly researched but never touched your blog. Founders who swear they “saw you somewhere” but can’t remember where.

That “somewhere” is increasingly an AI interface.

SEO teams still measuring success only through rankings and sessions miss this entirely. Clarifying how AI visibility influences traditional metrics like rankings and traffic helps you understand the full scope of changes across the search landscape. The brand impact is real, but the attribution trail is broken.

Why AI chat adoption matters more than traffic loss

Here’s the thing. This shift doesn’t hurt everyone equally.

Strong brands with evident expertise are pulled into AI solutions early. Weak or generic content gets ignored. The gap widens quietly, then suddenly.

We’ve watched companies lose mindshare before they lose traffic. First, they stop being cited. Then competitors become the default answer. Months later, organic clicks drop. By the time it shows up in GA4, it’s already a brand problem.

Which means the right question isn’t “Is SEO dead?” It’s “Are we visible where discovery actually happens now?”

How AI systems decide who gets cited

Large language models don’t rank pages the way Google does. They synthesize information from sources they consider authoritative, consistent, and trustworthy.

From what we’ve observed across dozens of accounts, three patterns matter most:

• Clear topical ownership. Sites that stay narrowly focused outperform broad content farms.
• Original insight. Rehashed explainers rarely get cited.
• Brand signals beyond your site. Mentions, links,s and reputation elsewhere matter more than most teams realize.

This is why some brands with mediocre SEO suddenly appear everywhere in AI tools. They’ve built authority outside traditional search, which should inspire teams to see new avenues for growth and influence.

Why “just keep doing SEO” isn’t enough anymore

Classic SEO advice still works, but it’s incomplete.

Publishing keyword-targeted posts without a clear point of view doesn’t move the needle in AI systems. Neither does scaling content volume with AI writers and hoping something sticks.

We’ve audited sites with thousands of posts and zero AI visibility. We’ve also seen lean blogs with thirty high-quality articles cited repeatedly.

The difference isn’t technical SEO. It’s a strategy. Integrating AI-focused content into your existing SEO plan, such as creating authoritative guides and building external brand signals, can help you adapt to discovery methods effectively.

AI systems reward clarity over coverage. They prefer fewer, stronger sources over many average ones. That’s a fundamental shift from how SEO teams have been trained to think.

What AI visibility actually looks like in practice

Teams doing this well don’t chase every AI tool. They build assets designed to be referenced.

That usually means investing in:

• Authoritative guides that thoroughly answer a question, not just target a keyword.
• Original data, benchmarks, or frameworks that others don’t have.
• Clear authorship and expertise signals tied to real people.
• Distribution strategies that earn citations, not just clicks.

This is why AI visibility looks closer to digital PR than content at scale. It’s about becoming the source, not filling the index.

The internal challenge no one talks about

Most teams know something is changing. The problem is prioritization.

You’re already juggling paid media volatility, broken attribution, sales pressure, and budget scrutiny. Adding “optimize for ChatGPT” sounds like another shiny object.

The teams that move fastest aren’t the ones chasing hype. They’re the ones reframing AI visibility as a defensive strategy.

If prospects learn from AI before they ever hit your site, you want your perspective baked into that learning phase. Waiting means letting competitors define the narrative for you.

How we’re advising teams to start

Not with tools. With focus.

The most effective first step is to identify where AI-generated answers already influence buying decisions in your category. Pricing questions. Comparison questions. Implementation questions. These show up on sales calls long before they appear in keyword reports.

From there, the work looks like building a modern authority engine. Fewer pieces. More depth. Stronger points of view. And intentional promotion beyond your own channels.

We’ve documented this approach in detail in our core guide on AI visibility, including how to structure content, earn citations, and measure progress even when traffic doesn’t move immediately. Establishing new KPIs beyond traffic and rankings ensures you can track success in this evolving landscape.

The bottom line

SEO isn’t dead. But discovery has fractured.

Teams that treat AI chat as a side experiment will feel the impact later, when it’s more complex and more expensive to catch up. Teams that adapt now build leverage quietly.

The window where this feels optional is closing. The good news is that the playbook rewards quality, clarity, and genuine expertise—things strong teams should be doing anyway.

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The Democratic New Jersey congresswoman seemed like a shoo-in to succeed Phil Murphy as her state’s governor, an office that trended blue in recent years. Yet she is now neck-and-neck with Republican Jack Ciattarelli, a successful businessman before entering politics. Her problem: disclosures that she spent some considerable time day-trading stocks while she was in office, possibly — if her critics are right — profiting off nonpublic information to make profitable trades. 

Rising public disgust over her alleged insider trading could cost her the Nov. 4 election. 

Yes, to hear critics tell it, Sherrill’s acumen at timing the market — buying and selling stock armed with nonpublic information during the COVID pandemic a few years back — puts her in league with some of the best insider traders in the business. 

Ivan Boesky watch out! 

The truth is that Sherrill’s stock trades might look bad, but they’re not illegal or unusual. In fact, they are in line with other lawmakers who have gotten caught in this ­periodic scandal, which amounts to allegations that they used their access to nonpublic information to profit on stock trades. 

More From Charles Gasparino

Based on my reporting, much of that information wasn’t even nonpublic, which is why no one ever went to jail over this stuff or has even been charged despite all the hoopla. Insider trading is notoriously difficult to prove because information is so fungible; warnings about the spread of COVID were all over the internet while Congress was being “privately” briefed in the matter. 

New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mikie Sherrill tours the USS Battleship New Jersey as part of a campaign stop on October 11, 2025 in Camden, New Jersey. Getty Images

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A ‘something’ burger? 

Which makes this “scandal” seem like a nothing burger for Sherrill, right? 

Not quite. On the campaign trail, Sherrill has been oddly dissembling when asked for the details of the timing of her trades — particularly when the markets were freaking out over COVID back in 2020 — other than to point out she no longer trades stocks after being called out a few years ago. 

That’s why I did a deeper dive in the controversy by reviewing the timing of her trades, disclosed through various publicly available sources such as a website that tracks this stuff, known as “Quiver Quantitative.” 

I came across something odd: In April 2020, the New Jersey Globe ran a story stating that Sherrill and her husband “decided to convert to ETFs last December and instructed a financial adviser to begin the process during the first week of January, before receiving any briefings on COVID-19.” 

Odd, because her congressional disclosures show she bought lots of stocks in January 2020, the same month President Trump first downplayed the severity of the virus. Unless I’m missing something, she really didn’t start unloading shares until Feb. 20, 2020, when “Trump 1” began warning about COVID and the stock markets began crashing. 

Significant trading 

Another oddity; Sherrill was hardly a piker at trading stocks in 2019 and 2020 when she first got to Congress. True, she’s no Nancy Pelosi; Sherrill’s trading activity reached a high of around $2.4 million in 2020, dwarfed by the $39 million in trades for the former House speaker last year. 

Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey Jack Ciattarelli (L) and Democrat Mikie Sherrill (R) during a debate at New Brunswick Performing Arts Center on October 08, 2025. Leonardo Munoz

But what she did was not nothing. So the question remains: Why even go there when you have so much else on your plate? 

Sherrill and her husband, Jason Hedberg, are hardly the fattest cats in government, though they are comfortably well off. Disclosure forms show they’re worth as much as $14 million. They own homes and property. 

Hedberg, whom she met at the Naval Academy, is a Wall Street banker who pulls in an estimated $3 million a year. (It was his late filing of stock trades that led to a small disclosure fine for Sherrill back in 2021. Through a rep he declined to comment.) 

Sherrill herself is no slouch; she was a helicopter pilot in the Navy, went on to become an accomplished private attorney at the firm Kirkland & Ellis before working as an assistant US attorney and then entering Congress. 

A spokesman for Sherrill’s campaign says “Mikie does not own or trade individual stocks, and has gone ‘above and beyond’ releasing the exact values of her finances to the dollar and while New Jerseyans have zero insight into Jack Ciattarelli’s net worth.” 

Again, she certainly isn’t the worst — or the first — lawmaker to be caught flat-footed trying to explain weirdness involving stock trading and whether they used the perks of their office to make money. 

Yet she does provide a cautionary tale; if you enter Congress, try focusing your time on working for the people back home and not being a day-trader. Put your dough in a simple mutual fund like the one that tracks the S&P 500. It’s been up around 168% since 2019, and it won’t cost you an election.

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Jerome Dewald sat with his legs crossed and his hands folded in his lap in front of an appellate panel of New York State judges, ready to argue for a reversal of a lower court’s decision in his dispute with a former employer.

The court had allowed Mr. Dewald, who is not a lawyer and was representing himself, to accompany his argument with a prerecorded video presentation.

As the video began to play, it showed a man seemingly younger than Mr. Dewald’s 74 years wearing a blue, collared shirt and a beige sweater and standing in front of what appeared to be a blurred virtual background.

A few seconds into the video, one of the judges, confused by the image on the screen, asked Mr. Dewald if the man was his lawyer.

“I generated that,” Mr. Dewald responded. “That is not a real person.”

The judge, Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels of the Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department, paused for a moment. It was clear she was displeased with his answer.

“It would have been nice to know that when you made your application,” she snapped at him.

“I don’t appreciate being misled,” she added before yelling for someone to turn off the video.

What Mr. Dewald failed to disclose was that he had created the digital avatar using artificial intelligence software, the latest example of A.I. creeping into the U.S. legal system in potentially troubling ways.

The hearing at which Mr. Dewald made his presentation, on March 26, was filmed by court system cameras and reported earlier by The Associated Press.

Reached on Friday, Mr. Dewald, the plaintiff in the case, said he had been overwhelmed by embarrassment at the hearing. He said he had sent the judges a letter of apology shortly afterward, expressing his deep regret and acknowledging that his actions had “inadvertently misled” the court.

He said he had resorted to using the software after stumbling over his words in previous legal proceedings. Using A.I. for the presentation, he thought, might ease the pressure he felt in the courtroom.

He said he had planned to make a digital version of himself but had encountered “technical difficulties” in doing so, which prompted him to create a fake person for the recording instead.

“My intent was never to deceive but rather to present my arguments in the most efficient manner possible,” he said in his letter to the judges. “However, I recognize that proper disclosure and transparency must always take precedence.”

A self-described entrepreneur, Mr. Dewald was appealing an earlier ruling in a contract dispute with a former employer. He eventually presented an oral argument at the appellate hearing, stammering and taking frequent pauses to regroup and read prepared remarks from his cellphone.

As embarrassed as he might be, Mr. Dewald could take some comfort in the fact that actual lawyers have gotten into trouble for using A.I. in court.

In 2023, a New York lawyer faced severe repercussions after he used ChatGPT to create a legal brief riddled with fake judicial opinions and legal citations. The case showcased the flaws in relying on artificial intelligence and reverberated throughout the legal trade.

The same year, Michael Cohen, a former lawyer and fixer for President Trump, provided his lawyer with phony legal citations he had gotten from Google Bard, an artificial intelligence program. Mr. Cohen ultimately pleaded for mercy from the federal judge presiding over his case, emphasizing that he had not known the generative text service could provide false information.

Some experts say that artificial intelligence and large language models can be helpful to people who have legal matters to deal with but cannot afford lawyers. Still, the technology’s risks remain.

“They can still hallucinate — produce very compelling looking information” that is actually “either fake or nonsensical,” said Daniel Shin, the assistant director of research at the Center for Legal and Court Technology at the William & Mary Law School. “That risk has to be addressed.”

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The older he gets, the more Bill Gates is surprised by what the world dishes up.

Take billionaires. There are many now from the tech industry, quite a few with politics that skew forcefully right.

“I always thought of Silicon Valley as being left of center,” Mr. Gates said. “The fact that now there is a significant right-of-center group is a surprise to me.”

Or take the evolution of technology in the decades since he began Microsoft and made it one of the world’s most valuable companies.

“Incredible things happened because of sharing information on the internet,” Mr. Gates said. That much he anticipated. But once social media companies like Facebook and Twitter came along, “you see ills that I have to say I did not predict.”

Political divisiveness accelerated by technology? “I didn’t predict that would happen,” he said. Technology being used as a weapon against the broader public interests? “I didn’t predict that,” he said.

Mr. Gates is a techno-optimist but he has limits, like cryptocurrency. Does it have any use?

“None,” he said. “There are people with high I.Q.s who have fooled themselves on that one.”

Even artificial intelligence, which Mr. Gates has spoken of enthusiastically, and which Microsoft is heavily invested in, produces a few qualms. “Now we have to worry about bad people using A.I.,” he said. (The New York Times has sued Microsoft and its partner OpenAI over copyright infringement; the companies have denied the claims.)

Mr. Gates, who turns 70 this year, is looking back a lot these days. Next week he is publishing “Source Code: My Beginnings,” which examines his childhood. The first of three projected volumes of memoirs, the book has been in the works for at least a decade but arrives at an unusual moment, as the tech billionaires have been unleashed. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg — their success has given them power that they are enthusiastically, even gleefully, using in divisive ways.

“Source Code: My Beginnings,” which examines Bill Gates’s childhood, is the first of three projected volumes of memoirs.

Thirty years ago, Mr. Gates created the model for the in-your-face tech billionaire. Microsoft in the 1990s supplied the operating system for the personal computers that were increasingly in every home and office, and the company had big plans for this new thing called the web. Mr. Gates and his company were perceived as powerful, ruthless and ubiquitous. Silicon Valley was terrified and even regulators were alarmed, suing Microsoft.

The anti-Microsoft sentiment in popular culture peaked with the 2001 movie “Antitrust,” about a tech chief executive who murders people in his quest for world domination. Reviewers underlined the allusions to Mr. Gates, although they largely panned the film.

The ire is long gone and Mr. Gates has no recollection of “Antitrust.” Among billionaires who generate strong emotions, he said with a hint of relief, “I’m not at the top of the list. The current tech titans would elicit a stronger negative reaction.”

He is a counterpoint to the moguls in the news. “We don’t have a club,” he said. “Nor do we have consensus. Reid Hoffman” — the co-founder of LinkedIn, a Microsoft board member and vocal supporter of former Vice President Kamala Harris — “is a billionaire. You can ask for his point of view. He’ll be glad to critique.”

Mr. Hoffman, who The Times reported in November was considering leaving the country after Ms. Harris’s election loss, did not respond to emails asking for his point of view. But plenty of others in Silicon Valley are watching the transformation of the billionaires into would-be overlords with a horrified fascination.

“It’s a steady subject of dismal conversation around here,” said Paul Saffo, a longtime tech forecaster. “The consensus is that Bill Gates looks sainted compared to the awfulness afoot.”

When we talked a few weeks ago, Mr. Gates was sitting on the other side of an office table in a rented suite in Indian Wells, Calif., next to the resort town of Palm Springs. Why were we here? It was cold in Seattle, still Mr. Gates’s home when he is not on the move. That was reason enough.

Despite giving many billions of dollars to the Gates Foundation, his philanthropic juggernaut, Mr. Gates remains the 12th-richest person in the world, with personal wealth of over $100 billion, according to Forbes. But his physique isn’t jacked, he does not have his own rocket fleet, and he seems eager to point out that he does not have all the answers.

After we spoke, Mr. Gates was going to President Carter’s funeral. President Carter was an inspiration and a partner; Mr. Gates’s foundation became a big funder of the Carter Center.

In some respects, they resembled each other. Mr. Gates and Mr. Carter each had two distinct careers, both of which took place in the public eye over years. After Mr. Carter was president, he spent more than 40 years doing good works at home and abroad. That second act tended to be reviewed more favorably than the first.

So too with Mr. Gates, although his divorce from Melinda French Gates in 2021 was a decided setback for his reputation. There was also an unseemly relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

“In India, Japan, China, the American dream is a vaunted thing, of which I am sort of an example,” Mr. Gates said. “And then there’s people who think there shouldn’t be billionaires. There’s people who think I use vaccines to kill children. There’s quite a range of opinions.”

Should billionaires be outlawed?

Mr. Gates is the opposite of the reclusive billionaire hidden away on his estate. He recently brought out his second Netflix series, “What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates.”

The fourth of the five episodes, “Can You Be Too Rich?” had people, including Senator Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist from Vermont, saying definitively yes. It was a mild but real form of self-criticism that few other billionaires would subject themselves to.

Working on the show didn’t change his mind, though. “Should we outlaw billionaires?” Mr. Gates asked. “My answer to that, and you can say I’m biased, is no.”

But he supports a tax system that is more progressive. Every year, he adds up the taxes he has paid over his lifetime. He figures he has paid $14 billion, “not counting sales tax.”

Under a better system, he calculates, he would have paid $40 billion. Released in September, “Can You Be Too Rich?” already seems from another era. The answer to Mr. Gates’s question, in an administration staffed by billionaires, is no.

Mr. Gates tries to be nonpolitical but he thought the consequences of the 2024 election were so significant he got involved financially for the first time. He gave $50 million to Future Forward, the principal outside fund-raising group supporting Ms. Harris, The Times reported in October. He didn’t talk publicly about it then and won’t now.

After our conversation, it came out that he had a three-hour dinner with the president-elect at the time, Donald J. Trump, about world health challenges like H.I.V. and polio. “He showed a lot of interest in the issues I brought up,” Mr. Gates told The Wall Street Journal.

This week the Trump administration created confusion over whether it would stop disbursing H.I.V. medications bought with U.S. aid. A spokeswoman for Mr. Gates declined to comment.

“I will engage this administration just like I did the first Trump administration as best I can,” Mr. Gates said in our interview.

A trial to his parents

Writing an autobiography is another way Mr. Gates is different from his peers, few of whom seem so introspective. His childhood, in an upper-class enclave in Seattle in the 1960s and early 1970s, is not inherently dramatic.

“A lot of people have the story of what a tough childhood they had, and how that is partly why they’re so competitive,” he said. “I don’t have that.”

What he did have was his mother, Mary Gates. She was remarkably accomplished in an era when most upper-class women were encouraged by society to stay home. The first woman president of King County’s United Way, she later was on the board of the United Way of America; in 1983, she was the first woman to run it.

“She was almost too intense for me,” Mr. Gates said. His father, a lawyer, was more removed but was drawn into the battle of wills.

There was a period when Bill — he was in sixth grade — was supremely difficult. “I could go days without speaking, emerging from my room only for meals and school,” he writes in “Source Code.” “Call me to dinner, I ignored you. Tell me to pick up my clothes, nope. Clear the table — nothing.”

“I was provoking them,” he said in our interview. “I didn’t think they had any logic for why I had to show respect for them. My mom was pretty pushy about ‘Eat this way,’ and ‘Have these manners,’ and ‘If you’re going to use the ketchup you have to put the ketchup in a bowl and have to put the bowl here.’ She thought of me as pretty sloppy. Because I was.”

It was not really about the ketchup, of course. “I didn’t have any negative feelings toward her but I could pretend to not care what she said in a way that definitely irritated her,” he said. “What was I trying to prove?”

Parents then could not keep tabs on their children if the children were determined. His sister Kristi, he remembers, “was wary of what might go wrong. Whereas I’m like, ‘Hey, what could go wrong?’” Bill spent much of his time programming, often sneaking away at night.

Then something did go wrong, at the end of his junior year in high school. His best friend, Kent, was mountain climbing, fell and died.

“It was Kent being an independent thinker, pushing his limits,” Mr. Gates said. “His parents worried about him and he was not naturally coordinated. And yet he seemed to be enjoying it and they didn’t stand in his way.”

What Mr. Gates learned from the tragedy was that life can be unfairly bad as well as unfairly good. He was very lucky; Kent was very unlucky.

Mr. Gates said that if his teenage self were diagnosed now, he would probably be told he was on the spectrum. Maybe his mother intuitively understood what he needed. “I wanted to exceed her expectations,” he said. “She was pretty good at always raising the bar.”

Raising the bar is what he consistently did when he and his friend Paul Allen started a company in Albuquerque in 1975 to produce software for the Altair 8800, a rudimentary personal computer. Mr. Gates was barely out of his teens. He soon moved the fledgling operation to the Seattle area, closer to his mother.

Stewart Alsop covered Mr. Gates when he was the editor of InfoWorld, an influential tech magazine of the era. “Bill gave the privilege of having dinner with him solo in Seattle every six months; the price was always coming up with something he hadn’t thought of,” Mr. Alsop said. That was easy as “he had a hard time seeing the world outside of his life.”

If Mr. Gates is on the spectrum, he now thinks it gave Microsoft an edge. “I didn’t believe in weekends; I didn’t believe in vacations,” he once said. He knew the license plate numbers of his employees so he could check if they tried to go home. It was a model for thousands of tech start-ups to come.

On the downhill side

“Source Code” ends with the beginning of Microsoft. Spreadsheets, databases and word processing were primitive tools, but users got an edge in productivity. The future would be better. “We really didn’t see much downside,” Mr. Gates said.

He kept his optimism for a long time. In 2017, he reviewed the book “Homo Deus,” by the Israeli philosopher Yuval Noah Harari. Mr. Gates took issue with the author’s warning about a potential future where the elite upgrade themselves through tech and the masses are left to rot. “This future is not preordained,” Mr. Gates wrote.

Now he is reading Mr. Harari’s latest book. “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to A.I.” is a critical analysis of our reliance on technology.

“Every smartphone contains more information than the ancient Library of Alexandria and enables its owner to instantaneously connect to billions of other people throughout the world,” Mr. Harari writes. “Yet with all this information circulating at breathtaking speeds, humanity is closer than ever to annihilating itself.”

Mr. Gates took “Nexus” personally. Mr. Harari “makes fun of people like myself who saw more information as always a good thing,” Mr. Gates said. “I would basically say he’s right and I was wrong.”

(Mr. Harari was unavailable for comment because he was attending a meditation course.)

To be clear, Mr. Gates is not apologizing. He remains a believer in the power and goodness of tech. But for all he resisted them initially, his mother’s lessons are evidently still with him. Mind your manners. Try and do good. And try not to get carried away.

As a billionaire, other people invest you with huge powers, Mr. Gates said. Because you are successful in one sphere, he mused, “they think you’re good at lots of things you’re not good at.”

It almost sounded like a warning.

Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán.

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