Navigating recent marketing shifts with the rise of ai

@Tak Lee would you be okay sharing the results of this survey?

Yes, of course @Matt! Happy to. I think it’ll be pretty valuable data. Hope to get more than a 100 responses but it’s sitting at 0 now

Cool, with that in mind, I see no issue with it!

Thanks Matt :)

Done, looking forward for the results

Thanks @Sofian Bettayeb!

Hey guys! As promised, here are the results from the survey.

There were only 14 total submissions. 13 from Hong Kong, 1 from the US. Nevertheless, some interesting data

Hi @Tak Lee, Thanks for sharing.
What are you working on? I'm curious now.

@Sofian Bettayeb I’m building a web design + dev agency but scaling just that is tough, so I’ve been exploring SEO and CRO too.

I do SEO & CRO at my full-time job. SEO is shifting extremely fast. Traffic is down across the board because more people are turning to LLMs to search.

Even before LLMs, clients would ask: “We’ve got traffic, now what?” Because traffic doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t convert. What's the point of 10000 people walking into your store if none of them buy anything?

We've been getting loads of client requests wanting to show up in LLMs, but even if they do, it likely won’t drive much traffic because of the zero-click nature of those results.

So I think the value of SEO is completely changing. It’s no longer about traffic. It’s about conversions. CRO is where that shift happens.
It’s way more valuable to show up for a low-volume, high intent query than to rank for a broad, high volume one that never converts.

But then comes the chicken and the egg problem - for CRO experiments to work well, there must be high traffic

That’s why I created the survey! I really want to understand how people are feeling about digital marketing right now. The old SEO playbook isn’t working anymore. Those magic days are over. Something new is emerging and I’m trying to figure out what that is

Cool, I'm also a bit deep into marketing and SEO. Let's connect.

One of the insight I got from your survey results is "people wanting business results but not ready to pay for agency"

Do you have insights to share too?

I think this is pretty common. I wasn't surprised. People are always hesitant to be locked into a contract with agencies

However, there's definitely a shift where businesses prefer to work with individuals