The Machine in the Middle
The web has a new gatekeeper, and it’s not your search engine. If a machine can’t see you, no one can. Here’s what that means.
When I got into the content space, everyone kept saying the same thing: future-proof your stack. Use something flexible. Go headless. Prepare for the future. Honestly, I thought “future” meant 10–15 years away. Something far out. Not my problem yet.
Fast forward a few years, and it’s obvious that the “future” they were talking about is already here.
The biggest shift? There’s now a machine sitting between people and the web. Users ask a chatbot. The chatbot goes to look for answers. If it doesn’t see your content, you’re basically invisible. It’s that simple.
And that’s why some companies are confused about their dropping traffic. Their audience didn’t disappear. People just changed how they look for information. They’re not clicking links like they used to — they’re talking to something that does the clicking for them.
So now the real challenge is different: Can this machine understand your content well enough to show you to the user?
The companies that cleaned up their stack early — structured content, flexible systems — they’re not panicking. They can adapt. Everyone else is trying to force old setups to work in a world that moved on.
This isn’t some SEO trend. It’s a change in how the internet is being consumed.
And that leaves one big question: How do you stay visible when you’re not talking to humans first, but a machine?