Over the past week, three major industry studies were highlighted by Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin in a LinkedIn post analyzing the real impact of conversational AI on web traffic.

The findings across hundreds of websites and over 100 million user sessions showed some sobering data about the value of AI search when it comes to clicks and conversions:

• Marie Haynes discovered that traffic coming directly from ChatGPT accounts for just 0.62% compared to Google Organic traffic. Including all other Large Language Models (LLMs) combined only brings that total to 0.73%. That is less referral traffic than DuckDuckGo.

• SEO Works UK benchmarked 95 commercial properties across 12 months and found that organic search delivered 39 times more traffic than AI assistants.

• Kevin Indig tested whether high AI visibility secretly drives an untracked wave of direct domain visits. His conclusion? Across 632 statistical tests, there is no reliable or detectable relationship between AI visibility and subsequent direct web traffic.

It’s that time of year again where we look ahead and try to predict the future. Will 2027 be the year AI takes over? Will flying cars blot out the sun and take over the skyline?

The answers to those questions (and more) are likely “No” and “No”, but there’s an even more pressing question on the minds of marketing directors, CEOs, and generally anyone who’s trying to improve visibility and brand trust in 2027: Is blogging still relevant?

Back in the day, “content marketing” simply meant SEO and blogging. And for good reason.

Older websites didn’t have many ways to dynamically update content without either adding new pages or sections or by reworking existing pages. The thing is…if your site is already complete, what the hell are you going to add that actually introduces value?

Some companies got around this by introducing tools like guides and reviews, but unless you were an e-commerce brand, it was kind of hard to continuously add new, valuable content month after month. And really, there are only so many guides and comparison infographics you can create before you’re creating content for the sake of content.

Whether we’re talking about social media, Google Ads, or hell, just plain old radio or TV ads, trying to capture qualified customer attention is harder than ever. In high-LTV sectors like healthcare and AEC, the attention economy is competitive, and not even from others in the same space.

You’re competing with your actual competitors, yes, but you’re also competing against influencers pulling pranks, AI-narrated history documentaries, notifications about your car’s extended warranty… the list goes on.

Look, we gotta’ be straight with you: We all knew this was coming.

AI slop has taken over the Internet. Social media accounts from local businesses are full of AI-generated flyers (ugh!), and CCM gets approached regularly from potential clients who want to focus on AI slop content (we politely decline to work with these brands.)

And we understand. The allure of “free” or cheap, fast content production is real. Why pay for content production when you can use a free LLM to spit it out for you? Well, if your goal is to simply “put out content”, then there’s nothing wrong with it. But there are several problems with that strategy.