There is an uncomfortable truth sitting in your analytics dashboard right now. Traffic is changing. Not necessarily a dramatic shift (although for many sites it's exactly that) but, regardless, the direction is clear. Fewer people are arriving from search. In fact, fewer people are arriving full stop. ‘Zero click’ might be overstating it for the sake of a snappy label, but your numbers definitely look different, and some of those tried and tested playbooks are producing diminishing returns.
If you're seeing this trend, the chances are that your website may well be getting ghosted by a whole new discovery ecosystem.
Today, a person considering your product or service might start on LinkedIn, YouTube or TikTok, do their research on ChatGPT and then get what they need to know validated by an AI overview. If they do visit your site, the sweetener is that it's more likely to be with high intent... but what if you're not even featuring in their initial discovery journey?
The question isn't 'how do we rank higher?', but the far more amorphous 'are we even part of the conversation?'.
The good news for businesses using Umbraco is that your content editors already have all of the tools at their disposal to redefine your website as the structured knowledge platform that will thrive in a world of AI discovery.
Umbraco can help you adapt for AI search quickly
Most websites are structured around pages, but AI systems don't think in pages. They think in entities, relationships and knowledge. They want depth, not volume.
As a website owner, if you want a presence in AI overviews and LLM answers, you need to adapt your content strategy for this shift and start building authority hubs (guides, FAQs, case studies, insights and interactive tools). The gold dust in your content can’t be buried in swathes of marketing copy, it needs to be front and centre to the content experience.
Umbraco’s flexible content modelling is particularly well suited to this approach. Instead of forcing content into rigid templates, it lets editors design content experiences that reflect how knowledge actually works.
The bonus is that once you've optimised your content for AI search, you've already done many of the hard yards to atomise it for other platforms.
Umbraco makes technical AEO/GEO best practice easy
Umbraco’s own guide on AEO/GEO readiness is a fantastic resource for content editors craving a practical step-by-step playbook. Definitely take time to read the full guide, but here are the four key takeaways:
Structure your content like it might be read out of context - clear headings, standalone paragraphs, and reusable block components that stand on their own two feet when pulled from a page
Kill pronoun-dependence - sentences starting with ‘This...’ or ‘It...’ that only make sense in sequence are invisible to AI systems extracting sections
Make trust explicit - reviewed dates, named authors, and cited sources are no longer optional decoration, they're the signals AI uses to decide whether to reference you at all. (And think about authority loops. It’s great if that fantastic piece of thought leadership links to the profile of the person who wrote it, but make sure the profile talks about their credentials as a subject matter expert, and in turn links back to the articles they have written.)
Get your technical foundations right - canonical tags, robots settings, redirect hygiene, and be meticulous in policing that your schema markup accurately reflects what's actually on the page
Umbraco makes all of this achingly simple, so even the most time-poor content editors have a foot-up.
Umbraco Forms gives you the tools to build interactive lead magnets
Digital experience owners have long since known the power of interactive tools to complement static content and generate higher engagement. In an AI search context, they’re an even more useful. Calculators, decision trees and configurators are exactly the kind of structured, logical content that AI systems understand and reference well.
Using Umbraco Forms with conditional logic, you can create genuinely useful tools that are not only more likely to be referenced in AI answers, but can also help you buck that that no/low click trend and turn interested visitors into highly qualified leads.
Umbraco Engage supports personalisation so your content can match user intent
AI systems don’t just reward good content, they reward content that matches what people actually want to know.
Umbraco Engage lets content teams build visitor segments based on behaviour and intent, then serve tailored content variants to each group. A developer gets technical depth, an executive gets business outcomes, a first time visitor gets the beginners guide. Everyone gets the content that feels relevant to them and the payoff in a new world of AI-driven discovery is real. The more closely your content aligns with specific user intent, the stronger your authority signals become. Built-in A/B testing and server-side analytics let teams continuously refine which answers resonate with which audiences, so content experiences can be continuously evolved and strengthened.
Wrap-up
The discovery ecosystem has already changed. The only real question is whether your website changed with it.
Umbraco gives content teams a genuinely powerful foundation to build AI-ready knowledge experiences, without the need for expensive new tooling or complex development. Start with one authority hub. Fix your trust signals. Build one interactive tool. The compounding effect of getting this right is significant and Umbraco really does make it that simple.
