Google sends you fewer customers every month. 8 founders on replacing SEO.
The question
AI-generated answers are eating search.
So we asked founders, "What one channel has actually replaced Google traffic for your business — and what exactly did you do to make it work?"
Eight founders answered.
What we learned
Nobody got their Google traffic back. Every founder here replaced the channel instead of fighting for the old one — most within six months.
Two strategies dominate: become what the machines recommend (AI assistants, app stores), or double down on what machines can't be (faces, communities, real relationships).
Owned audiences compound. Newsletters and communities were the slowest channels to build, and the only ones everyone agrees are durable. Start before you need them.
The live disagreement is paid distribution. Marcus's creator sponsorships have exact attribution; Priya calls any rented audience a landlord. Both are right — at different stages.
1. Become what the machines recommend
Discovery didn't disappear—it moved inside AI assistants and app marketplaces.
Both founders below stopped courting the search results page and started optimizing the surfaces where recommendations actually get made. And both founders stress the same upside: these channels carry purchase-level intent.
“Stop optimizing for Google. Optimize to be the product the AI recommends.”
Our organic traffic dropped 58% between January and October last year, and for months I treated it like a temporary Google update. It wasn't. The searches still happen — the clicks don't. What saved us was noticing that a trickle of new signups kept writing “ChatGPT suggested Formlet” in our onboarding survey.
So we rebuilt the marketing site for machines. Comparison pages written as direct, factual answers. Pricing stated plainly instead of hidden behind a demo. An llms.txt file, structured data everywhere, and a real push to show up in the sources assistants actually cite: G2, a handful of credible “best form builder” roundups, and old Reddit threads I'd answered honestly two years ago.
Today about 40% of new trials name an AI assistant as the referrer. One tactical tip: add an open-text “where did you hear about us?” field to your signup flow today. Your analytics can't see this channel. Your customers can.
“App stores are the new search engines — rank where the intent is.”
I watched two channels respond to the AI wave completely differently. Our blog lost half its traffic in a year. Our Shopify App Store installs didn't drop at all — they grew.
So I moved the entire growth effort to the listing. Review velocity is the ranking factor that matters, so we ask for one at the exact moment a merchant sees their first automated refund go through. We rewrote the listing around the phrases merchants actually type, and we answer support tickets in under an hour, because responsiveness feeds the algorithm too.
Marketplaces are rented land, same as Google ever was. The difference is intent: someone searching inside the app store is holding a credit card. I'd rather rank #3 there than #1 on a results page nobody scrolls past the AI answer to see.
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The bottom line
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