Website traffic is falling across the board, and it's tempting to read that as a marketing problem. It usually isn't. AI summaries now answer the generic top of funnel questions people used to click into your site to answer, so the casual browsers never arrive. The visitors who do show up are the ones already deciding whether you're a fit.
That changes what a manufacturing website is for. A list of machines, materials, and certifications was fine when buyers were willing to dig. Now they want a specific answer to a specific question, and if your site makes them hunt for it, they'll go back to Google or ChatGPT and get an answer from a source you don't control.
We talk with John Greeley of Navu about what shops should actually do about it, and a lot of it isn't what you'd expect. Old content that used to sit harmlessly on your site is now working against you, because LLMs read your whole site at once and stop citing you when they find pages that disagree with each other. Less content with more depth beats the old habit of publishing a page for every possible search term.
The other half of this is labor. The questions landing in your info inbox are usually answered somewhere on your site already, and they're pulling SMEs and owners off the work that actually moves the business. John walks through a real buyer journey where the ninth question was a technical spec buried on page 193 of a PDF, and the tenth was how to talk to sales. Nobody on that team spent a minute on it until the lead was qualified.
Brooke also joins us in the host seat for the first time and gives the Gen Z read on all of it, which mostly comes down to letting people find what they need before anyone tries to sell them something.