If your whole growth plan is "publish good content and Google sends traffic", I have bad news. Last month Google sent one visitor for every five pages it crawled. Anthropic's bot took roughly eleven thousand pages for every single visitor it sent back.
The crawlers still take your words. They just stopped sending you people. Search is no longer a distribution channel for your content. It is a distribution channel for the answer, and you are not the answer. You are the training data.
So what actually works now?
Stop writing to rank. Write to be quoted. The part an AI repeats back is a named, specific claim, so put yours in the first line of everything you publish. Not a throat-clearing intro, not a keyword. A sentence the model can lift whole and attribute to you.
That is the shift from chasing the click to owning the citation. You are no longer trying to win a blue link. You are trying to be the sentence the machine says when your buyer asks.
The move
Take your next piece and rewrite the opening line into one quotable, attributable claim with a real number in it. If a model summarised the page in one sentence, that sentence should name you.
What have you published this year that a crawler is quietly reselling without ever sending you a soul?
Alex Mureșan does go-to-market distribution for founders who'd rather be right early than safe and late. Get in touch →