What's Silently Killing Growth: The 2-Second Rule That's Destroying Your Website Traffic

0:00Josh Koenig:What is something that no one's talking about that's like silently killing growth? These brands are coming to you, they've got all these websites and things happening, and you're seeing a trend that most companies just aren't realizing right now. I think there's a lot of discourse right now about how AI and LLMs are changing search as a source. So I don't really, we'll get into that later. That's not really all that unknown. I think, though, the thing that we see in our data is just how vital it is to deliver that high-quality initial experience. Because the number of clicks you get into your property, like the web is the place where you get to show up and you actually own the experience for the visitor.

0:45The number of clicks is definitely, you know, it's getting harder because the paid channels are always shifting around what they can deliver. and organic is definitely changing. But the other piece of this is that when those clicks come in, if you're not able to quickly deliver the experience that a visitor wants, and the baseline for this is now set because, you know, more and more traffic is coming off of mobile devices, people don't really think of the fact that they're visiting a website as anything different from they tapped on their phone and they loaded an app. That's the baseline of experience that people expect, and one of the things that we can observe in our data is the number of clicks that don't even wait for a page to fully load, right?

1:27Like where people, like they tap, they get like even slightly bored, and they just swipe left and move away. That's me. I mean, it's all of us. I do it too, right? And the thing is you can literally see it in the data because we sit in the middle of the click stream for everyone so we can see stuff that even Google Analytics can't. We haven't productized that yet, which I really think we should, but we've done studies on it. And you can just see there's a very clear signal of when the initial request comes in saying, hey, I'd like to see this website, but none of the other things attached to that page load.

2:00And that means someone requested the website, but then didn't actually load it. They swiped away.

2:05Josh Koenig:Okay. So what is that magic number where it's like, if you're over this, you're done. You'll get swiped on. I think like the done, you're done at like two seconds. And good is under one second. And that's a change. It used to be people would say, like, one second is best in class. And if you're over five, then people... And I think expectations are changing. A lot of those stats that are out there were made in an era when most people were sitting in front of a computer or in front of a laptop. And they're just more patient in that mode. Or deep in their brain, their expectations are different.

2:45And on a phone, people just want things. They expect it to move faster. And there's no reason it can't. That's the really important thing to note for people. If you're doing it right, you can totally meet these expectations. But doing it right isn't a given. And so we like to help people make sure they get there.

3:02Josh Koenig:Yep. Okay. So speed still matters. What other data do you have that, like you said, maybe you could productize, but what do you have that maybe people who are running all the Google Analytics and all the software is showing them how their website is doing, what do you see that you know they probably can't get right now, along with the speed piece. The other thing that is really interesting, and this gets to that question of how LLMs and AI is changing search, but I mean, there's a lot of discourse around what that means from a user experience standpoint. People are still trying to figure out what it means from what your website is expected to deliver to this new non-human audience.

3:40And the truth is we've been optimizing our website for robots for a long time because people search engine optimization is just that, but this is a totally new iteration on that practice. And one of the things that we are, it's really interesting to see is just how much consumption of your website is driven by the, the, the crawling from the, the major model makers because they all are, um, you know, we have, uh, uh, a customer, um, that, uh, I think I can reference this customer, uh, uh, dot com, the ultimate fighting championship and the speed and intensity with which all the crawlers come in on fight night, because they're all racing to being able to answer the question of who won is it's really, it's almost like a denial of service attack.

4:35They like swarm that website and like like they try to crush it, you know, beyond it's actually there's more intense activity from those sources than there is from like casual visitors browsing to the website to try to see it at that point in time. It's really interesting to see that those patterns of that and you can see the ebbs and flows and surges of this agent driven. It's not it's not from people asking the agent. It's from the them trying to pre crawl so they can answer the question, you know, 90 seconds later.

5:05Josh Koenig:uh that it's a very interesting visual thinking about like all of them flooding a website and a website being like wow how do i handle this i mean that's a very different era we're in now are and we're just jumping right into the aips because now we're going there sure as well but like how should we be thinking about building knowing this is a new level of complexity that you know maybe websites have not been built for this level of aggression coming at them all at once to find answers yeah you know that's it's a really interesting thing especially for anybody who thinks about having websites that break news or deliver time-sensitive information.

5:36Like, I can't talk about any brands in this regard, but I have worked on projects where they're releasing market-moving material information, like investor relations and stuff like that. And that's always been something people were cognizant of. But again, to this point, the intensity of it has gone up. And, you know, I think the truth is that there's not really something you need to do differently to build your website to specifically withstand being swarmed by AI crawlers versus being able to withstand having something go crazy viral on social media. And at the end of the day, it's a lot of people wanting to or a lot of things wanting to read or consume the content off of your site in a pretty short amount of time.

6:25And the patterns for being able to have a website that stands up to that are pretty well established. And again, that's just when I talk about we wanted to build this stuff into our platform that we learned as consultants. That's one of the key things that we help people with. But I think there's a lot that's beyond that that goes into, you know, how do you even structure the information on your website so that it can meet the needs of a direct visitor, but also meet the needs of, you know, thinking of like the LLM almost like a research assistant. Right. Someone's going to think about it this way.

7:03Someone's going to send their intern to your website to figure out the answer to a question. How do you target the way everything is structured so that it's very easy for that research assistant type of persona, if you want to personify the LLM, to learn what they need to learn? And so, you know, we're still in the early days of figuring this out. And to be honest, the other thing that's true about this is that what's happening with the models is constantly evolving. Something someone said to me really recently, which I thought was a little bit wise, is it's probably risky to try to chase every micro trend that's occurring in AI right now because they move and cycle so quickly.

7:45You don't know whether there's going to be longevity in this. But there are underlying things that are definitely true that you probably should have been doing all along. Like people are going to have questions about you. You should acknowledge that and have answers to their questions readily available directly in that format on your website. That's something that humans like when they encounter it. And it's also something that the models can pick up and more easily digest, for instance.

8:12Josh Koenig:Okay, so this would be an interesting one to dive into and get like a best of list because I think you're uniquely positioned to answer this. I remember when we talked a while back, you were like, by the time people started talking about AI and LLMs are searching for answers, you're like, our customers had already been doing that for a long time. Like we have customers that are really far ahead because they're more technical. They were already asking chat GPT for the answers. They were already doing it in different places. So I think it's, you're in an interesting space. That's kind of ahead of where other companies are.

8:42Josh Koenig:So if you were to say five things right now, like five things that you should be thinking about one, putting questions on your website, you should have always been doing that still matters. Like what are five evergreen things that marketers should be doing when it, when it comes to their website? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I think we, speaking with my marketing hat on for Pantheon, because we are trying to reach this pretty technical audience, you look at the demographic breakdowns of like, I think broadly speaking, it seems like people like to engage with chat as a way or ask as a way to discover content.

9:15But it's really clear that our target audience is all in on this and has been for a while. So we've been thinking about this deeply. So yes, making information available in question and answer format. If you aren't already doing it, and I won't go into the details of this, but like the technical side of SEO where you are labeling the content on your website in a way that defines this is a map, this is an image, this is our address, these are our hours. There are commonly established formats for how to provide that meta information on the website that doesn't show up to a person, right? It's all in the code of the website, but it is currently used by Google to produce those rich overviews.

9:57But the LLMs know how to read it, and it really matters because it gives them context. Another thing is to looking outside of your website, you know, in the same spirit of questions and answers, you know, obviously these LLMs are going crazy on Reddit. So you have to pay attention to how you're showing up on Reddit and be engaged there. But beyond Reddit, other review, forum, question and answer websites, you just have to, you can't control what's going on there, but you need to really try to pay attention to it and influence it. You know, another piece would be thinking about, you know, the way that you show up, the way the language on your website shows up in different contexts, like the strength and clarity of the brand voice.

10:43That's something that can carry through or not in terms of how you're represented. And then, you know, honestly, just like making sure that more of your materials, this is actually the pendulum always swings back and forth on this in marketing. But like, how much do you make publicly available versus how much do you gate? because you want to gate some things because that's a way to, you know, signal deeper engagement with an audience. And there's lead capture opportunities, obviously. But if it's gated, then it's not going to be available to be indexed. And, you know, what's funny about all these things is that none of these are like new.

11:23These are like that's what I think is kind of the there's a silver lining in all of this to me, which is if you do the fundamentals really well, then it's not like one weird trick to get the LLMs to rank you highly. It's actually, no, you have to do all the things. You need to do them at a high quality and you need to do them consistently. And that was always true. So it's just like, hey, marketing, let's do our job.

11:46Josh Koenig:Yep, yep, there you go. Okay, simple as that, interview done. So, okay, you were saying that you're cautious to bet on how fast these LLMs are changing, the rules are different, what's being pulled and crawled and what's not is different. But is there anything right now that you're like, this might not work out, but I am betting on that because I still think you're a good person to place interesting bets. You've been doing it this whole time since creating Pantheon. Like, I'm sure you're placing bets right now. Yeah, fair point. I think the question of how far you lean into any of these tactics is one for people to consider to the point where, you know, paying attention to how you show up on Reddit, like people should do that if your audience is on Reddit, which, you know, there's a lot of things on Reddit.

12:34So your audience is probably there to some degree. For us, you know, we're not yet making the bet to like treat that like a community the same way we treat our internal community forums. But we've talked about that. Like, what if we tried to actually take more of what we're doing in community and actually push it out into these other third party external places? That's like more work. It requires a bigger investment of energy. It's in some ways there's some risks associated with it. Because, again, that's a forum you're not in control of. But I think that we're going to make some some investments along those lines.

13:15Similarly, like how much, you know, we, you know, we do a lot with G2, right? They're a great vendor I'm sure many of your audience works with. But there's a plethora of others. And do we want to, like, put on the radar and, you know, put in our budget and our plan for next year that we're going to try to actually run the board with all of these review sites and make sure that we're optimizing for all of them? um and uh and i haven't those are those are ones where i've not like made the bet but those are ones where i'm like seriously considering because again i think those are things that are they're good for the current um you know environment where we are thinking about how we show up in chat gbt but they're also just good for the business um i i'm reluctant to anytime someone comes to me with like a thing that is only for it feels like it's a it's like artificial for chat i'm like i like have a little pause on that, just in the same way that I don't love the idea of doing things that are only for SEO.

14:15Like if it's not something that is authentically useful and valuable, I definitely want to think twice or thrice before doing that.