Come back Jeeves, all is forgiven
Elevating your digital presence in a LLM dominated landscape.
By Crispin Heath on Sunday 14 September 2025
Every once in a while there's a shift in the digital landscape that seems to unify the clients we work with in a kind of collective terror.
And the thing we seem to be talking to all clients about right now is the drop off in traffic instigated by the shift to knowledge gathering with the Large Language Models (LLMs like Chat GPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini) and particularly since the launch of AI overview and AI mode in Google search.
But frankly it’s a return to the olden days of the internet, when Search was first pioneered, and we were all collectively invited to 'Ask Jeeves'? The only problem being that people did exactly that: they asked questions. In natural language. And the internet, as was, wasn't able to answer their questions. Because that's not how it was built.
So along came Google, and retrained us with their beguiling simplicity. To not ask questions, but to use Boolean Operators and Keyword Strings. And so our content was optimised to capitalise on that new behaviour. Keywords were stuffed. Links were backed. Authority was established. The Search algorithms adapted, and the content arms race escalated. And with it everyone consigned Jeeves as a comical footnote in Internet history.
But now, the technology has caught up and it turns out Jeeves was right all along. There is undeniably a fundamental change in the way people are finding their information because we’re human and we like asking questions. That’s how we always wanted to use the web.
So now we’re back there and the technology has caught up, your visibility now requires a new approach or maybe more pertinently a little bit of a new approach but with a whole heap of old practices thrown in.
Brands have to be present in the authoritative, structured, and trusted content that AI models use to build their responses.
- AI-generated answers have become the dominant force in Google Search, influencing 84% of all queries and reshaping how users receive information online(1).
- While overall site traffic may fall in the AI search era, the visitors who do arrive are far more valuable. Ahrefs data shows AI search users convert 23 times better than traditional organic visitors(2).
We believe there are 5 fundamental things you could be looking at now to ensure that your online brand presence is LLM ready:
A quick online brand health check
How is your brand presence and sentiment doing online. It's all very well focussing on what you're saying on LinkedIn but what are others saying about you in places like Reddit and Glassdoor which are where LLMs will be looking to understand how your brand is perceived. Understanding where your brand is being mentioned and how is more important than ever.
Is your content strategy LLM ready?
For example attributed research; deep topic led insight; and in depth FAQs. Authored thought leadership on your site, linked to fleshed-out LinkedIn pages and a range of editorial/ earned coverage will all help bolster credibility - which requires a strong proactive PR programme and coordinated spokesperson strategy to boot.
Employee advocacy is even more important
How ready are your colleagues to represent and bolster your brand's sentiment ratings online? What’s your employee communications strategy to help turn the dial?
Is your website LLM ready?
Is your site your crawlable? Is your metadata AI ready? How well optimised is your knowledge graph?
Are you measuring the right things?
Are you using tools such as WAIKAY or Similarweb's AI measurement framework to identify how well you’re performing in AI and identifying how you can do better in the topics you want to index for.
Collective terror is probably misplaced because Jeeves was right all along... but in order to ensure you can answer the questions users are asking, quick action is imperative to ensure you remain visible in the new knowledge gathering era.
If you fancy a chat about this email me on cheath@teamspirit.co.uk.
