Traffic was comfortable because it was a number. Today most questions get resolved without anyone visiting a site, and that number stopped telling the story. The practical question is what you look at instead.
Do I come up when people ask about my topic?
It’s the base signal and almost no one has it. It isn’t asking about your name, it’s asking the way a client asks: about the problem, not about you. If describing your specialty doesn’t surface you, no traffic number makes up for that.
Am I described the same way everywhere?
The second signal is consistency. Ask several assistants the same question and compare. If each one tells a different version of what you do, the problem isn’t the assistant: it’s that your material says different things depending on where you look. That inconsistency also explains why ChatGPT says one thing and Gemini says another about you.
Do I come up in recommendation questions?
There is a big difference between being cited while a topic is explained and being named when someone asks who to go to. The second is the one that brings work. Measuring them separately keeps you from celebrating the easy one.
What do I do with Google then?
You still look at it, but it means something else. You no longer look at it to count clicks, you look at it to know whether what the search engine understands about you matches what artificial intelligence understands. When both say the same thing, the machine is willing to name you. And it pays not to confuse position with presence in the answer: only 12% of what the AI cites is in Google’s top 10, as Ahrefs measured in 2025.
How often should this be checked?
Less than you fear and more than you actually do. A quarterly review is enough to catch a change of direction, because what moves isn’t your merit but what the machine manages to read, and that moves in months. Checking daily won’t give you new information. What does help is always asking the same questions, worded the same way, so the comparison means something.
The reason traffic stopped telling the story is in the Great Decoupling.
Get your diagnostic and start by knowing where you stand today.