I was looking at my Grokipedia page and checking how the edits were approved by Grok. Like most AIs, Grok had crawled the entire internet for human-generated content - a point confirmed by Elon Musk in his January 2025 CES interview with Mark Penn:
“The cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training. That happened basically last year.”
Watch Stagwell's CEO Mark Penn interview Elon Musk at CES! https://t.co/BO3Z7bbHOZ
— Live (@Live) January 9, 2025
To make a decision, Grok looks at truth sources. In this case, I was trying to add the URL for the "Institutul pentru Cercetare in Informatica (ICI)," and Grok accessed the provided URL to confirm it was the official one.
But that made me wonder: Who decides which information is correct, and how? A simple metric might be how often a URL is referenced elsewhere. But if you're old enough, you'll remember techniques like spamdexing or SERP poisoning, where malicious actors flooded the internet with pages containing specific keywords to manipulate search results, often pushing harmful sites ahead of legitimate ones.
This realization underscores why it's more important than ever to reclaim agency over your online presence through proper hygiene.
Reclaiming Agency Through Online Hygiene
Now is the time to properly monitor your online presence. Register all variations of a name or brand (with or without hyphens), typo variations (typosquatting), TLD options, and keep previous domains registered and parked or redirected - even if they're not in use.
The rise of AI has amplified domain-based threats, making "defensive domain registration" (buying variations, misspellings, and related TLDs) a proactive strategy to safeguard against misinformation, impersonation, and reputational damage.
With AI tools used in research, customer service, and content generation, a single rogue domain could influence widespread outputs, tricking users into clicking malicious links for phishing or scams. This highlights how dynamic AI knowledge bases can inadvertently amplify unverified or malicious content if sources aren't controlled.
Controlling Your Data: Why I Embrace (Some) Tracking
I often find myself in discussions where people block all tracking for privacy - a generally good approach. But they're surprised when I explain that, beyond blocking aggressive ads, I keep most tracking active.
Why? Because I want to be in control. I'm feeding my data, the data I curate and control, to the internet and AIs. I control the source of truth.
A bad actor can easily hijack something with little or no baseline information, but it's harder if there's already a wealth of accurate data to override. It's like using a longer password: You don't make it uncrackable; you just make it take more time, deterring attackers toward easier targets.
For individuals, this means curating personal profiles on platforms like LinkedIn to influence AI-generated profiles about you.
The Vital Role of Authentic Written Content
The second point is about online content, written pieces like this article. One of the most profound shifts in digital discovery is underway: High-quality, original written content is becoming vital as a reliable "truth source" for humans and the foundational reference for AI engines generating responses. Meanwhile, traditional traffic from search engines like Google is transforming, pivoting toward AI-driven referrals.
Traditional organic traffic from Google dropped significantly in 2025 and into 2026, due to AI Overviews providing instant answers on results pages. This surged "zero-click" searches (60-70% of queries in many cases), where users get answers without visiting sites, while sites face DDoS-like aggressive crawlers from AI companies scraping content .
Global publisher referral traffic from Google fell by about a third (33%) from late 2024 to late 2025, with informational content seeing steeper declines. Studies show CTR drops of 30-61% with AI Overviews, and publishers forecast 40-43% less traffic as AI handles more queries click-free.
Yet AI assistants are emerging as the primary discovery layer for quick, factual, or complex queries. When they cite sources properly (as top models increasingly do), they send highly qualified, conversion-ready traffic, often outperforming broad Google clicks.
AI models favor:
- Depth and expertise: Long-form pieces (2,000+ words) with unique insights, data, case studies, or original analysis get cited more.
- Structure and clarity: Clear headings, lists, tables, FAQs, and strong E-E-A-T make content easier for AIs to parse and reference.
- Originality and human touch: AI struggles with novel perspectives or first-hand reporting; authentic writing stands out over generic "AI-slop."
As we anticipate the rise of authentic content, this human element will dominate, rewarding creators who produce depth over volume.
From SEO to AEO: Optimizing for the AI Future
Traditional SEO isn't dead, but it's on life support, especially the obsession with millisecond page speeds, keyword stuffing, and blue-link rankings.
The game is shifting to AI Engine Optimization (AEO - Answer Engine Optimization or GEO - Generative Engine Optimization), prioritizing content that's easily consumable, understandable, and citable by AI agents.
Page speed mattered when users bounced from slow sites, but in the AI era, zero-click resolutions make raw speed less critical for discovery. The battle for every ms is replaced by fights for citations and answer visibility.
We already use structured data for Google's rich results. The quest now: What's the best way to feed AI? JSON, markup, XML, embedded on-page, or served separately like AMP once was?
Future Expectations: Changing Web Traffic and Server Loads
I'm expecting shifts in webserver loads. Traditional search sent high volumes of low-intent visitors who bounced quickly (50-70% rates), spiking loads and forcing speed optimizations.
With AI handling queries directly, low-intent traffic gets filtered reducing server strain.
AI-referred traffic is high-quality: Visitors are pre-qualified, with longer sessions, lower bounces, and higher conversions (3-8x better than Google organic). Advertisers are paying more for sites driving AI citations, as these visitors are gold.
Featured image generated with Grok Imagine
