Your next customer may never visit your website
Most searches now end without anyone clicking anything. That is a real problem for publishers — and a strange, specific opportunity for small businesses, if your facts are written down where a machine can read them.
Picture your shop with the lights on, the counter wiped, everything ready — and a steady stream of people stopping outside, reading the menu in the window, and walking on. They got what they came for. They never came in.
That is roughly what has happened to the web this year.
The numbers are worse than most people realise
Search results used to be a list of doors. Now the answer is written at the top of the page, and most people read it and stop.
The Pew Research Center tracked 68,879 real searches from 900 American adults. When a search produced one of these written answers, people clicked through to an actual website 8% of the time. Without one, they clicked 15% of the time. Roughly half the traffic, gone.
The citation links inside those answers — the little source references — were clicked in 1% of visits. They are, in practice, decorative.
A randomised experiment published this spring, run by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the Indian School of Business across 1,065 people, put the drop in clicks at 38% on the searches where an answer appeared. Searches ending with no click at all went from 54% to 72%.
The same study found something quietly damning: people were no more satisfied with their results than the group who saw no written answers at all. The traffic did not go somewhere better. It just stopped.
The conclusion almost everyone draws is wrong
The reaction has been a lot of posts declaring websites dead. Why maintain one, the argument goes, if nobody arrives?
Because the premise is backwards. Those answers are not generated out of thin air. They are assembled from pages — and one of those pages should be yours.
Your website stopped being only a destination. It became a source. It is the thing the answer about you gets built from.
Which means the question is no longer “how many people visited my site this month”. It is a harder one: when someone asks about a business like mine, what gets said about me, and where did that come from?
If you have not written your facts down anywhere, the answer still gets assembled. It just gets assembled out of whatever else exists — a directory listing someone filled in badly in 2021, a review that mentions a price you no longer charge, a phone number from two premises ago. You do not get to watch this happen. You just get fewer calls.
The part that is genuinely good news for small businesses
Here is the bit that gets lost in the panic, and it is worth sitting with.
The traffic being destroyed is mostly informational. “What time do they open.” “How much does that cost.” “Do they do X.” Those used to be clicks. Now they are answered in place.
If you are a publisher, that is an extinction event, because the informational click was the product. You wrote the article, the click was the revenue.
If you run a bike shop, a dental practice, a bakery or a plumbing firm, you never sold the informational click. You sold repairs, appointments, bread and callouts. Someone learning your opening hours without visiting your website was never a lost sale — it was a lost visit, which is a different thing entirely. The visits you actually care about, the ones where someone has decided to buy, are the ones least affected.
So the headline panic is largely a publisher’s crisis being read as everybody’s crisis.
And the inversion nobody expected
Now the genuinely strange part.
What makes a page easy for a machine to read correctly is, almost item for item, what large companies have spent fifteen years removing from their websites:
- Plain sentences stating plain facts
- Prices, written as numbers
- One page that says what you do and where you do it
- Pages that load without three seconds of scripts, consent walls and pop-ups
- Nothing important trapped inside an image, a PDF or a video
Big organisations are terrible at this now. Their opening hours live inside a JavaScript widget. Their prices are “contact us for a quote”. Their homepage is a video. There are four overlays before the text.
A one-page site for a bike shop that says, in sentences, we are on Mill Road, we open at eight, a basic service is £45 and takes two days, we do electric bikes is more legible than almost any corporate site on the internet.
That is not a small advantage. For the first time in a long while, the thing that wins is clarity rather than budget — and clarity is free.
What to actually do about it
Concretely, this week. Each of these is one message to devkoi — the sentence in quotes is genuinely all you need to send.
1. Write the boring facts down, as text. Hours, address, phone number, the area you cover, what you do and what you don’t. Not in a graphic. Not in a PDF. Text.
“Add our opening hours, address, phone number and the areas we cover as text at the bottom of every page.”
2. Answer the questions people actually ask. Think of the five things customers ask before they commit. Give each one a short, direct answer. Direct answers are what get quoted.
“Add a questions section: do you take walk-ins, how long does a repair take, do you work on electric bikes.”
3. Say your prices, or at least your ranges. An unstated price gets guessed at, and the guess is rarely in your favour. “From £45” beats silence every time.
“Add a price list with our six most common jobs and what each one starts at.”
4. Keep the page plain and fast. No autoplay video, no consent maze, no app-download layer over the text. devkoi builds plain pages with no JavaScript by default, which is exactly the shape that reads cleanly — so mostly this means not asking for the clutter.
5. Keep it true. Changed your hours? Closed for a fortnight in August? Put the new price up? Facts rot faster than anything else on a website, and a confidently wrong answer about your business is worse than no answer. This is the part that usually fails, because updating a website is normally annoying enough to postpone.
“We’re closed 3–10 August and the basic service is £50 from next month.”
6. Make sure it is actually published. A preview link is not on the internet — it is unlisted, it expires, and we ask search engines to leave it alone. Nothing can cite a page it cannot reach. Publishing to your own domain starts at $19 a month.
The shop-window problem is real, and it is not going away. But a window only works if there is something written in it, and most small businesses have spent years with the facts locked in a brochure nobody can open.
Write them down. It is a smaller job than the headlines suggest, and you are better placed to do it than the companies spending millions on the same problem.