I read a lot of marketing analysis. Most of it evaporates by lunch. But every so often, someone writes a sentence that rearranges how you see your own business — and Kevin Indig, the growth advisor behind the widely read Growth Memo, wrote one of those in his January 2026 essay on what he calls the Great Decoupling.
His argument, distilled: “Traffic was never the point. It was just the easiest thing to measure.” Growth-memo
For anyone who has spent years chasing website visitors, that lands like a slap. It also happens to be the most useful thing a small business owner can hear about AI right now. Here’s why.
The Lesson: Your Traffic and Your Revenue Have Split Up
For two decades, digital marketing ran on a simple chain of logic: better rankings meant more clicks, more clicks meant more traffic, and more traffic meant more customers. Indig’s research shows that chain has snapped. His team’s study of Google’s AI Mode found that for informational searches, clicks out to external websites dropped to nearly zero — people got their answers inside the AI interface and never left.
Yet here’s the twist that most coverage misses, and the part that changed my thinking: the buyers didn’t disappear. Indig documents businesses whose traffic is falling while their inquiries and sales demos grow by double digits. The education that used to happen on your website now happens inside an AI conversation. The customer still learns, still compares, still decides — and then contacts the business the AI helped them trust.
Your traffic left. Your demand didn’t. It just moved somewhere your analytics can’t see.
What This Means for a Business Like Yours
If you own a small business, you’ve probably felt this without having a name for it. The website report looks fine, maybe even good. The phone is quieter anyway. Or the opposite: visits are down, but the customers who do reach out seem strangely well-informed and ready to buy. Both are symptoms of the same shift Indig identified.
Three Takeaways Worth Stealing
Sharp Positioning Gets Cited. Vague Positioning Gets Skipped.
This may be Indig’s most practical insight for small businesses. AI systems recommend businesses they can describe confidently. If your online presence says you do “a bit of everything for everyone,” an AI has nothing firm to grab. The bakery known specifically for gluten-free wedding cakes gets named; the bakery that’s vaguely “great baked goods” gets summarized into oblivion. Specificity isn’t limiting — in the AI era, it’s the price of admission.
Start With Your Customer’s Questions, Not Your Keywords
Indig urges a move from keyword-first to customer-first thinking: what do your buyers actually ask, and where do they ask it? For a small business, that’s liberating. You don’t need enterprise SEO software. You need to know the twenty questions your customers ask before they hire someone like you — and to answer them, publicly and better than anyone else in your market.
Measure Influence, Not Sessions
His hardest-hitting recommendation: stop leading with traffic numbers and start tracking whether you’re in the consideration set — whether AI systems mention you, how you’re described, and whether new customers arrive pre-educated. Fewer visitors who already trust you beat thousands who bounce.
Where the Lesson Ends and the Work Begins
Indig wrote his analysis for marketing teams at large companies. But the decoupling doesn’t check company size — if anything, small businesses feel it faster, because they never had the brand cushion big players enjoy. The question his work leaves open is the practical one: how does a business without a marketing department actually earn its place in AI recommendations?
That’s the work we do at LeadSupport.net. We take the principles the industry’s sharpest analysts have proven — positioning clarity, question-first content, influence measurement — and turn them into plans a small business owner can actually run. We start by showing you what AI systems currently say about your business, then build the visibility strategy to improve it. No guarantees exist in this field, and you should be wary of anyone offering them. What we offer is the discipline of doing the right work, measured honestly.
Traffic was never the point. Being chosen is. If you’re ready to be measured by the metric that matters, reach out to LeadSupport.net — and let’s find out where you stand in the answers your customers are already reading.