CBC News spoke to Hamzah Khadim, co-founder of the Toronto-based AI-SEO agency Logik Digital, about how AI summaries and chatbots are changing the way people find information online. The feature ran on CBC News as a written analysis by technology reporter Nora Young and as a segment on The National. It examined a change that is already measurable rather than speculative: human traffic to websites is falling, and machines now do a large share of the reading.
What the CBC Feature Examined
The piece set out to answer a question that most business owners have not yet asked. If an AI tool answers the question directly, what happens to the website that used to supply the answer?
The data behind that question is not ambiguous. Cloudflare, which provides internet infrastructure for a large share of the web, measured traffic between June 2025 and April 2026 and found human visits declining across every major industry it tracked, with the hardest hit categories down by as much as 40 percent inside a year.
Google AI Mode, the conversational version of the search box, has passed a billion monthly users. Between AI summaries sitting above the results and chatbots that answer without sending anyone anywhere, the click that used to follow a search increasingly never happens.
CBC anchored the story in the experience of a long-running food blog whose owner found portions of her own recipes appearing inside AI summaries, published without her permission and without anyone needing to visit her site. It is the clearest version of the problem. The content still gets read. The visit does not happen.
THE SHIFT IN SEARCH
AI systems are increasingly becoming the first readers of web content. The content may still influence the answer, but the user does not necessarily visit the original website. For businesses, visibility increasingly means being understood and cited by AI systems, not simply ranking in a traditional list of links.
What Hamzah Told CBC News
Machines Are Now the Primary Readers of Your Content
“The biggest impact is … machines going to read your content,” Khadim told CBC News.
For most of the history of the web, a page was written for a person who would land on it and read it. That assumption no longer holds. A large share of the requests a website now receives are automated: crawlers gathering training data, retrieval bots fetching pages in response to a live question, and agents acting on someone else’s behalf. The page still has to work for the human who arrives. But it now has a second reader, and that second reader decides whether the human arrives at all.
Search Has Moved From “Keywords to Conversations”
Khadim told CBC News that search has moved from “keywords to conversations, and that the goal for any website is no longer turning up in a list of links but being part of the AI’s answer”.
That reframes what winning looks like. Ranking well used to mean appearing among ten links and competing for the click. When someone asks an AI assistant a question, there is no list. There is one answer, assembled from a small number of sources, usually between two and seven.
The objective is not to appear alongside the answer. It is to be inside it. It also changes what the content itself has to do. A page written to rank for a keyword is built to match a phrase. A page written to be cited has to contain a clear, self-contained, verifiable answer to a question somebody actually asked, phrased close to the way they asked it.
FROM RANKING TO CITATION
Traditional SEO focuses heavily on earning a position in a list of search results. AI SEO adds another objective: becoming one of the sources an AI system selects, extracts information from, and cites in its answer.
Logik Digital Work: From No AI Visibility to a Google AI Overview Citation
Re-Juvenation Cosmedical Injectables & Laser in Georgetown is a strong example of how AI SEO can translate into measurable search visibility. Initially, the clinic was not being cited in Google’s AI Overview for relevant local searches.
After implementing a focused AI SEO strategy, Re-Juvenation was featured among Google’s top recommended clinics for laser hair removal in Georgetown, with its business, location, and Elite iQ laser technology specifically highlighted in the AI-generated results.
THE RESULT
Re-Juvenation moved from having no relevant Google AI Overview visibility to being specifically recommended for laser hair removal searches in Georgetown, with its business, location, and Elite iQ laser technology highlighted in the AI-generated result.
Your About Page Matters More to AI Than It Does to Your Customers
Asked what that looks like in practice, Khadim pointed to the About page, and to adding detail most visitors will never finish reading.
“People aren’t gonna necessarily read all of that, but AI definitely will,” he told CBC News, adding that it helps establish trust.
- Concrete information gives AI something to work with. Founding year, team size, credentials, certifications, service areas, and other specific business information can help AI systems understand and recommend your business.
- Visitors scan an About page and move on. AI systems can process the page in full.
- Content most human visitors will never finish reading can still establish credibility. Detailed business information gives AI systems more context from which to assess the entity.
- Optimizing for AI discovery means writing for a machine reader. The page still needs to work for people, but it also needs to provide clear, structured information that machines can understand.
YOUR ABOUT PAGE IS AN ENTITY SIGNAL
Your About page should clearly establish who your business is, where it operates, what it does, who operates it, and why it is qualified to provide those services. These details may not all be read by a human visitor, but they give AI systems the factual context needed to understand your business.
What This Means for Your Business
Five things worth doing, in order of how quickly they pay off.
- Find out what AI already says about you. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews about your business by name, then about the service you sell in your city. The answers tell you whether AI knows you exist, whether the details are right, and who it recommends instead of you.
- Treat your About page as your entity home. One page should carry the definitive statement of who you are: founding date, location, service area, team, credentials, and links out to every profile that corroborates it.
- Write so answers can be extracted. Lead with the answer, use headings phrased the way people actually ask, and keep each answer complete enough to stand on its own when it is lifted out of context.
- Build mentions, not just links. AI systems weight what third parties say about you more heavily than what you say about yourself. Editorial coverage, directory profiles, reviews, and industry listings all feed that.
- Measure AI traffic separately. Referrals from AI platforms do not appear as organic search in GA4. Set up a custom channel group so you can see the volume, and more importantly, the conversion rate, on its own.
THE FIVE-STEP AI VISIBILITY CHECK
Audit what AI already knows about your business, strengthen your About page, structure content around extractable answers, build credible third-party mentions, and measure AI-driven traffic separately from traditional organic search.
Read and Watch the Full CBC Feature
The full analysis by Nora Young is on CBC News, along with the segment that aired on The National.
- The web is being redesigned for AI. What does that mean for human readers? CBC News, July 30, 2026
- Watch the segment on The National. CBC News, July 29, 2026
About Logik Digital
Logik Digital is an AI-SEO agency with offices in Toronto and Singapore, working with local and service-based businesses across healthcare, legal, and home services. The agency holds Google Partner status and has been building search visibility for clients for more than 15 years. Its current focus is AI SEO: making sure clients are found on Google, cited by AI platforms, and chosen by customers.
Want to Improve Your AI Visibility?
AI search is changing how customers discover businesses. Logik Digital helps businesses understand how AI platforms interpret their brand, services, expertise, and online presence, then builds the foundation needed to become more visible and more frequently cited.
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