Your website has a new reader

Two clients hired Hooman Studio in the same month after finding us through AI search. One from Portugal, one two weeks later. We show up by name in Google AI Mode and ChatGPT, a discovery channel that didn't exist two years ago. The brands cited there are the ones whose writing was worth citing before AI cared. This is how we rebuilt ours.

A founder used to ask three friends and Google. Now the same founder asks ChatGPT, then Claude, then Perplexity, then maybe a friend. Gartner is projecting organic search traffic to commercial sites will drop 25% by 2026 as that shift accelerates. We're watching it in our own analytics already. The leads that used to come from typing a category into Google now come from someone screenshotting a list a model generated.

The site is still doing the work. The reader has changed.

Three things make a page worth citing on an AI engine. None of them technically complicated. All of them harder than they sound.

The first is answer-first writing. The page opens with the answer to the question it exists to answer, in 40 to 60 words. Not a topic introduction. Not a setup. The answer. A 2024 Princeton paper found that around 72% of pages cited by ChatGPT open this way. Most agency websites are written like trailers for the page, not the page itself. The trailer doesn't get cited.

The second is sections that survive being lifted. A language model doesn't read a page top to bottom. It pulls a chunk and quotes it. If a section needs the four above it to make sense, it stays in the document. We rewrote our case studies so any section, on its own, still tells you what the project was, who it was for, and what we did. That's not a formatting change. It's a writing change.

The third is the one most agencies won't do. Cut the adjectives. "Comprehensive healthcare website design" is invisible to a language model because it could describe forty agencies. "We replaced Windward's service grid with a 3D paper boat that sails through the patient journey" is citable, because it can only describe one. The constraint forces specificity, which forces real judgment, which most agency writing is built to avoid.

When we ran the existing Hooman Studio site through the new writing rules, we hit our own clichés in the first hour. End-to-end design and development. Bespoke brand systems. We partner with ambitious clients. The kind of language a competitor's site would also use, which is exactly the failure. A model reading the web has no way to tell us apart from anyone else when both pages sound the same.

The fix wasn't to write more pages. It was to make the pages we already had more specific. Eight years of work, almost none of it on the homepage in any concrete form. We rewrote it to name the projects, the industries, the people, and the outcomes.

The hardest sentences to cut were the ones that sounded most like an agency.

The discovery channel growing 500% year over year is the one most studios still treat as a side bet. Search optimisation is being sold the way it was sold in 2018, with a paragraph about ChatGPT bolted on, by people who don't write for a living. The studios cited by AI engines in the next two years won't be the ones with the most aggressive GEO retainer. They'll be the ones whose writing was worth citing before AI cared. The work to get there is editorial. It always was.

The new game is being played whether you play it or not. Right now, somewhere, a founder is asking ChatGPT or Google AI Mode who does what you do, and the model is answering with a list. Two of those answers last month landed in our inbox. We rewrote our site so they would.