Getting Found Is Only Half the Job

Businesses are being urged to prepare for the next wave of digital discovery. SEO, AEO, GEO and AI-driven search are generating plenty of advice about how to become more visible, more discoverable and more likely to be recommended.

And much of that advice has merit. How customers find businesses is changing, and being visible matters.

But here's a question worth asking before committing to the next round of digital investment.

What's the point of making your business easier for AI to discover if you haven't made it easier for customers to do business with you?

Someone arrives at your website wanting to check opening hours, make a booking, compare a product or complete a purchase. Instead, they're navigating promotional messages, hunting for basic information, encountering outdated content or working through unnecessary steps.

The business has succeeded in attracting the customer. Now it's making that customer work to accomplish something relatively simple.

And this isn't just an irritation. There's a commercial consequence.

Research from the Baymard Institute consistently identifies avoidable usability problems in ecommerce checkout processes. Its 2025 benchmark found that almost two-thirds of desktop and mobile sites assessed had mediocre or worse checkout experiences. Better design and simpler processes represent genuine opportunities to recover sales that might otherwise be lost.

As digital discovery becomes more sophisticated, the contrast between finding a business easily and struggling to do business with it may become even more conspicuous.

How did it become so difficult?

A website rarely becomes difficult to use overnight.

Businesses introduce new products, change services, expand into new markets and adopt new systems. Their websites must accommodate those changes, often alongside the demands of marketing, operations, customer service and technology.

A new product needs a landing page. A campaign introduces another offer. An operational change requires a different booking process. Each decision may be perfectly reasonable in isolation.

But the accumulated result can be a website that reflects years of individual business decisions rather than a coherent customer experience.

Sometimes the business itself has changed more significantly than its website suggests. Its products, customers and commercial priorities have evolved, while its digital presence still reflects what the business used to be.

Customers should be able to understand who the business is today, what it offers and whether it serves their needs. That's difficult when the information they encounter tells yesterday's story.

Navigation becomes crowded. Information is duplicated or contradicted. Customer journeys acquire additional steps. Pages and promotions remain online long after their original purpose has disappeared.

And those forgotten pages introduce another risk.

A business may consider an old offer finished and assume it is no longer relevant because it has disappeared from the website's navigation. But removing a link from a menu doesn't necessarily remove the page itself.

Search engines and AI-powered discovery tools may still find and surface that information. A customer looking for a particular product or service could encounter an old promotion, find no indication that it has expired and reasonably assume it remains available.

Content that has disappeared from the business's attention hasn't necessarily disappeared from the customer's view.

The organisation understands the history behind these additions and changes. The customer doesn't, and shouldn't need to.

And customers arrive with their own purpose, not the business's agenda. They may simply want an answer, a booking or a way to speak to someone. The website shouldn't make them navigate the organisation's internal priorities to accomplish those things.

As complexity accumulates, even modest improvements can require untangling years of dependencies, competing requirements and operational workarounds.

What began as a series of manageable changes becomes a much larger and more expensive problem.

The cost doesn't always appear where you'd expect

The commercial consequences of a difficult customer experience aren't always obvious.

A customer who can't find the information they need may leave without making an enquiry. Someone struggling to complete a booking might abandon it. Others will persevere, but arrive at the transaction already frustrated.

And some customers will contact the business for help with things they should have been able to accomplish themselves.

That creates a second cost.

An employee has to answer the question, clarify the information, resolve the confusion or complete a task that the website was supposed to make straightforward.

One enquiry might take only a few minutes. Across hundreds or thousands of interactions, those minutes become a meaningful operational expense.

But the costs aren't necessarily visible together.

Marketing may be measuring website visits, campaigns and conversions. Customer service sees the enquiries. Operations deals with the exceptions and workarounds. Technology manages the systems and competing change requests.

Each team sees part of the problem, but the business may never see its cumulative cost.

And that matters when investment decisions are being made.

It can be relatively easy to justify another campaign, new content or an initiative to improve discoverability. These activities have identifiable costs, established measures and tangible outputs.

Finding the budget to simplify an existing customer journey, remove redundant content or address accumulated friction can be considerably harder.

The investment is visible. The cost of doing nothing often isn't.

A business can calculate what it will cost to improve a booking process. But what does it currently cost to leave that process difficult? How many potential customers abandon it, and how much staff time is spent helping people complete tasks they should be able to manage themselves? How many customers simply decide not to return?

Some of those answers can be measured. Others require investigation or informed estimates. And the customers who quietly walk away may never appear in a report.

The absence of a reliable number doesn't mean the absence of a commercial cost.

Particularly when resources are constrained, businesses need to examine not only what an improvement will cost, but what continuing with the existing experience may already be costing them.

Otherwise, the business risks continuing to fund customer acquisition while overlooking the barriers that prevent customers from doing business with it.

Stewardship: making room to look after what already exists

Businesses routinely make room for digital growth. New campaigns, new features, new products and new channels all compete for attention and investment.

But how much room do they make for looking after what is already there?

A website doesn't remain useful simply because it continues to function. Keeping it relevant as the business and its customers evolve requires ongoing attention.

That creates a need for something less glamorous than another launch, but potentially just as valuable: digital stewardship.

Stewardship means taking responsibility for the experience customers encounter, not just the next addition to it.

Sometimes that means simplifying a booking process or making important information easier to find. Sometimes it means correcting outdated details, retiring pages that no longer serve a purpose or removing steps that have accumulated through years of operational change.

It also means recognising that customers may encounter the business through search, social media or other digital channels, not necessarily through its homepage. What they find needs to reflect what the business can offer today, and the next step needs to be clear.

None of this automatically calls for a major technology project.

There are circumstances where underlying systems have become so outdated, or accumulated complexity so difficult to unwind, that substantial redevelopment or replatforming becomes necessary. Those decisions carry their own costs and risks.

But allowing problems to accumulate until a major intervention becomes unavoidable shouldn't be the default approach.

The more useful discipline is to make time for periodic review, correction, removal and simplification as part of ordinary business operations.

That work needs legitimacy, ownership and resources. Otherwise, it will always struggle for attention alongside initiatives promising something new.

The purpose isn't to create a perfect website or digital presence. It's to keep making it easier for customers to do business with you.

Getting found is only half the job

The way customers discover businesses will continue to change. Search will evolve, AI will create new pathways, and businesses will need to adapt.

Investing in discoverability makes sense.

But that investment deserves an equally serious commitment to what happens after customers find you.

Can they find what they need? Can they understand what you offer? Can they book, buy, enquire or get help without unnecessary effort?

And is someone paying attention to the barriers that quietly develop over time?

Before committing the next dollar to attracting more customers, it's worth asking whether some of that investment would deliver greater value by making it easier for the customers you've already attracted.

Getting found is only half the job. The other half is making it easy for people to do business with you.