Why Your Shop’s Website Traffic Is Down, But Your Leads Aren’t | Ep. 537

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Website traffic is falling across the board, and it’s tempting to read that as a marketing problem. It usually isn’t. AI summaries now answer the generic top of funnel questions people used to click into your site to answer, so the casual browsers never arrive. The visitors who do show up are the ones already deciding whether you’re a fit.

That changes what a manufacturing website is for. A list of machines, materials, and certifications was fine when buyers were willing to dig. Now they want a specific answer to a specific question, and if your site makes them hunt for it, they’ll go back to Google or ChatGPT and get an answer from a source you don’t control.

We talk with John Greeley of Navu about what shops should actually do about it, and a lot of it isn’t what you’d expect. Old content that used to sit harmlessly on your site is now working against you, because LLMs read your whole site at once and stop citing you when they find pages that disagree with each other. Less content with more depth beats the old habit of publishing a page for every possible search term.

The other half of this is labor. The questions landing in your info inbox are usually answered somewhere on your site already, and they’re pulling SMEs and owners off the work that actually moves the business. John walks through a real buyer journey where the ninth question was a technical spec buried on page 193 of a PDF, and the tenth was how to talk to sales. Nobody on that team spent a minute on it until the lead was qualified.

Brooke also joins us in the host seat for the first time and gives the Gen Z read on all of it, which mostly comes down to letting people find what they need before anyone tries to sell them something.

What’s Covered in this Episode

• (0:00) Brooke steps into the host seat, and John introduces Navu
• (6:38) Take your shop to the next level with DN Solutions
• (7:50) What a single line of JavaScript can tell you about visitor behavior
• (10:35) About 37% of users who eventually convert used the chat along the way
• (11:42) Why traffic is down but conversions aren’t
• (13:26) How LLMs read your entire site at once and punish conflicting answers
• (16:17) Less content, more depth, and a ruthless pruning habit
• (17:35) Your site’s unanswered questions as a canary in the coal mine
• (20:14) What buyers actually asked Mike when Hill rebuilt its site
• (22:15) Why the old pop up chatbots earned their bad reputation
• (24:42) More than 60% of buyers now start their research in a chat interface
• (26:16) Turning AI buzzwords into outcomes at the IMTS Industrial AI Conference
• (27:04) Labor savings is how most customers justify the spend internally
• (28:50) The landing page listings and a conversation about instant gratification
• (32:12) Quote response time as the number one factor in winning or losing work
• (35:13) The real user journey and the questions that you see
• (38:30) Brooke on why her generation would rather research than call
• (42:27) Salespeople querying the site mid call instead of chasing down an SME
• (44:31) Kennametal’s Next Level Shop at IMTS 2026
• (45:34) Get started and build a custom demo at navu.co/makingchips

Resources Mentioned

• DN Solutions
• IMTS Industrial AI Conference, Wednesday September 16, South Building
• Check out the Kennametal booth at IMTS 2026, the Next Level Shop, booth 431800 in the West Building, level 3

Connect with John Greeley

• Email John Greeley: john@navu.co
• Navu

Connect with MakingChips

• MakingChips.com
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