I rebuilt my website from scratch for AI - here's why
I deleted 400 articles from my website.
20 years of content. Gone. And it's the best decision I ever made.
The reality: invisible to AI
My site has existed since 2000. 652 pages about Slovenia, the country I've lived in for 20 years. For years, I wrote for Google. Keywords, backlinks, H1 tags. It worked.
Then I noticed something weird: my visitors were asking me questions that ChatGPT had already answered. Except ChatGPT never cited my site.
Why AI ignored my content
AI doesn't read like Google. They look for:
- Structured content (not jumbled WordPress)
- Verifiable facts
- A real author with proven expertise
- Formats they can parse (JSON-LD, llms.txt)
My WordPress site hit zero of these marks. So I rebuilt everything. Not a redesign. Not a migration. A complete rebuild for the AI era.
The results
After a few weeks:
- 327 citations from Microsoft Copilot in 3 months
- Cited by Google AI Mode on "10-day Slovenia road trip"
- Bing impressions multiplied by 5 in 2 weeks
When someone asks Google for a 10-day itinerary in Slovenia, it's MY content that the AI uses to build its answer. Day by day. Ljubljana, Bled, Soča, Postojna, Piran. My itinerary. My recommendations. My 20 years of on-the-ground expertise.
AI citations = visibility = real traffic
The impact is measurable. My Bing impressions went from 200 to almost 1,000 per day, right when my Copilot citations exploded.
And that's just 2 AI engines. There are 6 major ones. Most sites don't even know these citations exist. They don't measure them. They don't optimize for them.
That's exactly why the early movers get a massive head start.