TLC Panel: Accessibility, AI Discoverability, & SEO with Shirley van Haalem, Alisa Scharf, and Sani Manic
Hi TLCers,
Over the last year, many of us have been watching a fundamental shift occur in how people discover, evaluate, and choose products and services.
Increasingly, AI systems are shaping customer perception, comparisons, trust, and purchase intent before a visitor ever reaches a website. For some organizations, the website may be shifting from a place of discovery into a place of confirmation.
If that’s true, what does it mean for all of us??? What does it mean for:
experimentation teams?
SEO strategy?
accessibility?
structured content?
UX and digital journeys?
measurement and optimization?
And perhaps most importantly: What should organizations actually DO about it?
Join me as we welcome back some super smart guests to talk about a really important topic:
Sani Manic, Co-Moderator, NoHacks (technical SEO & AI discoverability)
Alisa Scharf, Seer Interactive (AI discoverability & search strategy)
Shirley van Haalem, Online Dialogue (accessibility, semantic structure, and machine readability)
Join us for a practical, cross-disciplinary conversation exploring the growing convergence between accessibility, SEO, AI discoverability, and experimentation.
Topics will include:
Why AI-referred traffic may behave differently from traditional traffic
The shift from “website as discovery” to “website as confirmation”
Why semantic structure and machine readability suddenly matter more
Accessibility as both a usability and competitive advantage
Structured content, AI agents, and machine-consumable experiences
How experimentation teams may need to rethink metrics, journeys, and validation methods
Upstream influence and “brand impact” experimentation
Why websites still matter, but optimization may need to change
What human-centered design looks like in an AI-mediated ecosystem
This won’t be a “hack your AI rankings” discussion.
It will be a thoughtful discussion about how digital decision-making itself may be evolving, and how organizations can respond in ways that are measurable, meaningful, and genuinely useful for humans.
For those of you interested, here's some of the stuff we're reading and writing right now that inspired this conversation:
AI Can't Read Your Damn Website (humans can't either) https://testandlearn.community/blog/ai-cant-read-your-damn-website-humans-cant-either
The Funnel Didn’t Break. It Just Moved https://testandlearn.community/blog/the-funnel-moved
Google AI Optimization Guide https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide?hl=en#agentic-experiences
Ignore for Google Search Is Not Ignore for AI Agents https://nohacks.co/blog/ignore-for-google-search-is-not-ignore-for-ai-agents
How Accessibility Prepares Your Website for AI Search https://smithandconnors.com/insights/how-accessibility-prepares-your-website-for-ai-search
Web Accessibility ROI, SEO Traffic, AI Bot & Agent Optimization https://www.accessibility.works/blog/web-accessibility-roi-seo-traffic-ai-bot-agent-optimization/
The GEO Olympics Study: What 231,347 LLM Responses Reveal About AI Brand Visibility https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/what-ai-thinks-about-your-brand-is-already-written