How AI has broken 2 of my businesses (and what I am doing about it)

The Start Up To Grown Up Podcast

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How AI has broken 2 of my businesses (and what I am doing about it)

AI has rapidly changed how we search for and find information and content. It is likely to have broken your firm's marketing efficiency. Here's why and what to do next.

Heather Townsend

May 04, 2025

Transcript

Welcome to a free edition of Start Up To Grown Up: Your source for ideas, insights and tactics to take back control of your business and scale it sustainably and profitably by Heather Townsend, award-winning author of The Accountants’ Millionaires’ Club and Founder of The Accountants’ Growth Club

It’s been a turbulent few weeks, business-wise. Not in a “my whole team walked out” way that has happened in the past. But OK, this isn’t working, so what now? This is a follow on post from last week’s post on ‘fix these 4 core business development processes before you start to scale’.

In this article, I’m going to honestly break down the challenges faced across both of our businesses and some of the background for these challenges.

Firstly, what are the businesses that I am talking about?

The Accountants’ Growth Club

Website

This is our membership and coaching company for small accounting firm owners who are looking to grow and scale their business while working fewer hours with less stress. It’s a great little business, and the plan was to move this into an Employee-Owned Trust from 1st Jan 2026. The only problem is that we need more members to justify my valuation on exit.

No problem. Or so I thought. After all, inbound marketing using content IS my speciality. But when I looked into the problem, it went much deeper than that.

The sign-ups to our email list had tanked. And they tanked for 2 reasons: our website traffic from search has dropped by 70% this year compared to last year. And overall traffic to our website had dropped by 48.74%. Then we are not getting the same level of people signing up for our email list. We used to be able to rely on 50+ new sign-ups a month. Now we are lucky if we get 15 sign-ups a month. As a result, it’s proving to be hard work to get the right level of attendance and new member acquisition at our webinars and workshops. Once, it used to be easy to get 5+ decent leads from a webinar. Now we have to scrap for every single sniff of a lead.

We haven’t done anything different. But when you are a business whose marketing is too reliant on informational search, then AI will have wreaked havoc on your website traffic.

How to make partner

Website

Progress to partner academy

This is a global training and coaching business helping professionals in practice take the step up to partner, and when they get there, stay there. This may sound like a humble (or not so humble brag), but I am the worldwide expert in what it takes to make partner. It’s what I have spent over 50% of my time since 2004 doing. I used to be able, through my knowledge of SEO and content marketing, to get on average 5-10 sign-ups to my email list every single day.

In fact, we used to on average gain 90 new people every month, completing our Partnership Readiness Assessment (using scoreapp - this link will get you 50% off your 1st month and a small affiliate payment to us) and then about 100 or so new sign-ups from our website. Well, how the mighty have fallen. That’s now a meagre 20 sign-ups a month from people starting or finishing our Partnership Readiness Assessment, and another 30 or so per month from our website.

Then, when you look at our Google Analytics for our How To Make Partner website, it makes for depressing reading, a story similar to our other business. Organic search is down by 65%. And when organic Search used to make up over 90% of our website traffic and was also responsible for most conversions, you can see there is a problem.

That problem means our membership site, Progress To Partner, is stubbornly stuck on £2-3k of monthly sales. When what we really want is about £10k a month of digital content sales. Strategically, we want and need digital content sales from our How To Make Partner business to not just pay the bills but also give my business partner and me a reasonable income for our retirement years.

The AI double whammy

At this point, I am not getting into the whole ethical debate about the tech bros with their AI models stealing my IP from my books to help create their AI tools. But yes, this did happen. In fact, the first version of ChatGPT used to be able to give me a decent summary of my books. But that train has left the station, and I can’t put things back to where they were. Whilst AI is the most amazing tool and has become my best intern and research assistant in the last 2 years, it has also decimated my website traffic and my ability to get people to sign up for my email list.

Here’s why…

Firstly, think about your search habits now. If you want a quick answer to a problem, do you (a) do a Google search, (b) ask for help on social media, or (c) pop your question into your AI tool of choice? Unless your question is for a recommendation to a local business, such as “accountant near me”, you probably are not using Google. Then, if you do use Google, it now handily pops up at the top of your search an AI overview. Who now needs to click into your website?

As a result, my experience of drops of 60-80% in informational searches to my websites is not uncommon. AI has basically broken informational search as an easy win to get high-quality targeted buyers onto your website. As some senior marketing people in big businesses said to a client

ChatGPT has swallowed the internet.

Here’s what the data says:

The negative impact of AI is most pronounced for non-branded, informational searches – the very queries users often employ when seeking general knowledge or answers to questions.¹ Amsive recorded a -19.98% click-through rate decline specifically for non-branded keywords when AI overviews were present.² Ahrefs noted that 99.2% of keywords triggering AI Overviews in their study were informational.³ This trend creates "zero-click searches," where users get their answers directly from the AI overview summary without visiting cited websites.¹ Some sites heavily reliant on informational content have reported organic traffic drops as large as 60% on certain pages following the AI overview rollout.¹

But it’s not just the problem of getting users to click through to your website. It’s then the challenge to get them to download your lead magnet. Previously, the best-performing lead magnets were always the type that promised quick and big results for minimal effort. You know this sort of thing “steal my exact marketing plan” or “grab my template” or download my “6-step process to…”. Well, you know I said AI has become my new research assistant and intern. It’s absolutely fantastic at creating this sort of thing. Even better, I no longer have to give up my email address and end up spammed by a dubious business that believes that it can safely ignore data privacy regulations.

So there you have it, not only have I lost 60-70% of my website search traffic, but I’ve also stopped giving my traffic the sort of stuff that they really want to download and in return hand over their email address to me.

The VAT (GST/Sales tax) rules for business-to-consumer

I bet you didn’t expect this! Well, this has caused us to really rethink what we are doing with our Progress To Partner Academy. In a nutshell, when you sell business-to-consumer and digital products, the place of supply becomes where your consumer is located. However, the place of supply then determines what VAT you should charge. This then becomes a problem if certain countries or trading blocs, i.e., the EU and India, decide to put a zero threshold on when VAT needs to be charged. This means if I sell 1 digital copy of Poised for Partnership for 5 euros to someone in Europe, I need to file a VAT return in that European country.

The word that now comes to mind is unprintable, particularly when 50% of your digital content sales come from outside of the UK.

What it meant is that if we had carried on in the same way, our accountant’s fees for helping us with all the VAT filing would have been sky high. Which just isn’t worth it..

What now?

As you can see, the impact of AI plus the international VAT rules has meant some reflection and thought on what we are doing and why we are doing it. What we can’t do is carry on the same with our marketing and our Progress To Partner Academy.

Having done our research, these are the key critical moves to stem the flow:

Increase our brand-building activities on social media
Go hard on YouTube (it’s the second biggest search engine)
Simplify our funnels and lead magnets to the stuff that we know works
Change our content so it highlights our credibility, goes deeper and has more personality
Invest in more partner-led activities, I.e. running webinars with other businesses with complementary audiences

We have taken some decisions…

Decision 1: Start a ‘How To Make Partner’ Substack with paid subscribers on from the beginning

The great thing about the paid membership feature of Substack is that it handles all the VAT stuff for you. We just give them 10% of our revenue, and we don’t need to worry about who is buying our stuff and where they are buying it. Even better, after 9 months of being purposeful on Substack, I am getting 6-10 sign-ups each day on our Start Up To Grown Up publication. Unless I start paid media, such as Facebook ads, I can’t get a higher level of sign-ups right now.

Decision 2: Start the How to make partner podcast via Substack

I’ve been truly blown away by the Start Up To Grown Up Podcast getting over 2000 downloads in less than 12 weeks of going live. Given the generational shift in how Gen Z and the millennials like to consume their content, i.e. watch or listen, we have to now put our How To Make Partner material into podcast form.

Decision 3: Go hard on YouTube

We’ve got YouTube channels, and we have over 1000 subscribers to our How To Make Partner channel, but less than 300 on our Accountants’ Growth Club channel. We need to increase the subscriber numbers and traffic substantially.

Decision 4: Hero our assessments and the results they can bring to our clients

AI can do lots of things, but it can’t pinpoint for our ideal clients where they are going wrong with their business or career progression. Our Partnership Readiness Assessment and Growth Assessment can do that. So we need to ‘go large’ on this and do everything in our power to get people to do the assessment.

See how I get stuff done.

I’ve been procrastinating about what the value should be of signing up to be a paid subscriber here on Substack. I was originally going to turn this on back in autumn in 2024. Then I didn’t get the early traction I wanted. So my head dropped, and I quietly decided that I would turn on paid subscribers when I had time.

Well, now is the time. Most weeks, I will be writing up what I am doing to turn around the pipelines of both businesses AND build not just 1 but 2 paid newsletter/membership businesses. I will be sharing my exact decisions and how I have used AI, data and my expertise to change things. You can literally steal my methods for your own business. I’ll share with you my plans, results, AI prompts, and even the deep research reports I use to guide my decisions.

If you join as a paid subscriber, you will get an exclusive ringside seat into exactly how I go about taking our digital content sales from £2k a month up to £15k a month, across both businesses.

Here’s my mind map of the topics I will be covering over the next 2-3 months for paid subscribers.

The first article I am publishing this week - just for paid subscribers - will be a deep dive into how to create the right type of content (and repurpose it) using tools such as AI - that will help turn readers/watchers/listeners into clients and paid subscribers.

Your actions this week:

Your first action is to sign up as a paid subscriber to follow my journey over the next 2-3 months to fix our marketing! (Sorry, rather blatant!)

Click here to get 20% off annual membership as a thank you for being an early subscriber

Remember, paid subscribers get:

Steal all my methods, exact how-to plans and templates of how I am scaling 2 knowledge-based businesses via coaching, paid membership and consulting services.
Regular office hours and private virtual events for paid subscribers
Unlimited Q&A via the app
Access to my new books as and when published.

After you have signed up, your action for this week needs to be to think about how to adapt your marketing to the changes brought about by AI.