If you mostly use ChatGPT or Claude and you're trying to keep up without wasting time, budget, or attention, this is the part that matters: The game has been changed.
The old deal was simple: platforms crawled your site, then sent people back to click. That deal is breaking. First you get cited by the model; only then do humans click.
Cloudflare said that as of June 2025, Google was sending roughly 1 visit for every 14 crawls. OpenAI was around 1 for every 1,700. Anthropic was around 1 for every 73,000. That 1700:1 crawl-to-referral ratio is why the click era is starting to end.
OpenAI's published ChatGPT Search behavior makes the shift easier to see. The answer is pulled into the chat, and sources sit in a sidebar. For a normal user, that means the answer page is replacing the results page. The first win is not "rank and hope." It is "get cited inside the answer."
A product update is worth reading only if it changes your next decision. This one does. If you own docs, content, or discovery, the first knobs to look at are crawl permissions, citation visibility, and monetization terms.