A client we have worked with for years, a safari operator, read through a site audit we had sent and came back with one question.
One question I have is where does AI play into all of this? Does AI play a role at all in helping websites be on the forefront of efficiency and is it at all part of Bricks Builder or not?
It is the right question aimed at the wrong half of the problem.
The word “AI” is doing two completely different jobs in that sentence. One is AI as a tool that builds websites. The other is AI as the thing now standing between a stranger and your website, which is the part people mean when they talk about AI referral traffic. They get bundled together in every conference talk and every panicked LinkedIn post, and they should not be.
AI as a build tool: our side of the fence, not yours
Bricks Builder does ship an AI assistant. You can ask it to draft some CSS or fill a block with placeholder copy while you are working in the editor. Useful. Also entirely irrelevant to your visitors, because none of it runs on the live site. What gets served to a person on a phone in Sandton is HTML, CSS, a few scripts and some images. The same as it was in 2015.
We use AI daily on our side. Mapping fields when we move a site off a legacy stack. Drafting alt text across seven hundred images so a human only has to correct rather than write. Scaffolding structured data. Reading through a plugin’s code faster than we could by hand. It changes our turnaround and our margins.
It does not change your page weight, and it will not make a slow site fast.
A page loads quickly because of the decisions inside it: how many plugins are doing work on every request, whether the images were exported at the size they display, whether the builder is generating six kilobytes of inline CSS for a single heading. Those are judgement calls. A machine typing faster does not make them for you. When we rebuilt Rockfig Lodge from Elementor to Bricks, the home page went from 21 seconds to 4.4 on mobile. Nothing about that was AI. It was deleting things.
So, to answer the question directly: there is no AI inside your website making it efficient. There is us, and there are the choices we make about what your site is allowed to load.
AI referral traffic: the half that actually matters
Here is where it gets real.
Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 US adults through March 2025, covering 68,879 Google searches, of which 12,593 produced an AI summary. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits. When there was no summary, 15%. Roughly half the clicks, from the same searches.
Your search ranking did not move. The click did.
At the same time, an entirely new source of visitors has appeared. Adobe, looking at more than eight million visits to US travel sites and publishing in June 2026, found traffic arriving from AI sources up 194% year on year in May 2026, and up 2,215% since it started tracking the metric in October 2024.
Those visitors behave better than the average, too. They spent 70% longer per visit and bounced 41% less often.
And then the part that keeps getting left out of the headline: they still converted 28% less than non-AI traffic. That gap has narrowed by nearly 70% since October 2024, so the direction of travel is clear. But it has not closed.
Fewer people are clicking through from search. The ones arriving via an AI assistant read more and buy less, for now. Both of those are the same instruction: whatever traffic you do get has to work harder.
That is the honest read. Not a doom story, not a gold rush. A shift in where the pressure sits.
On chatbots, since it always comes up next
The reflex response to any of this is to bolt a chat widget onto the site.
For a considered, relationship-led sale, we would push back on that hard. If somebody is planning a trip they will take once, or commissioning work that will represent their business for the next five years, the conversation with a real person is not the overhead before the sale. It is the product. It is the first evidence they get of whether you are any good at this.
Automating it away to answer questions faster is optimising the wrong number. There are businesses where a bot earns its keep: high volume, repetitive queries, order status, opening hours. That is a different business to yours.
What actually matters, in order
Three things, and the order is the whole point.
1. Machine readability
This is the unglamorous one. An AI assistant reading your site is doing what a screen reader has always done, and what Google’s crawler has always done: parsing structure. Which means the fixes are the same ones we have been recommending for a decade.
- Alt text that describes the image, rather than repeating the filename.
- Heading levels that reflect the actual hierarchy of the page, not whichever size looked right.
- Structured data that says this is a lodge, this is a rate, this is a location.
- Content that exists as text, rather than baked into a graphic.
Adobe scored travel sites on exactly this and found that even in the best performing categories, hotels and car rental, around a third of page content still could not be read by a machine. The work did not change. The stakes did.
2. Content that answers planning questions
People do not ask an assistant for the “best safari lodge”. They ask what a family with young children should do in the Waterberg in October, or whether a lodge is drivable from Johannesburg without a 4×4. If the answer to that question lives on your site in plain language, you can be part of the answer. If your site contains only rates and a gallery, you cannot be.
3. The platform
Migration matters, and we will make the case for it all day, but it is third for a reason. A fast, lean site full of unreadable content is a well engineered dead end. Get the substance right and the platform decision pays off far harder. That is precisely why our Bricks Builder conversion work starts with an audit rather than a rebuild quote.
The check almost nobody runs
Before any of the above, one thing worth checking this week. Confirm whether anything at your hosting or CDN layer is blocking AI crawlers, and confirm that whatever it is doing was a decision somebody actually made.
A lot of security tooling shipped aggressive bot blocking defaults over the last two years. Plenty of it was switched on by someone protecting a site from scrapers, entirely reasonably, at a time when the assistants people now use to find businesses either did not exist or did not matter. There are still good reasons to block some of it. Scraping is real, and not every crawler is a customer. The problem is not the blocking. The problem is nobody deciding.
The block sits above your website, so nothing inside WordPress will tell you about it. Your rankings look normal. Your analytics look normal, which is its own trap, and one we have written about before. You are simply absent from a channel you never knew you were in.
It is a fifteen minute check. We find it more often than we would like.
Sequencing, not panic
If you take one thing from this: you do not need an AI strategy. You need your website to be legible, to answer real questions, and to not be quietly firewalled off from the tools people are using to find businesses like yours.
Do those in order. Check the crawler access first, because it is quick and the answer is binary. Fix readability next, because it serves search, assistants and actual human beings using screen readers all at once. Then have the platform conversation, with numbers in front of you.
We are based in Plettenberg Bay and work with clients in Cape Town, Johannesburg and well beyond South Africa. If you want to know which of those three your site is actually failing, that is what an audit is for. Get in touch, and let us write the next chapter of your brand’s story properly.
