Inspired by the Fireside Chat: Stop Chasing Traffic. Start Converting It.
If you spend time talking with CEOs and digital leaders at large commerce brands right now, a clear pattern emerges.
Everyone is experimenting. Everyone is testing. Everyone is looking for the next strategy that will keep growth moving forward.
And almost everyone is quietly coming to the same realization: Chasing new traffic is no longer a dependable growth strategy.
AI-driven discovery has fundamentally changed how customers find products and brands. Search is no longer a single doorway you can optimize against. It’s fragmented across LLMs, summaries, recommendations, and answers that sit largely outside a brand’s direct control.
That’s why the brands that win in the next era won’t be the ones that magically unlock new traffic sources.
They’ll be the ones that figure out how to monetize the attention they’re already getting – more effectively, more consistently, and more quickly – across their sites and digital experiences.
For years, growth followed a familiar playbook.
You invested in SEO. You optimized paid channels. You added marketplaces. You pushed harder on acquisition.
Traffic was something you could engineer. That assumption is breaking down.
Discovery today is fragmented across:
Brands no longer fully control where (or how) customers first encounter them.
Waiting for the next acquisition channel to appear isn’t a strategy. It’s a stall.
Traffic growth is no longer a reliable or predictable growth lever.
What hasn’t gone away is demand. What has changed is how much patience customers have once they arrive.
The traffic that reaches your site today is often:
There are fewer clicks and fewer second chances.
That means every interaction on your site carries more weight than it did before. If a customer lands on a PDP without the right context, story, or next step, that attention is gone.
In an AI-shaped buying journey, attention is the scarce resource. Revenue is a function of how effectively you convert it.
Historically, conversion optimization sat downstream.
You worried about conversion after traffic targets were hit. That hierarchy no longer holds.
When traffic is volatile and increasingly outside your control, what happens after the click becomes the growth strategy.
That shows up in very practical ways:
Conversion is how brands turn attention into revenue – and it now matters more than acquisition volume.
One of the biggest risks for large brands today isn’t bad ideas. It’s good ideas that ship too late.
Customer behavior, discovery patterns, and expectations are changing too quickly to wait for perfect answers. Teams that hesitate lose momentum.
The brands pulling ahead are the ones that:
Speed to execution is no longer an efficiency metric.
It’s the difference between responding to reality and optimizing for a version of the market that no longer exists.
This shift – from chasing traffic to monetizing attention – is exactly the problem Fastr was built to solve.
What we see across enterprise brands is not a lack of ideas or ambition. It’s friction. Insight lives in one tool. Experience changes live in another. Execution gets stuck in backlogs, handoffs, and approval cycles.
Fastr collapses that gap.
When teams can see what’s happening on their site, understand where attention is leaking, and immediately change the experience – without tickets, without weeks of process – conversion stops being a quarterly initiative and becomes a daily capability.
In a world where traffic is volatile and attention is scarce, the advantage isn’t more data. It’s the ability to act on what you already know, faster than the market changes.
There’s no shortage of AI in commerce right now.
Dashboards. Copilots. Assistants. Layers of insight added on top of already complex workflows.
Most of it looks impressive. Very little of it actually makes teams faster.
If AI adds steps, creates more handoffs, or simply explains complexity instead of removing it, it’s not progress.
AI that doesn’t collapse process is just productivity theater.
The AI that matters is the kind that shortens the distance from insight to action – and helps teams respond to what’s happening now, not weeks later.
This is not a waiting game. It’s not about finding the next traffic source or acquisition hack.
The next generation of winning brands will be the ones that:
Attention is already reaching your digital experiences. The advantage now lies in what you do with it.
The brands that get this right won’t need to find new traffic. They’ll grow anyway.