If you want more people to visit your website, one way is to nail down the SEO or optimize the content for LLMs. I find it amusing that no matter that it's 2026, I still see sites putting out massive amounts of text hoping the machines will scrape it and recommend it to users.

It's usually AI-generated long-form content, blog posts, mostly—useless to their average customer. The only point of this type of content is to fool the machines by inserting lots of different words or phrases aligned with whatever people search for when they need a specific service or product. The more alignment between the searched terms and the ones on their website, the bigger the chances people will end up on their site.

Yes, true. But it only gets people to the website.

Once they're there, SEO is useless. All that matters is how they perceive what they see. The bigger the pile of pointless stuff they encounter, the harder it is for them to find what's actually worth their time—and the more crap they see, the less trustworthy you appear. Especially if it's their first visit and they haven't used your offering yet, so the trust is still not established.

And it's pretty similar with those pushy "Subscribe to our newsletter" modals that pop up as soon as you start scrolling. Or basically any modal that appears without the user initiating the action. It desperately screams for attention and interrupts the user flow, risking their already fragile attention and potentially losing them forever. Better leave those cheesy techniques to online betting and clickbait sites, and focus on providing the content people actually need.

Bringing customers to the site is hard, but it's only one part of the job. And if your site sucks, more people on it won't help your business.

So next time you hear another brilliant idea from a marketing guru on how to get or keep more visitors, think twice before implementing it. The more effective—but slower—way of growing your user count is building trust, brick by brick. You do that by being truthful, relevant, and useful.

Quantity was never a good measure of credibility. So instead of thinking about how to add more things, think about how to add more value.