The starting point
The site was on WordPress, with the usual stack of plugins. For a personal site it was a more complex setup than necessary. I had started publishing in three languages back around 2020, but when I no longer needed extra clients, that publishing habit faded until it stopped.
In early 2026 I read quite a bit about the results Claude was giving a lot of people (development, SEO, operations). After years of watching marketing fads come and go, I tend to take this kind of enthusiasm with a pinch of salt. But I wanted to try it firsthand.
When I started, the site had close to zero real organic traffic; the little that moved in analytics were spikes from AI bots crawling the site. I had set it aside and no longer worried about it. That made it, precisely, the perfect site to experiment with: no real risk. And, above all, it generated almost no leads.
Why I rebuilt the site on Astro
After accepting that my WordPress was probably not the ideal foundation to compete well on performance and results, I decided to go all in with Claude and use it as an assistant. We started by choosing a simple, flexible-enough technical stack. I have a developer background, so I didn't need a back office or anything sophisticated to manage the site and the content.
The full stack essentially became Astro v5: static output, fast, without the plugin overhead, easy to version-control and edit directly. That simplicity shows in performance: on Lighthouse the site scores 99–100 on performance, 100 on SEO and best practices, and 95 on accessibility, on both mobile and desktop.
For a content site in three languages, that simplicity is exactly what reduces friction and lets the SEO and content work be what leads, not the infrastructure.
Claude as an SEO assistant
For the analysis side I relied on claude-seo, an open source SEO analysis plugin for Claude Code created by Daniel, easy to connect to the workflow. From there, the site started to get, on a regular basis, new content, updated old content, improved internal linking and more.
The working pattern is consistent: short, repeated cycles rather than one big one-off overhaul. Writing and translating into the three languages, reviewing what's published, spotting broken links and content gaps, and starting again. It's exactly the kind of repetitive task where an assistant like Claude provides real leverage.
Why SEO isn't what it used to be
There's an underlying shift that conditions everything above: being in Google's number 1 spot has stopped guaranteeing free traffic. AI Overviews take up more and more space on the results page, and a growing share of searches ends without a click, because the user gets the answer without leaving the SERP. SparkToro and Datos' work on zero-click searches documents this trend well.
On top of that, more and more people use AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini directly as a search engine. And a result obtained through an AI carries, in many people's eyes, a high recommendation value: it's not an ad or just any link, it's an answer.
That makes SEO more complex and shifts the weight toward other signals: demonstrable experience and authority (E-E-A-T), well-placed structured data (Schema.org), entity clarity about who you are and what you do, and content written so an AI can cite it in specific passages. Optimizing to get cited by AI (what's starting to be called GEO) is a new layer on top of classic SEO, not a replacement.
What has happened since
Search Console started recording data for the site on 16 March 2026. Over the following three months, impressions and clicks grow steadily from near-zero, with average position stabilized around 9.7.
These numbers deserve an honest read. CTR on Google is low, around 0.1%: many impressions stay as visibility without a click, exactly what you'd expect in an AI Overviews and zero-click scenario. The real value isn't so much in those clicks as in what doesn't show up in Search Console: from that base, the site has gone on to generate inbound calls on a regular basis from prospective clients in Europe, the US and Asia.
The detail I'm most interested in: several of those contacts mention having been referred by an AI platform, for very specific tasks related to their project. It's not a massive volume, nor is it meant to be. It's a personal site that was switched off and that, with a better technical foundation and sustained content work, has become a discovery channel again, including inside the AI tools where many people now start their search.
Notes on scope and what's not shown
This case is an experiment on my own site, not a client account. The traffic figures come from Google Search Console and the performance figures from PageSpeed Insights; the charts on this page reproduce that real data. The "an AI recommended me" attribution comes from what the contacts themselves report, not from a closed tracking system, and the period is short with a small lead volume. That's why I present it with caution: the direction is clear, but it's early to draw definitive conclusions.
The experiment continues; this case reflects a snapshot from mid-2026.