The Front Door Has Moved

On Chegg's Q1 2023 earnings call, CEO Dan Rosensweig said something that would end up costing the company $14.5 billion. He told investors that ChatGPT was starting to affect new customer growth. The stock fell 48% in a single day. Two years and one CEO change later, Chegg was down 99% from its peak and suing Google over AI Overviews for good measure.

Chegg didn't lose to a worse product. Its homework-help content was good — good enough, in fact, that Google's AI kept summarizing it directly into search results, so students got the answer without ever clicking through. The front door Chegg had spent two decades building — rank well on Google, capture the click, convert the visit — simply stopped being where people were standing.

I call this the front door moving. Not "digital transformation," not "SEO strategy" — the actual, physical fact that the place where people first encounter you has relocated, and no amount of institutional excellence at the old address changes that.

It's happening again right now, one layer up. ChatGPT is closing in on 20% of global search-query share — the first time in two decades anyone has put a real dent in Google's near-monopoly — and it's on pace to keep growing. Businesses in categories where AI Overviews dominate are already seeing lead-form submissions drop 10 to 30 percent, according to Wall Street Journal reporting. When a buyer asks an AI assistant for a recommendation and your name isn't in the answer, you don't lose the sale. You never entered the room where the sale was decided.

The organizations still safe are not the ones with the best websites. They're the ones who've noticed the door moved and walked through the new one before checking whether the old one still worked.

From Dancing in the Wind: An Adaptive Leadership Framework in the Age of AI.

Where is your front door right now — and have you actually checked, or are you assuming it's still where you left it?