The web is changing, not disappearing
The Website Has Survived Every Supposed Replacement
Every few years, something arrives that is supposed to kill the website.
First it was social media. Then mobile apps. Then no-code platforms. Now it is artificial intelligence.
And this time, the argument sounds pretty convincing.
Why visit a website if you can ask ChatGPT? Why scroll through ten Google results if an AI-generated answer gives you what you need immediately? And if an AI agent can eventually compare products, fill out forms, book appointments, or make purchases for us, why would we need to navigate websites at all?
It is a reasonable question.
But it starts from the wrong assumption.
Websites are probably not disappearing. What is changing is what a website is for.
We have already seen this happen several times.
Early websites were mostly digital documents. You opened a page, read some information, clicked a link, and moved to another page.
Then websites became interactive. We started shopping, banking, watching movies, managing projects, editing documents, booking flights, and running entire companies through a browser.
A website stopped being just a collection of pages and became software.
Artificial intelligence is pushing the web through its next transformation.
The website will still have an interface for humans. But that interface may no longer be the only way customers interact with the business behind it.
The Biggest Change Is the Journey
For years, a typical online customer journey looked something like this:
Need → Google search → website → navigation → action
Suppose you wanted a hotel in New York.
You searched Google, opened a few websites, compared locations and prices, checked room availability, chose an option, filled out a form, and made a reservation.
Now imagine saying:
“Find me a hotel near the Museum of Modern Art for three nights, under $300 per night, with breakfast and free cancellation.”
An AI can increasingly handle parts of that research for you.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT agent, for example, can navigate websites, interact with their interfaces, and fill out forms while performing tasks on behalf of a user.
The journey starts looking more like this:
Need → AI → multiple sources → decision or action
There is an important detail in that second journey.
The websites are still there.
The human simply may not visit all of them personally.
That distinction is at the center of what is happening to the web.
Your Website Has a New Kind of Visitor
Until recently, businesses could think about two broad types of visitors to their websites.
The first was obvious: people.
The second was less visible: search engine crawlers. Google and other search engines analyze websites so they can understand, index, and eventually show their content in search results.
Now we have a third:
AI agents.
An agent is different from a traditional search crawler because it does not necessarily stop at finding or reading information. It can use that information to help complete a task.
For a small business, that distinction matters.
Imagine a customer asking an AI:
“Find a dog groomer near me that is open Saturday morning and can handle a large dog.”
Or:
“Compare these three accounting firms and tell me which one works with small ecommerce businesses.”
Or:
“Find an available dentist appointment next week after 4 p.m.”
The AI needs information to answer those questions.
What services does the business offer? Where is it located? What are its opening hours? How much does something cost? Is there availability? How does someone book?
A good business website already contains much of this information.
The difference is that in the future, its reader may increasingly be software acting on behalf of a person.
Fewer Visits Can Still Mean More Influence
We can already see the beginning of this change in search.
A Pew Research Center study examining Google search behavior found a striking difference.
When an AI-generated summary appeared, users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits.
When there was no AI summary, they clicked a traditional result in 15%.
And links included directly inside the AI summary received clicks in only 1% of those visits.
That creates a strange situation.
Your website can influence a customer’s decision without receiving a visit from that customer.
Imagine that someone asks an AI where to have dinner nearby.
The AI discovers your restaurant, checks your location, opening hours, menu, vegetarian options, ratings, and price range, and recommends it.
The customer goes to dinner.
Your website helped create that customer.
Your analytics may show no website visit at all.
For decades, businesses have treated traffic as one of the clearest measures of online visibility.
Traffic will still matter. But it may no longer tell the whole story.
We are moving toward a world where being found, being understood, being cited, being recommended, and being visited are no longer necessarily the same thing.
We will explore that change much more deeply in the next article in this series.
Why Businesses Will Still Need Their Own Website
If customers can discover businesses through Google, social media, marketplaces, AI assistants, maps, and dozens of other services, it might seem logical to ask why a business still needs its own website.
The answer is control.
Your Instagram profile belongs to your business, but Instagram controls the platform.
Your Amazon store might sell your products, but Amazon controls the marketplace.
An AI assistant can describe your company, but the AI company controls how that answer is presented.
Platforms change their algorithms, business models, rules, prices, and priorities. We have already explored what can happen when digital products slowly shift away from serving the people who made them successful in Enshittification in AI: How Generative Tools Are Losing the Plot.
Your own website is different.
It is the digital place where your business can define its own identity, services, information, experience, and rules.
And that role could become even more important in an Internet overflowing with automatically generated information.
Your domain can become the authoritative source that says:
This is who we are. This is what we offer. This is how it works. And this is how you can do business with us.
Humans need that source.
Search engines need that source.
AI systems increasingly need it too.
Websites Are Starting to Become Usable by Machines
Here is where things become more interesting.
Today, an AI agent that wants to book an appointment on a website may have to behave somewhat like a human.
It finds the right page. It identifies a button. It clicks. It finds a form. It determines what each field means. It enters information. It submits the form.
Every one of those steps creates an opportunity for misunderstanding.
A proposed technology called WebMCP points toward another model.
Instead of forcing an AI to visually interpret every interaction, a website could explicitly tell an agent which actions are available.
For example:
Book an appointment. Search inventory. Filter products. Contact support.
Chrome is currently experimenting with WebMCP as a proposed web standard. It is far too early to assume that WebMCP itself will become the universal solution, and small businesses certainly do not need to rebuild their websites around it today.
But the underlying idea is much more important than the name of the technology:
Websites are evolving from things machines can read into things machines may also be able to use.
We will get much more technical about this later in The Future of the Web series.
What Happens When Building a Website Becomes Cheap?
There is another major change happening at the same time.
AI is making it dramatically easier to generate layouts, images, copy, and code.
Creating something that looks like a website is becoming cheaper and faster.
That may sound like bad news for web designers and developers.
It is more complicated than that.
As we discussed in Can AI Really Help You Build Your Website?, generating a page and creating an effective business website are not the same job.
If almost anyone can generate a decent-looking landing page in a few minutes, then having a decent-looking landing page stops being much of a competitive advantage.
The value moves somewhere else.
Understanding the customer.
Structuring information properly.
Connecting systems.
Creating useful content.
Building a recognizable brand.
Designing a good user experience.
Making a site accessible.
Integrating the website with the actual operations of the business.
Building trust.
Technology tends to commoditize production before it commoditizes judgment.
AI can make producing pages easier.
That makes knowing which pages, systems, information, experiences, and integrations a business actually needs more valuable, not less.
Design Still Matters When Machines Do the Clicking
If AI agents eventually handle more routine interactions, it is tempting to imagine that visual design will become irrelevant.
Why care about the website if an AI makes the reservation for us?
Because humans do not visit websites only to push buttons.
We visit them to decide whether we trust a company.
We look at a photographer’s portfolio before hiring them.
We explore a hotel’s rooms before booking.
We read about a consulting company before handing it an important project.
We inspect a product before spending thousands of dollars.
An AI can reduce friction around the functional part of a decision. It cannot eliminate the need for confidence, identity, taste, emotion, or judgment.
In fact, when producing a technically competent website becomes easier, those human qualities may become more important.
Good UX will matter too.
An agent might be able to complete a terrible checkout process faster than a person, but that does not make a manipulative or confusing experience acceptable. As we have discussed in Dark Patterns in UX Design, a business can optimize an interface for short-term actions and still damage the thing that matters more: trust.
The future of web design is not simply about making interfaces easier for AI to operate.
It is about designing systems that work well for machines without forgetting the humans those machines represent.
What Should a Small Business Do Today?
You do not need an “AI-ready website package.”
You do not need to chase every new acronym.
And you definitely do not need to rebuild your entire website every time a new AI protocol appears.
Most businesses can prepare for this future by getting the fundamentals right.
- Make it extremely clear what your company does.
- Keep your services, products, locations, prices, contact details, and opening hours accurate.
- Create content that contains actual expertise rather than repeating the same information already published on hundreds of other websites.
- Organize that information properly.
- Make the site fast and accessible.
- Use clear language.
- Keep important information in formats that search engines and other software can understand.
- Maintain your Google Business Profile, ecommerce feeds, and other relevant business data.
- Continue investing in a website experience that gives customers a reason to trust you.
Interestingly, Google’s current guidance for AI features in Search is much less exotic than much of the marketing surrounding “AI optimization.”
Google says traditional SEO fundamentals continue to matter for AI Overviews and AI Mode. It also says websites do not need a special AI file, special schema markup, or a completely different optimization strategy just to appear in those experiences.
That is a useful lesson beyond Google.
Preparing for the future rarely means throwing away everything that already works.
It means building solid foundations that can support whatever comes next.
The Website Isn’t Dying. Its Job Is Changing.
For most of the web’s history, we designed websites around one basic assumption:
A person would arrive, look at the interface, and decide what to do next.
That assumption is no longer always true.
Sometimes a person will visit.
Sometimes a search engine will extract information.
Sometimes an AI will use that information to construct an answer.
Increasingly, an agent may interact with the business on the person’s behalf.
The website survives all four scenarios.
What changes is its role.
It is no longer just a collection of pages waiting for someone to arrive. It is becoming an interface between a business, its customers, search engines, applications, and intelligent machines.
The future is probably not a world without websites.
It is a world where visiting a website is no longer the only way to use one.
