I’ve spent most of my working life on websites: building them, optimizing them, and helping millions of people do the same. So the question I keep coming back to lately is an existential one for my whole field: where are websites going? What even is “the website” five years from now?
Several things are true at once, and some of them pull in different directions. But they point to one destination. The website becomes the home base of your business: humans and agents alike can read it, act on it, and check that you are real.
Websites are built for agents now, too
Here’s the thing: websites were never built just for humans. We were always building for humans and bots. For twenty years, my advice, and everyone else’s, was: build for humans, and the bots will follow. That advice was correct, but only because of a quirk of history. Google had billions of dollars and two decades to get very, very good at reading pages meant for people.
The new wave of agents visiting your website doesn’t have that. Most AI tools are, frankly, not that good at figuring out what’s on a page that was designed purely for human eyeballs. Maybe they’ll get there. But at least for the foreseeable future, your website needs surfaces that are easy for agents to parse and use.
The sudden rebranding of SEO into GEO and AEO tells the same story. SEO was always really “Google optimization”. There were other surfaces, and good SEOs optimized for them too, but the Google work had by far the highest ROI, so that’s where the focus went. The new names mostly reflect one thing: we now have to optimize for more surfaces than one. The work itself is the same as it always was. What changed is that Google is no longer the only surface worth the effort.
A recent example of how quickly this shifts. When ChatGPT search launched, it grounded its answers in Bing’s index, and suddenly everyone was scrambling to figure out how they were doing in Bing. They always should have known. But for years the ROI on Bing was low, so nobody bothered. Then ChatGPT was caught quietly pulling Google’s results instead, and just these past few weeks Bing showed up again in its retrieval traffic. Three swings in under two years, none of them announced. That’s the new reality in one anecdote: which surface matters is no longer your call, and it can change overnight.
Before you rush off to build a separate site for agents: we’ve done that before. Remember m-dot sites? Remember AMP? Parallel versions of your website always drift out of sync, and then they die. The answer isn’t a second website. It’s one source of truth with multiple renderings, where the machine-friendly surface is generated from the same content the human one is.
A technically perfect website is now a choice
Building a technically correct website was always absurdly hard. You had to actually know the spec of a good website: the standards, the edge cases, the intricacies underneath, and how these standards interact. Very few people ever did. The best SEOs in the world, and that’s about it.
That’s changing fast. This is exactly why I built specification.website: point an agent at the spec and let it go nuts. What used to require rare expertise is becoming something you can run.
So technical excellence is no longer a rare skill; it’s a choice. That doesn’t mean everyone will make that choice, certainly not yet, so for the moment there is still real advantage in being one of the few who do. But the direction is clear: the bar keeps rising, and what used to win markets slowly becomes the baseline. The lasting value moves to the questions machines can’t answer for you. Does a website even matter for your business? Do you have anything real to say on it?
Websites don’t matter equally, and that’s fine
Where I live, a plumber, carpenter or electrician who is good at the job and can communicate half decently will be busy year round, with or without a website. Could a good website make them even busier? Probably. Do they want that? Many don’t, and that’s a perfectly rational choice.
For a brand, it’s the opposite. The website is probably more important than the most chic high street store they could open. Partly for the experience, but mostly for a brutally simple reason: there are only so many high streets, and your potential buyers live everywhere.
The website becomes an interface bundle
A website used to be an HTML thing, in some cases with an API. That’s no longer enough. If your website matters to you, it should at the very least also be an MCP server, and in many cases even ship a command-line client. That way agents can interact with your business directly: check availability, place the order, book the slot.
The specific standards will churn. MCP is today’s answer; something else will come after it. The durable point is this: a website is becoming a bundle of interfaces. One for humans, several for machines, and the machine ones don’t just answer questions, they take actions.
Conversion is leaving the website
More and more buying decisions happen away from your site: in AI answers, in chat interfaces, in agent-mediated transactions. This is the uncomfortable one. You can rage against it or you can plan for it.
The website doesn’t die in that world. Its role shifts. It becomes the canonical source of truth about your business: the system of record that feeds every surface where the actual decision gets made. If an AI assistant recommends you, it’s because your home base gave it every reason to. Thin, stale, machine-hostile websites simply won’t be recommended.
Authenticity is the only moat left
One thing ties all of this together: generic AI slop will get you nowhere in this world. Everyone can generate it, in infinite quantities, which makes it worth exactly nothing. The only thing that can’t be generated is being real: real work, real people, a real voice, real customers who really vouch for you.
In an agent world, authenticity can’t just be claimed, it has to be checkable. An agent choosing between two suppliers can cross-reference everything, cheaply and instantly. Does the story on your site match the trail you leave everywhere else? Do the people actually exist? Do the reviews hold up? SEOs will recognize the goal: this is what Google’s E-E-A-T was always reaching for. The difference is that Google estimates trust from signals; an agent can simply go and check. Authenticity stops being a marketing word and becomes infrastructure: identity, provenance, trust. Proving you are who you say you are is about to become the most valuable layer of the web.
You can’t build that layer on your own site alone: you also need to exist elsewhere on the web, and you need others vouching for you. Whether we call that link building, PR or something else doesn’t matter. It needs to be done. And the proof isn’t only technical: a genuinely good about page, real people with real faces and a real story, does the same work. It might be the best page on your site.
So where does that leave the website?
Not dead. Not even close. But different: the website is becoming the verified, machine-readable home base of a business. It feeds every other surface. It answers agents and takes their orders. It proves the business is real. And it still, sometimes, gets visited by an actual human, who had better find something authentic when they arrive.
The websites that thrive in this world get three things right. They’re technically excellent: now a choice, and for the moment still an edge. They’re easy for agents to find and read: a plumbing problem. And they’re unmistakably real: the hard part, and it always was.