When I am building a website, I think about the people who will visit it. I make sure they can easily take in all the information. I create ways for them to navigate the website. I ensure that the website comes across as approachable and professional.
In future, however, it will not only be humans but also AI agents that browse websites. The person who sent the agent into action only comes into the picture later – once the AI agent has examined the website and deemed it relevant. Only once this hurdle has been cleared does the website have a chance of communicating with a human.
Why fewer people will visit your website
AI systems are the interface through which we will communicate with software in the future. Whereas five years ago you still had to understand the rules by which Photoshop operates in order to edit an image, today you simply come up with a prompt and the software delivers a result.
The same applies to searching online. In the past, you would type in a few keywords, let the search engines look for them, and then work your way through the list of search results. Nowadays, you type a question into the AI window in your browser. The AI agent comes back with an answer.
When it lists the sources from which it has obtained his information, it is a very short list. This is because the AI agent has filtered out the majority of its search results during its research. What we are presented with is a heavily pre-filtered summary. And we just have to hope that we aren’t missing anything important.
If you want to be found, you have to make yourself visible
Many websites are not well readable by AI agents. Information may either not be captured at all or only partially. These websites remain invisible; they will not appear in the AI agents’ responses.
People are forgiving of structural shortcomings; they don’t notice if the hierarchy of headings is incorrect or if a text has the wrong content attribute. Machines need machine-readable code; they cannot make sense of unstructured content. AI agents filter out anything they cannot read.
Don’t forget the content
However, it is not just the technical optimisation that matters; content also plays a role. This has always been the case, but now that AI agents can actually read, this aspect has become even more important for a website’s ranking and visibility.
People scan two or three pages and read around 400 words; AI bots read EVERYTHING. People patiently work their way through complex sentences, whilst AI bots expect clear, concise statements and filter out texts that do not get to the point as irrelevant. Correct formatting and easily digestible content formats such as definitions, comparison tables and instructions are more important than ever.
We need both: people and AI agents
Once again, people are at the heart of this journey. They may not have found their own way here – the AI agent led them here – but they are the ones who make decisions and interact. So we’re still building websites for people.