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What’s the Point of Your Website in an Age of AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 447)

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Do you still need a website in an age of AI? More broadly, what is the point of your business’s website in an age of AI?

As AI becomes more prevalent, we’re hearing more people suggest that maybe your website isn’t important any longer. To put it mildly, that’s a load of crap. In some ways, your website becomes more important in an age of AI.

Why is that? What do you need your website to do for your customers, your brand, and your business now more than ever? Most importantly, what is the point of your website in an age of AI? That’s what this episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast is all about.

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What’s the Point of Your Website in an Age of AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 447) — Headlines and Show Notes

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You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

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Transcript: What’s the Point of Your Website in an Age of AI?

I’ve seen a number of people talking lately about why websites aren’t as important in an age of AI. That with the rise of AI and the coming of AI agents, your customers aren’t going to visit your website and that it’s a waste of time and effort to focus too much on your website now.

Cover your kids ears and let me be abundantly clear how I feel about this. Bullshit. That is terrible advice.

I believe that saying your website is unimportant in an age of AI is complete and utter nonsense. Why is that? Why do I feel so strongly about this? And what’s the point of your business’s website in an age of AI? This is episode 447 of Thinks Out Loud. Let’s dive in.

Do you still need a website or is AI taking over? Let me get this out of the way right up front. Yes. Yes, you need a website. Your customers are going to need a place they can go to learn more about your business, your products or your services, even in the age of AI.

More to the point, you want a place where you control the customer experience and have the opportunity to create memorable brand interactions with potential customers. You want a place where you can keep your content assets free from the dictates of big tech. And you want a place where customers can visit when they think of you first, no matter how they’ve heard of your brand, so they don’t always have to ask an AI or search for you.

That last point is particularly important because those alternatives are also where your competitors live. Your customers may start out thinking of you, but end up somewhere else because your competition may do a better job of optimizing for the algorithm. Don’t play that game. Don’t build your brand on rented land. That’s been true for years. It doesn’t stop now. Do the work necessary to get customers to come directly to you.

If you think that I’m delusional about this or that I don’t understand how the world works or how the world is going to work, spare me, right? This is far from my first rodeo on this point. We have heard this many times before when it comes to new technologies coming around.

A few of these technologies come immediately to mind. Y’know, social media… there was lots of advice around building your presence on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or YouTube. “There’s no need for a website. Social gives you everything.” Uh-huh. Sure.

What about Google Local and Google Business Profiles? Yeah, definitely. Let’s let Google decide. There were also products like Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, which technically were still your website. But I think we’ve learned over time those tended to be better in practice for Google than they were for your actual business.

If you don’t believe me though that you need a website and that you will still need a website, maybe you’ll believe one of the biggest, most successful social media creators in the world.

Did you know that Mr. Beast has a website? The big YouTuber? He has several. In fact, he’s got a bunch of websites. Yes, YouTube and Amazon and Instagram and X play a major role in his company’s web presence. But he still has an e-commerce website. He’s still got a place for people to get jobs with his production company. He has a site for Mr. Beastburger. Plus, there’s a single website, MrBeastInfo.com, that connects all of these and directs his customers to whichever one best serves their needs in a particular moment. It’s the hub at the center of his digital universe. Many of the links on that site do link to various YouTube channels that he controls. But here’s the point, he gets to control where those links point and he can change them at any time he wants to serve the needs of his brand and to serve the needs of his business and to serve the needs of his customers. Again, it’s the hub at the center of his digital universe.

I’ve talked about using a hub and spoke strategy for some time. The idea is that you’ve got a hub which consists of your website, your CRM, and if you have one, your app. Those are the assets that you control. Technically, the big ones are your website and your CRM because even Apple and Google control the App Store, they can control those over time. Your hub provides the assets that your customers can always visit if some gatekeeper like Google or Facebook or Apple or Amazon changes the rules on you.

And then you’ve got the spokes. Those are the channels where your customers can find you and interact with you. They should absolutely help you grow your brand’s awareness. They should absolutely help you grow your brand’s engagement. They might be a major source of traffic, engagement, revenue, or profits for your business.

But at the same time they should lead over time back to your hub to let you connect with those customers directly, whether they’re using your site, your app, or through various CRM channels like email, snail mail, and SMS.

If you think about it, the people most interested in telling you you don’t need a website are the ones who benefit the most from using the alternative they provide. That includes social media platforms. It includes Google. It includes Amazon. It includes Apple with the App Store. And when we think about AI, it’s the VCs backing AI companies who are saying, “You don’t need to worry about the website. You only need to worry about being there in the AI.”

Now don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying you don’t want to use these channels as spokes in your hub and spoke strategy. I’m saying that you always want a hub, too, just in case the folks in charge of those spokes change their minds about how they should work, or as happened many times before, shut them down completely.

Think about what happened with TikTok over the last couple of weeks. First it existed, then it was banned for a day, now it’s back. We don’t know if it will stay back. What if you built your entire brand on TikTok and it simply went away? That’s happening even as we speak.

Ultimately, your hub, your website and your CRM is for your business and your customers. Yes, your website will need to support AI broadly and AI agents specifically in time. But you’ll almost always want it to support human beings too. In fact, that’s where I think you should focus first.

Why focus on humans? Aren’t people turning to AI more and more? Won’t agents really change the game? Well, let’s start with the idea that at the moment, AI agents technically don’t exist, right? I mean, they’re a cool idea. And they could turn up at scale 10 minutes after I record this. But they don’t exist right now.

We don’t really know what building a website for agents means in practice yet. I suspect that’s going to be true for at least a little while after they do exist too, which I’ll explain in a minute. Building for a technology that doesn’t exist yet is expensive and frankly a distraction from making things better for your customers that actually use or are trying to use your site today.

We know, for instance, that cart abandonment on B2C sites is generally pretty high. We know that large numbers of website searches on B2B sites fail outright. People simply can’t find the information they’re looking for. We know that engagement rates on most sites tends to be fairly low, regardless of whether they’re targeting consumers or business customers.

Why not fix those things now instead of creating something new for a tool and technology that’s at best just a little bit over the horizon?

Second, because if and when AI agents exist, their job will be to serve the needs of their person. An agent is going to need to get answers to questions their person asks. An agent is going to need to find solutions to a problem their person has. An agent is going to need to present images of what those solutions look like. An agent is going to need to show videos of those products or solutions in action. Especially at first, agents may need to point their people to a place where they, the person, can see all of these for themselves.

Doesn’t that all sound like something your website should do? In fact, shouldn’t it do that already? Think about it. Where is the agent going to get these answers, these solutions, these images, and these videos? Don’t you want to make sure you have content and images and videos to provide those answers? And hear me out. Wouldn’t it be convenient if an agent could go to, I don’t know, one place to find what it’s looking for that addresses its person’s need? Something like, I don’t know, a website?

Sure, at some point the agent may simply present the one and only answer that perfectly meets the needs of their person. That could absolutely happen.

How soon do you think that’s likely to happen though? How soon do you think that’s likely to get adopted at scale? How much are you willing to bet on the answers to those questions?

I don’t mean to malign any of the possibilities that agents offer. Agents sound genuinely cool in theory. I’m a relatively early adopter. I use AI regularly today and I have a series of tests I run regularly to see how much I can outsource to any artificial intelligence I’m using. At the moment, the vision is compelling. But in practice, the results so far are far from letting them simply take care of everything.

And if we look past adoption curves, those suggest we’ll have some time to adjust once agents hit the market for real. Smartphones took nearly four years to reach 50% market penetration and almost 80 years to reach 80%. That’s Comscore data. Even if AI agents cut those times in half, you’ll have probably a year to meet the needs of the earliest adopters, a couple of years to meet the needs of the top 50%, and probably three to five years to meet the needs of the top 80%.

And you’ll still also need your website to accommodate 20 % of your customer base after that three to five year period. Hell, here we are in 2025 and roughly 9% of the US still doesn’t have a smartphone. Some of that is tied to income, so those might not be your customers. Some is tied to education, so some of those folks might be your customers. And some is tied to a rural-urban divide, which could go either way.

The point remains that you’re likely going to be serving the needs of 5% to 10% of your customers, and probably a lot more, through — a good lord, this pains me to say — traditional website for years, if not for decades.

If we broaden our discussion from agents to AI more generally, recent numbers show that almost 40% of Americans ages 18 to 64 have used generative AI. More than 24% of American workers used it, “at least once in the week prior to being surveyed.” This according to an NPR story on a study conducted by the Census Department. Further, that roughly one in nine folks, or about 11%, used generative AI nearly every work day.

Again, those are compelling numbers. They’re also not a majority of your customers, at least not yet. And we’re two plus years in two and a half years in, since the launch of ChatGPT.

One other reason that gives me constant confidence about this reality, inertia. Inertia is the toughest thing in the world to sell against. People are going to do what they’ve always done unless they’re given a compelling reason that makes change worth the effort. There are still 9% of the population who don’t have a smartphone. Why? Because they don’t work better than what they have today. That’s going to be completely true for websites too.

There’s something like 1.9 billion websites in the world and over 200 million websites that are actively updated. Customers aren’t going to adopt agents if they have to wait for every website in the world to become AI agent friendly. If the agents can’t provide good answers from the web as it is, people aren’t going to use them.

I’m reasonably confident that agents are going to have to work with the web as it exists today versus everyone else making websites that meet the needs of agents right away. It just doesn’t seem likely to me. I could certainly be wrong. And obviously those that figure out how to work better for AI and for agents will have an advantage over those that don’t. But I’d be willing to bet that that process is going to take a little time and that you’ll be able to move fast enough when the time comes.

Of course, I want to be very clear. You need to pay attention to your data. I’m seeing clients get small but growing amounts of traffic, referral traffic from ChatGPT, from Gemini, from Perplexity and others. Agents are coming. Your customers will use AI agents to find what they need. Feel free to disregard everything I just said if you find that your traffic from these sources has reached critical mass. I’m not being sarcastic. There’s no such thing as “best practices” if your data tells you a different story.

To wrap up this point, I am absolutely bullish on the idea of AI and agents. I use the former all the time and I’m very eager for the latter to arrive. I’m very much in that 11 % who use AI nearly every day for work. But don’t let the hype distract you though from doing what’s necessary today to take care of your customers today.

You have time to get ready for these tools. And there are things you can and should do now to be ready. What are those things? What should you do? Well, I’m glad you asked.

First, don’t rebuild your website from the ground up. At least not yet. That’s usually not necessary.

Unless your website is older, and I’m talking more than roughly four to five years, it’s probably modern enough for now. I’m gonna have a little sidebar on this in a minute. It’s likely mobile-friendly. It’s likely accessible for visually impaired people or those with low vision. It’s hopefully relatively fast.

This is the one I’m gonna take a quick detour on, then get back to the original point, but to the point of modern enough, you should regularly work to make your site faster and more accessible. I’d recommend that “regularly” means taking action at least once a year. A faster, more accessible website is better for customers. A faster website is better for search. It’s almost certainly going to be better for AI agents.

Either your IT team or your marketing operations team, assuming you have one, should have website performance improvements baked into their budgets every year. If they don’t, or if you don’t have those teams, you should make sure you’re including that in your budget and taking those actions, again, at least once a year. The alternative is a site that’s worse for search, worse for AI, worse for accessibility, worse for customers, and worse for your business.

Now, how do you make your existing site work better? Start by remembering what a website is. It’s your 24x7x365 salesperson. It’s your 24x7x365 customer service rep.

Its job is to help your customers find the information they need and to help your customers buy your products and services. Period.

Your website is not its visual design. It’s not the layout. It is the content and experiences you offer.

Focus on your core customer experiences and your core content to make a better website. What are the questions your customers need answered? What are the problems your customers need solved? How effective is your website at answering those questions and solving those problems?

Your analytics can help you find out. Start with a content audit. What are the top pages customers visit on your site? Which ones have particularly low engagement rates? Which ones do customers never see? That’s where you start.

Look for opportunities to improve poor performers — that is, pages that get lots of traffic but have low engagement rates. When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you want to do is stop digging. Don’t keep sending tons of traffic to pages that don’t perform.

Then, look for opportunities to get more traffic to high engagement rate pages. Build an action plan for how you’re going to improve those poor performing pages and how you’re going to drive more traffic to the high engagement pages. Use heat mapping tools. Try something like Hotjar or Glassbox or Microsoft Clarity to see where your customers struggle with your site. And then build a plan to make your content more effective and more available to your customers.

Then… execute against that plan.

Make sure you’ve got structured data in place that makes it easier for AI tools to understand what your page and your content is all about.

The point here isn’t to ignore agents or AI. It’s that you’re building the right content that can help AI answer its people’s questions, its users’ questions. You’re building solutions that meet the needs of AI and of your customers. And that you’re setting yourself up for long-term success.

So yes, AI is coming. And it’s going to change the way we do some of our web development, some of our website management. Most of those changes though are yet to be determined. You’ll have time to adjust.

Just keep paying attention to your customers and your data so you’re ready to move and that you know where to go when the time comes.

That notwithstanding, the point of a website in the age of AI is to be the place where anyone and everyone, human or AI, can find the answers they need. The point of a website in the age of AI is to be the place where you can create a deeper, richer brand experience and engage with human customers directly. The point of a website in the age of AI, as always, is to bypass the gatekeepers who want to get between you and your customers. The point of a website in the age of AI is to build your brand and build your business, just like it should have been doing all along.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 447 .

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Show Outro

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep sending me things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

Tim Peter is the founder and president of Tim Peter & Associates. You can learn more about our company's strategy and digital marketing consulting services here or about Tim here.

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