AI Can't Kill Websites That Build Connections (Yet)

Are you concerned with AI pronouncements of the web? You need to be, in case your brand is dedicated to delivering information only. Nevertheless, websites succeed when they create interactive relationships. Something dies every few years with the declaration of the internet. Blogs. Snail mail. Email. Social media. And in 2010, brand websites were the big casualty as it was predicted. Facebook was the unassailable center of gravity at the time. Others gave the open web its grave and counseled companies to drop their independent websites, and construct everything on top of other applications. The logic was, why have a website, when the audience is already here? Some brands listened. A significant number of them transferred their contents, customer care and in some instances their stores to platforms such as Facebook pages. Just now, nothing happened almost immediately. In any case, it was all the same: As the platforms became larger, organic reach was destroyed, algorithms changed, and visibility disappeared. The firms which gave up their websites abruptly came to the understanding that enterprises that instruct you to construct on their grounds do not have your interests at heart.

The latest form of that narrative is today's RIP panic, which was triggered by Google Gemini, artificial intelligence recaps, and search visualizations that move.

To be fair, it does feel bigger. More existential. Not your-traffic-might-drop huge, but your-business-model-might-evaporate huge. When Google is capable of creating complete visualizations of a search query, whether infographics or mini-sites as part of the searching experience, it is reasonable to question whether the open web is being eliminated. It raises a significant question to marketers: When information is flattened into a dynamic visualization by AI, what should a brand site do?

Surprisingly, the layer to which AI can potentially be the most impactful is also the layer that is being examined the most: the informational web. This aspect in the internet describes, summarizes, gathers, and disseminates information, which is often interchangeable, redundant, and synthesized easily. The large search engines motivated marketers to develop this layer within the shortest time possible in order that content of their organizations would be discovered. It is also the layer that is based on low trust. It has been rotting over the years because of:

• Misinformation
• Shallow content
• Filler search engine optimization
• Clickbait aggregation AI has not made the decay any better than it was or made it any faster, it has revealed how weak this layer was always.

The Trust Question

The resulting exposure poses a fresh conflict: When AI is used to picture the information found on the open web, do individuals put more or less trust in the results? When Google visualizes an answer that was trained on Wikipedia, can the answer be credible like Wikipedia? Maybe if it cites Wikipedia. What would happen when Google creates a visualization of your product story or offer? Do folks believe in that representation so much as you have taken the time to make such a site? The answer is unclear. What becomes obvious is that such an informational layer will flourish in the AI-based visualizations of Google. In case your site mostly gives information about commodities in form of lists of facts, definitions, how-to articles, AI can create an acceptable alternative right in the search experience. No clicks required.

Who's at Risk?

You can understand the drops of the early web traffic hits:

• Wikipedia-style repositories
• Publishers of generic "what is" and "how to" content
• SEO content farms
• Aggregator sites that merely add the formatting
• Brand sites that are online brochures to product and service
• Reviews AI does not need to be brilliant to be a replacement to these sites. It simply must be good enough - fast, clean, coherent in appearance, complete in context. However, the difference counts: AI would be able to substitute informational websites, but not interactive experiences that are built on the foundation of mutual trust between the destination and the consumer. The informational web is indeed troubled but that is not all. The remaining part is the space which can not be occupied by AI.

AI can not yet go to the interactive, identity-driven layer of the web. That brings us to the actual emerging fault lines which is trust. The visualizations created by AI generation will be trusted by people as much as the sites they will substitute (or possibly more).

The Processing Fluency Problem

The reason is this: Scholars have long recorded a cognitive oddity known as processing fluency - the tendency of humans to confuse "this is easy to understand" with "this is true". Information delivered in a conversational, smooth manner, tends to change the sense of clarity into the sense of credibility. In other words, in the situations when all things are put in the same smooth interface, people believe everything equally. Due to the necessity of flexibility and a general adaptability of the AI visualization, it will inadvertently be based on repeating templates. You can see in the same visual frame a dissection of your mortgage choices, a summation of your medical symptoms, an inventory and critique of movies of Julia Roberts that are similarly paced, toned, and designed. Whether that is good or bad to the culture is another issue - preferably at the expense of a bottle of wine.

To the brand marketer, however, the implication is quite clear: The value of the web to be engaged in will increase, rather than decrease. It is not able to remember you, to adjust to you, or to ask you to become part of a process of creation in which your contribution is truly significant. AI is able to imitate a web site, yet it cannot imitate a relationship. That's an opportunity.

Relationships need a state, identity, and permission which are not provided in the dynamic visualizations of AI. They involve a user:

• Signing in
• Interacting
• Posting
• Buying or co-producing They need a brand to decide how it would like people to feel, and not what they would like people to know.

What Survives AI

This surviving layer of the web might be inherently functional, such as:

• Commerce - e.g. checkout, account management, and fulfillment
• Personalized or exclusive tools - e.g. websites like Lego Ideas where customers shape future products
• Communities in which interactions occur between people and not systems
• Brand storytelling in which pacing and craft count and point of view Applications requiring memory, permissions, and user-specific outcomes can neither be synthesized on demand by Google because the quality is not the same. Seeing the sheet music of the Violin Concerto written by Beethoven is not the same thing as seeing Itzhak Perlman to perform it. When the informational web is supplanted by AI search visualization (and I believe that it remains a huge "if"), then the construction of participation into your websites eats up the brand and marketing oxygen remaining in the room.

If AI takes over the informational web, the first victim will not be informational websites: it will be the loss of traffic to every website, which has already started to happen. The open web economic reasoning is based on a simple formula:

• Release information
• Gain awareness
• Get a significant number of visits
• Choose a portion of customer traffic The latter has already been broken by AI. Answers, summaries, and visualization can be displayed right in the search, which makes the visit optional. However, good relationships are not developed at the search level. They are not reliant on rankings. They are not made available by visibility. They are gained by:
• Referrals and interactions
• Quality moments when a user does not just skim across a page

This change creates a new strategic platform: Brand sites need to be constructed on depth, and not discovery.

In case AI ends up gobbling up the informational web over time or even all at once, the question that arises to the brands is fundamentally simple: What do you need of your brand site? It is what makes it have a long-lasting value since it all lies in choice, identity, interaction, and relationships. That is the way to a succinct, straightforward playbook of what brand websites should be next:

Make Your Website a Tool, Not a Brochure

If the site does not allow a customer to do anything - manage an account, configure a product, learn a skill, access a community, or take part in creation - AI search will supersede it. Tools survive. Brochures won't.

Build Experiences That Involve Identity

Logins, profiles, preferences, memberships, loyalty programs, saved progress, anything that improves with coming to know the customer, will make it. AI is incapable of simulating stateful or permissioned relationships.

Establish Engagements AI Cannot Generate

Like in the Lego Ideas site, communities, and models where the input of humans influences the output. Participation is the moat.

Invest in Stories

Googling can fake information; it cannot fake intent so easily. Brand voice, interactive storytelling and guided learning are no longer flourishes, but functional. The New York Times, as an example, can be an incredibly interactive experience regarding a crumbling highway.

Think About Traffic as an Advantage, Not a Plan

In an interactive search world, it is an AI that makes traffic uncertain. Relationships, logged-in users, subscribers, members, customers become the actual measure. In case of web movement, the web will not disappear. It will narrow the spaces that matter, and these are the spaces that brands can, and should, begin to create at this moment.

Tech adores declaring things dead. It has been repeating so much in the past 25 years that it has become a cliche. It's happening again. But the web is immortal; it is transformed under the impact of the time. It will be reshaped by AI not by destroying what the brands are capable of and need to create, but by making it clear what is worth creating. You have control over the next thing you create. The only thing left to the web that the AI cannot yet flatten is the work that has always produced actual value namely:

• Relationships
• Identity
• Participation
• Experiences that matter That's not the ending. That is what you are to be making all this time. It's your story. Tell it well.