The website is arriving at its most powerful iteration

There’s a faulty narrative floating around from LinkedIn to X. Mainly pushed by Agentic Fundamentalists. SaaS is dead. Websites are dead. We don’t need interfaces anymore, the agents will do it all for us while we talk into our phone.

Its true that times are changing. The traditional ‘website’ is going to morph and iterate, in a way that’s more useful for the customer and more performant for the business that runs it. There’s never been a bigger shift in technology for the website than right now. Not even the explosion of mobile or the adoption of faster internet. Let’s unpack it.

The future of the web is rooted in the model of increasing relevance while reducing cost. Both have been triggered by the capability of AI in the past six months. They have moved from theoretical to demonstrated, from curiosity to roadmap consideration.

First is costs down: the ability to create new experiences has become cheaper, faster and to a good standard of quality. You have the ability to make new online experiences and components with far greater velocity. Even business users, with no code or low code tools can get quite far (though security and governance still remain a concern). This means you can produce far more content, landing pages, intent led sections and more, than ever before. Before there were two issues: 1) Bandwidth issue, 2) ROI issue, some pages or changes wouldn’t make enough return. AI helps eliminate both.

Second we can skyrocket relevancy: we have a set of tooling emerging that is using AI to adapt and personalize what we already have. If a customer is coming in from a particular keyword from search or we have context from an AI tool, or a particular campaign, the tooling can create a new landing experience based on what you already have in terms of content and product. Add in any context if they’re already logged in with their history and that becomes really interesting!

If customers could be served much greater relevancy, more often, we have an exciting future for the website.

If we imagine a website less in terms of pages, and more in terms of its atomic parts, we see the future with greater clarity. If you have been practicing composable commerce or headless for a while, this will feel familiar. In the end the building blocks of experiences are the fuel for experiences themselves. The more atomic we can become, the more speed at which we can move, or in this future, the higher quality fuel we can give to AI to build with.

1) The product: product, its attributes, its description, images, usages, reviews and everything that surrounds it it, is the key fuel for the agentic world and the building block of future web experiences. Making sure your product content is structured from the start in a way AI can quickly understand, matches schemas (JSON-LD, OG, etc) and is easy to consume is key.

2) The content: longer form content on product usage, collections, launches, category information and more all make up valuable content that will feed the future. Customers still want the story, the romance, the background and the depth. Often, purchasing the product is as much about the story and the brand as it is about the product itself. The relationship between this content and your product is also key: where should what content show up? Again, this is context to the future of your experiences. Make sure you separate style from content. A heading in text could be rendering ten different ways, we only need to know that its a heading.

3) The components: ways to access and see content and products, which when wired together, create experiences. AI can create the experience. A customer can land after a long conversation about winter jackets on a brand she knows already. Let’s weave together our atomics to convert our customer, again. Components such as a product listing component with reviews and images, filters and attributes so she can curate her own view, or ask AI to do it for her. Social proof components that add real users, increasing her confidence and love of the products. Content links to explore more about a brand or a category, enhancing her connection to the brand.

I am not downplaying agents and their role in the future. I’ll be writing much more about them in coming weeks. Think back through some of your recent purchases. Think about how you decided, what you looking at, what you thought about. Here’s some of mine.

1) Buying a new gaming controller for my boy (Fortnite). This was a high consideration purchase too. YouTube content was examined, influencers looked at. A few contenders narrowed down. Next we need the source content. Direct from the manufacturer: where exactly were the additional buttons? Video content on the site explained it well, with high resolution images not found on most providers sites of the same controller. Can you remap the buttons easily? Wired or not? So much of where this was sold did not have this info or detail.

2) Looking for some Chelsea boots across different retailers the images and reviews were so important to get to the detail of what I was looking for. I needed zoom, good images, fast access to reviews, and more. They needed to be brown, but there are SO many different types of brown, and many different Chelsea boots. I’ll be wearing them for work, and quite a lot, so it was a high consideration purchase, it even needed a tablet screen to really examine the images.

You can argue all of these will be executable on agentic platforms in the future, in a way that is full of friction today. I believe that too. I also believe that agentic tools will need to progress to accept different types of content from retailers to enhance their experience delivered to customers. I also believe customers will continue to enjoy the activity of shopping and finding products they desire. Not all product purchases should be as fast as possible. Some almost demand quality brand experience, hence the resurgence of the store. The desire to replicate the in store experience online, as an agent takes you on a tour of content, product and inspiration to land you at your next purchase.

The web is once again evolving, in many directions at once. You know your customer. The best brands are considering how they can make all of their content and experiences atomic: delivering to web, mobile, agents and more. Are you seeing the future this way? The cost of not producing more relevant content and experiences will be the loss of revenue, the fading of your brand, and getting lost in the noise.