What is the Future of Websites?
The Website Story So Far
This could be changing the way we work, even if we cannot yet see exactly how that change will unfold over the next few years. But when you look at the advancements we have seen in just the last few months, it feels like the future is finally starting to take shape.
That is why it is worth looking back at how knowledge work has evolved so far and then asking what might be coming next. The evolution of computers has always been a story of abstraction. Machine code was abstracted away by human-readable programming languages. Then the command line interface was abstracted away by modern operating systems. Today, using a computer no longer requires you to know how to program it or even how to work from a command line.
Of course, all of that code is still being run, and all of those commands are still being executed. But unless you are doing something highly technical, you no longer need to be aware of any of it.
AI as the New Interface
I think the same thing has already started happening with modern software, and it is only moving in one direction. We are quickly entering a world where you do not even need to use the software directly. AI will increasingly handle the software layer for you. And unless you are doing something especially technical, you may not even need to interact with the operating system in the way we do today.
If that sounds hard to imagine, consider how this is already happening. One of the earliest and most obvious use cases has been research. It used to be that if you wanted to research almost anything on the internet, you would go to Google, perform a series of searches, and work your way through a dozen or more webpages. Now, unless you absolutely need to verify every fact yourself, it often makes more sense to have AI do the research for you.
That shift helps explain why website visits are down right now. And as models continue to improve, it will make even less sense for people to do that work manually. The same pattern is already visible in tools like Photoshop and PowerPoint. For the vast majority of people, AI is already better at many of these tasks than they are. Unless you are doing something highly specific, using the tools yourself may no longer be the most efficient option. And again, the better the models get, the less sense it will make.
What This Means for Software
My prediction is that within the next one to two years, most software will no longer be designed primarily for humans. It will be designed for AI. Just as the command line still exists beneath the modern operating system, there will still need to be an interface for humans. Websites are not going away. But fewer and fewer humans will be using them directly, and more and more of those interactions will be handled by AI.
That means it may be time to start thinking about your website less like a digital brochure and more like a database and a tool for AI. Is all the information anyone could possibly want about your company somewhere on your website, clearly organized and clearly labeled? As someone who reviews company websites every day, I can say with confidence that the answer is almost certainly no.
And from a business standpoint, that gap matters. Human visitors may never read thousands of words about your company because most customers are not going to look at more than one or two pages. But AI will. It will read the details, connect the dots, and use that information to make recommendations on behalf of the customer.
The Competitive Shift
The real question is whether AI can easily complete the transactions a customer might need to make through your website. It looks increasingly likely that tools like WebGPT, or similar AI-powered browser systems, will become the standard for these kinds of interactions.
If an AI cannot easily do business with your company through your website, there is a good chance it will use a competitor’s website instead. In the future I am imagining, unless the human is especially motivated, they will not go to the website themselves. They will rely on AI to do it for them. And that means the companies that structure their sites for AI access, clarity, and action will have a meaningful advantage over the ones that do not.
