Your website just became important again, but not for the reason you might expect. For the first time in years, your website might be the most important element of your online presence, because one of your most important audiences might not even be human.
We’re in the midst of a dramatic shift in how people source information and act on it, and most organisations haven’t fully absorbed it yet. It’s a shift as significant as the shift from static websites to user-created content and social media 15-20 years ago.
We’re entering a new era, which some are calling the agentic web: a world where AI agents browse, search, summarise, and make decisions on behalf of users. (If you’re into the academic side of the topic, there’s an excellent github repository of research on the agentic web.)
Recent research showed AI agent traffic grew 8 times faster than human traffic last year. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince recently predicted that AI agent traffic will surpass human traffic by next year. (Cloudflare processes around a fifth of all website traffic globaly – including this website – so they have good data to base predictions on.)
Your next “visitor” might be an AI assistant doing research for a potential customer, client, or stakeholder, helping them understand a topic or get something done.
But only if your website allows AI agents to scan it and helps them understand your content. Many websites don’t, and their carefully crafted content will be invisible to their intended audiences increasingly using AI agents.
Even if AI agents can see your content, they’re reading it differently. When helping a user perform a practical task an AI agent will be extracting structured facts, without being influenced by the emotive marketing copy and imagery designed to sway humans.
This doesn’t mean redesigning everything. It means ensuring your content is visible to AI agents and thinking about what your content says when it’s read literally, not emotionally. Is your key message clear if all the design is stripped away? Does your content hold up as information, not just storytelling? Do you have structured content AI agents can use, perhaps even APIs for AI agents to be able to perform tasks for their users?
Organisations that get this early will have a significant head start on those that don’t. The rest will wonder why their carefully curated online presence isn’t working anymore.
If you’d like help understanding what this means for you and your organisation – whether a website visibility audit, content audit, or a communications strategy – get in touch!
