All change! The website still matters, but you'll need to re-think it for the AI era

It doesn’t matter whether it’s B2B or B2C, the buyer journey is being disrupted. Nowhere is this more evident than with the brand website. Website traffic is declining, but that doesn’t mean it’s no longer useful in the buyer journey. It simply means the traditional approach to navigation, pages, and funnels no longer works.

Maybe it’s true that the website is no longer the primary interface for customers, but it is still the primary source of brand information. At the same time, brand websites need to serve two very different consumers of information: humans and machines. And those needs are diverging fast.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s B2B or B2C; the buyer journey is being disrupted. Nowhere is this more evident than with the brand website. Website traffic is declining, but that doesn’t mean it’s no longer useful in the buyer journey. It simply means the traditional approach to navigation, pages, and funnels no longer works.

Maybe it’s true that the website is no longer the primary interface for customers, but it is still the primary source of brand information. At the same time, brand websites need to serve two very different consumers of information: humans and machines. And those needs are diverging fast.

Marketing has lost control of the website

 Amanda Cole, CMO at Bloomreach, argues that Marketing has always been in control of the website and the journey a visitor takes once they arrive. They optimize the content shown, create conversion paths, and personalize the experience where possible. For the most part, things worked well.

But then AI browsers and Large Language Models (LLMs) came along, and things aren’t so straightforward or easy. AI browsers are actively recommending competitor websites, and answer engines are giving customers the information they need without going to a website at all.

From the B2C perspective, Cole says consumers don’t want to be owned by a brand; they want the brand to consistently earn their business. And she gets that, but it’s completely disrupting what she knows to be true, and that’s making planning B2C and B2B website experiences really difficult.

Her colleague Meera Murthy, VP of Product, shares a conversation with the CEO of a health supplement company. The CEO believes SEO is dead, and it’s changed the way he thinks about his website. He wanted to know what personalization means now if people aren’t coming to the website. How does he communicate with his customers? Does he invest more in marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart? What happens to his brand?

Her advice was to continue investing in the marketplace, but the way consumers find products will be split. She says there are those that know what they want and just go buy it, and those who don’t care, they just want to buy something fast and move on.

There is no magic answer for B2C, Murthy suggests. Instead, we’ll see a mix of approaches until we see what happens with LLMs and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). And that means you still need to invest in your website and figure out how to work with AI browsers and AI agents consuming your website’s content.

Designing website experiences for humans and AI agents

The website experience you created for humans is no longer working for them. They are turning to large language models (LLMs) for information rather than scrolling through websites to find it. But it’s also not working for LLMs and AI agents. LLMs are seeking as much information as possible from those websites to surface in their answers and they aren’t finding it. It feels like a 'Catch-22'. According to Cole:

Marketing has always been about simple, simple, simple. Get the message to as simple of a message as you possibly can, because humans have the attention of a goldfish and they can only absorb so much information. We're now going to this ability to process an infinite amount of information, and then these agents are going to re-consume and display that information back to the end user in a way that the end user prefers to see and read, and understand the information. And you have to completely re-architect how you think about what your job is as a marketer.

The website now serves two masters with very different needs. There’s the layer that’s optimized for ingestion (machines), and the layer that’s optimized for experiences (people). At one time, these two layers were one in the same. Now they aren’t. Today, the website is becoming two systems sharing a single interface: an adaptive interface for humans and a knowledge layer for machines.

But how does the website really have to change?

Cole believes the reality is that it’s about dumping as much information as you can to give agents context. So, we now have a brand website packed with information to support agents' needs, but it's overwhelming and confusing for real people. How do you support an actual person who comes to the website?

What if the first thing you see as a person is a conversational interface? She says: 

Let’s say you come to bloomreach.com and there's a blank screen, very Google-like experience, and it says, What can we help you find? And you say, I'm a reporter trying to understand more about what's happening in the AI and marketing space. The entire rest of the experience that you have on bloomreach.com is informed by that perspective, and content is created as you're engaging. Maybe it says, Here's some content that the Bloomreach team recently wrote. Is this relevant to you? And you can say that's not exactly what I was looking for. I wanted more information about their products. Again, the entire experience of that website changes, informed by how you are conversationally dictating the web experience that you want and the information that you're looking for.

This new homepage can work the same for a B2C website as it does for a B2B one. In fact, this is very similar to the contextual experiences Contentstack is discussing. A buyer visits a website to shop for sneakers, and a conversational interface opens, asking what they are looking for. The buyer answers, and the website experience changes to support their response. No need to search or click through pages of products. Simply ask the AI, and the website will adapt to your request.

It makes sense, but it also creates a new class of problems. If the website is constantly adapting for the visitor, how does the brand narrative remain consistent? And how does a brand train the AI to know what to show the visitor first?

Conversational interfaces increase relevance, but they run the risk of degrading the brand experience because visitors just come, get the information or product they need, and they leave.

And maybe that’s okay. But it’s something marketers need to be aware of, because it means they have to build that brand awareness and relevance in other ways.

Owning source credibility in the Answer Engine experience

There’s more to think about here, though. Murthy said people ask LLMs for product recommendations. But when the LLM provides answers, it doesn’t just pull in product details from a brand’s product detail pages; it also incorporates other related information. At this point, Murthy believes that the brand has lost control of its products because the LLM is also interpreting other data from the internet and mixing it with brand information.

For her part, Cole adds that the brand still doesn’t own source credibility in the ChatGPT experience. An LLM doesn’t have to ingest your entire website. It can choose what content to reference, and that means more loss of brand control.

LLMs favor sites like G2 and Reddit because they contain real user feedback and aren’t overly influenced by brands. You see very specific questions and use cases on sites like these, especially technical responses - content you don’t see on brand websites.

B2B marketing websites, according to Cole, have become marketing content-heavy to encourage conversions. As a result, they are less specific on product capabilities and use cases. She sees the website becoming more like a documentation-style web experience.

Murthy suggests that instead of the LLM using information from the internet and other sources, make product detail pages contain all the information needed to make a decision. It’s likely information the brand or manufacturer has but doesn’t publish on the website because people don’t have the patience to read through it all. You can also add in user-generated content from customers, and clearly developed user cases and customer stories. Now, the LLM gets it from the brand, giving the brand back some control of its product details in answer engines.

At the same time, Cole reminds us, you need to tie that information back to a benefit statement to teach agents how to frame their responses.

Of course, making all that extra information available on a product detail page won’t work for people, so it will have to be hidden. Cole said Bloomreach creates robot.txt files to add greater depth, context, and information for LLMs.

Murthy adds that even conversational interfaces on the brand website should have access to all this extra information, so when a visitor is talking to one, the agent is not just returning marketing content from the website; it can have a more in-depth conversation. The key takeaway here is that the first interaction with your brand may be from an answer engine summary you have little control over. So, it’s important that you do everything you can to give LLMs the information they need, in the hopes they use that, over information from other sources:

How long will that be the case? I don't know, but being really good at core SEO is still important. Building out highly technical, very rich context in your robots.txt files, in your hidden files, in your documentation, on your website, and then aligning with and really creating that user generated content, or that community based content, and making sure that it's representative of the brand message that you want to put on display. That is core across both B2B and B2C.

My take

Personally, I think 2026 will be the year of the website. It’s where marketers will need to spend a lot of their time, rethinking how the website will be a part of the buyer journey. The website may no longer be the front door of your brand. Instead, it will become the foundation that supplies truth and context of your brand, your products and services.

The focus must be to re-design for both machines and humans. That will require experimentation with conversational interfaces, technical archtecture changes to supply as much information as possible without overwhelming people, and tying technical information with brand narrative.

This might be one of the biggest evolutions for the brand website, and one of the hardest. Because as soon as you think you have it right, something will change again.

Good luck!