Save Your Website From Being Killed By AI

Every few years, the internet declares something dead. Blogs. Snail mail. Email. Social media. And in 2010, the forecasted big casualty was brand websites.

Back then, Facebook was the unstoppable center of gravity. Some declared the open web dead, advising businesses to abandon their standalone sites and build everything on other apps. “Why maintain a website,” the argument went, “when the audience is already here?”

Some brands listened. Many moved their content, customer service, and, in some cases, their stores onto platforms like Facebook pages. Almost immediately, nothing happened.

Well, nothing except the inevitable: As the platforms grew, organic reach collapsed, algorithms shifted, and visibility evaporated. The companies that surrendered their websites suddenly realized that businesses telling you to build on their land rarely have your best interests in mind.

The proclamation didn’t kill websites; it just confirmed a timeless truth: The “death of (fill in the blank)” in tech is almost never a demise. It’s a reshuffling. A redefinition. A narrowing of what matters.

Today’s RIP panic, sparked by Google Gemini, AI Overviews, and dynamic search visualizations, is the latest version of that story. To be fair, it does feel bigger. More existential. Not your-traffic-might-drop big, but your-business-model-might-evaporate big.

If Google can generate full visualizations of a search query, from infographics to mini websites inside the search experience, you can reasonably wonder whether the open web becomes unnecessary.

It forces a meaningful question for marketers: If AI flattens information into a dynamic visualization, what’s a brand website to do?

AI may kill the informational web

Interestingly, the part of the web that AI may disrupt most directly is also the layer under the most scrutiny: the informational web. This part of the internet explains, summarizes, collects, and dispenses information, often in interchangeable, redundant, and easily synthesized ways.

The big search platforms encouraged marketers to build this layer as quickly as possible so their organizations’ content could be found. 

It’s also the layer built on low trust. It’s been decaying for years due to misinformation, shallow content, SEO filler, and clickbait aggregation. AI hasn’t improved or sped up the decay; it has exposed how fragile this layer always was.

This exposure raises a new tension: If AI visualizes information sourced from the open web, do people trust the output more or less?

If Google visualizes an answer trained on Wikipedia, does the reply inherit Wikipedia’s credibility? Maybe if it cites Wikipedia. What if Google generates a visualization of your brand’s story or product offering? Do people trust that representation as much as your carefully built site?

The answer is unclear. What is clear is that this informational layer will thrive in Google’s AI-generated visualizations. If your site primarily provides commodity information — lists of facts, definitions, or how-to articles — AI can generate an acceptable alternative directly in the search experience. No clicks required.

My use of AI is a good example.  In the last year, I upgraded tech in my office — microphones, speakers, production software, etc. In zero cases did I look at the manufacturers’ digital manuals. I simply went into my generative AI account and asked how to set it up, debug it, or solve another problem.

You can see why the early web traffic declines hit:

• Wikipedia-style repositories
• Editorial news services
• Publishers of generic “what is” and “how to” content
• SEO content farms
• Aggregator sites that add little more than formatting
• Brand sites that act as online brochures for products and services

AI doesn’t have to be brilliant to replace these destinations. It only has to be good enough — fast, tidy, visually coherent, and contextually complete.

But the distinction matters: AI can replace informational sites; it does not replace interactive experiences that establish trusted relationships between the consumer and the destination.

Yes, the informational web is in trouble, but that’s only half of the story. The other half is the space that remains — the space AI can’t occupy.

What AI won’t replace (yet)

AI can’t yet reach the functional, interactive, identity-driven layer of the web. That brings us to the real emerging fault line — trust.

People will trust AI-generated visualizations as much as the websites they replace (probably more). Here’s why. Researchers have long documented a cognitive quirk called processing fluency — the tendency of people to mistake “this is easy to understand” for “this is true.” Information presented in a familiar, frictionless format often transforms the feeling of clarity into a sense of credibility.

Said another way: When everything is presented in the same smooth interface, people trust everything at the same level.

Because AI visualizations must be flexible and broadly functional, they will almost certainly rely on repeating templates. The same visual frame may present a breakdown of your mortgage options, a summary of your medical symptoms, a list and analysis of Julia Roberts’ films with identical pacing, tone, and design.

Whether that’s good or bad for the culture is a separate debate — ideally over a bottle of wine. But for brand marketers, the implication is unmistakable: The value of the web that requires participation will rise, not fall.

AI can generate a clean visualization of how a mortgage works. It cannot approve your mortgage application. It cannot remember you, adapt to you, or invite you into a creation process where your input genuinely matters.

AI can impersonate a website, but it cannot impersonate a relationship. That’s an opportunity.

Relationships require state, identity, and permission — elements that don’t exist in AI’s dynamic visualizations. They require a user to sign in, engage, contribute, transact, or co-create. They require a brand to choose how it wants people to feel, not what it wants them to know.

This surviving layer of the web could be inherently functional, including:

• Commerce, such as checkout, account management, and fulfillment
• Personalized or exclusive tools
• Participatory programs, such as websites like Lego Ideas, where customers shape future products
• Learning experiences with sequence, nuance, and point of view
• Communities where interaction happens among people, not systems
• Brand Storytelling where pacing and craft matter
• Applications that require memory, permissions, and user-specific outcomes

Google cannot synthesize these experiences on demand because the quality isn’t the same. Looking at the sheet music of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto is not the same as hearing Itzhak Perlman play it.

If AI search visualization replaces the informational web (and I think it’s still a big “if”), then building participation into your websites consumes the brand and marketing oxygen left in the room.

Traffic dies; relationships don’t

If AI absorbs the informational web, the first casualty won’t be just the death of informational websites; it will be traffic to all websites (more than it already has). The economic logic of the open web is built on a simple pattern: publish information, earn visibility, receive a lot of visits, and convert some of those visitors. AI has already broken that chain. When answers, summaries, and visualizations appear directly in search, the visit becomes optional.

But quality relationships aren’t created at the search layer. They aren’t dependent on rankings. They aren’t earned through visibility. They’re earned through referrals, interactions, and quality moments when a user does more than skim a page.

In an AI-mediated search world, traffic becomes unpredictable, and relationships become durable. That shift sets up a new strategic baseline: Brand websites must be built for depth, not discovery.

What brands must build next

If AI ends up absorbing the informational web gradually or all at once, the question for brands is refreshingly straightforward: What parts of your brand’s website require you?

Its durable value derives from everything that depends on choice, identity, interaction, and relationships. That points toward a short, clear playbook for what brand websites must become next:

1. Make your website a tool, not a brochure
If the website doesn’t let a customer do something — manage an account, configure a product, learn a skill, access a community, or participate in creation — AI search will replace it. Tools survive. Brochures won’t.

2. Build experiences that require identity
Logins, profiles, preferences, memberships, loyalty programs, saved progress — anything that gets better once a customer is known — will survive. AI can’t replicate stateful, permissioned relationships.

3. Create interactions AI can’t synthesize
Think in co-creation models like the Lego Ideas website, communities that matter, and programs where human contributions shape outcomes. Participation is the moat.

4. Invest in narratives again
Google can simulate information; it cannot easily simulate intention. Interactive storytelling, guided learning, and brand voice become differentiators, not decorations. For example, The New York Times hosts a wonderfully interactive experience (registration required) about a crumbling highway.

5. Treat traffic as a bonus, not a strategy
In an AI-mediated search world, traffic becomes unpredictable. Relationships — logged-in users, subscribers, members, customers — become the real metric.

If the web shifts, it won’t vanish. It will constrict the parts that matter, and those are the parts brands can — and should — start building now.

Next web may be smaller but more meaningful

Tech loves declaring things dead. It’s happened so many times over the last 25 years that it’s become a cliché. It's happening again. But the web never dies; it gets reshaped by the pressure of the moment. AI will reshape it, not by erasing what brands can or should build, but by clarifying what’s worth building.

You can control what you build next. What remains — the only part of the web AI can’t flatten (yet) — is the work that has always created real value: relationships, identity, participation, and experiences that matter.

That’s not the ending. That’s what you should have been building all along.

It’s your story. Tell it well.