The future of the website

I’ve spent most of my working life on websites: building them, optimizing them, and helping millions of people do the same. So the question I keep coming back to lately is an existential one for my whole field: where are websites going? What even is “the website” five years from now? Several things are true at once, and some of them pull in different directions. But they point to one destination. The website becomes the home base of your business: humans and agents alike can read it, act on it, and check that you are real. Websites are built for agents now, too Here’s the thing: websites were never built just for humans. We were always building for humans and bots. For twenty years, my advice, and everyone else’s, was: build for humans, and the bots will follow. That advice was correct, but only because of a quirk of history. Google had billions of dollars and two decades to get very, very good at reading pages meant for people. The new wave of agents visiting your website doesn’t…