The Future of Websites

Artificial intelligence is pushing the internet to its biggest inflection point since the mobile revolution. Will websites survive the transformation? Learn about the future of websites on The Whole Idea Podcast. Joining host Greg Oberst are panelists, Matt Trinneer, associate creative director at DCG ONE, Kristen Crandall, director of analytics at DCG ONE, and Kevin Bolduan, programmer and lead website developer at DCG ONE. The change that's coming is huge, and so is the upside for marketers who embrace it. 

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Transcript

The Whole Idea Podcast by DCG ONE

The Future of Websites

Greg:
Are websites headed for another inflection point? Will sites be obsolete in the future? 

Hello everyone and welcome to The Whole idea podcast by DCG ONE. I'm your host and moderator Greg Oberst with a round table full of website experts here to help us answer these and many other pressing questions about the future of sites. 

Our panel includes Matt Trinneer, associate creative director at DCG ONE and a leader of our in-house Skunkworks AI think tank, Kristen Crandall, director of analytics at DCG ONE, also a member of our Skunkworks crew, and Kevin Bolduan, programmer and lead website developer at DCG ONE. 

OK, panel. Yes, there are a number of forces lining up for what could be radical change in the way we design, develop, and use websites in the not-so-distant future. We're seeing some of that happen now. 

Kevin, let's start with you. What is this inflection point we're approaching? 

Kevin: 

The way I think about it is the internet, remember, was born before the web. So there was an internet. 

The DARPA folks and all those kinds of things going way back in, in time, into the 80s. By the 90s, the first inflection point in my opinion was what we call today the World Wide Web browsers, graphical interfaces, not text based. That obviously ushered in a revolution in marketing and branding and other things like that. 

I would suggest that the second inflection point was mobile, so the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 changed the way we as designers and developers build websites and the way that consumers interact with websites, what they do on their phones, and then I would say that we are just now at the beginning of the third inflection point, and that is the introduction of AI, and I believe that how people interact with online content is changing. 

We're at the very beginning of it, but it is changing because of AI and so those of us who are building websites and designing websites and helping. Companies and brands figure out what their online presence is and needs to be, need to understand that we are not where we were 18 months ago. 

Greg:

Yeah, it's changing that fast. 

Kevin:

Correct.

Greg: 

Kristen, I've, I've heard it said that centralized and decentralized data control will not only determine the future of websites but society itself, not to get heavy. But do you agree with that assessment? 

Kristen: 

I don't, actually. I think that that's probably a little bit too apocalyptic a little bit for how it's happening. 

So, I think just like at the beginning of the internet, there'll be a little bit of wild west for a while, where the little guys might have a chance to show up and results in a way that they haven't before, but I think eventually instead of, you know, just Google or Meta being the big central big brother, there's just going to be one of the AI's that rises to the top and becomes that too and so in that way, I don't think it will change that much. 

I do think just in terms of data in general and not being website specific, we'll probably move toward leaning into more decentralized data sources, simply because we're going to have to, to keep things secure. And just because there are so many different ways to get data, I don't know if it's going to continue to make sense to have it in one easy, efficient place anymore. 

Greg:

So decentralized being you and being able to control our own? 

Kristen:

Correct. And I think in the short term we're going to see a little bit more decentralization, which is fun for an analyst, by the way, but I think it'll all just get back into the centralized format we're more familiar with today. 

Greg: 

OK, then, Matt, web design of the future, how will it be affected by AI and data, be it centralized or decentralized? 

Matt:

Yeah, that is a very deep question. You know, I think probably one of the most significant things that's changing right before our eyes is that your website is no longer just going to be exclusively used by humans there's going to be AI tools that are also going to be accessing what's on your site, so I think designers are going to have to think a little bit differently about presentation, and the experience that they deliver because in a lot of cases I think people are going to be getting information from your site but they never get there. They're getting it directly from a chat experience, so the kind of traditional ways that humans usually navigate, you know, where they would go to the site, they would then search around on the site and look for the information that they want. Well, that's going to be changing to queries that happen within an AI search tool. 

You're also seeing the emergence of natural language search where people will come to your site and instead of trying to navigate, you know, through the navigation tabs that everyone's used to and understand. They can go to that search box and say this is specifically what I want, and an AI tool can bring that response back. So, I think you're going to have a little bit different workflows than maybe what we've had. I think what's not going to change is it's still going to be…the winning sites are going to have really high quality relevant content that that's always been true and I think it's going to continue to be true, but the way that that information gets used and accessed, it's going through kind of a revolution right now where the way that people are finding things is changing, I think in a lot of ways for the better, you know, rather than thinking of searching this experience where Google's crawled the entire internet and then serves up a bunch of locations where you can go to. 

What's changing is now you can just get answers, which is much more efficient in a lot of ways a better user experience. So I think designers are going to be challenged moving into the future, like how do we embrace this, how do we maximize that experience for people, how do we make sure that the sites that we build are just as accessible to AI tools as they are to humans, so that we can kind of deliver on the promise of that and everybody can have a better user experience and easier, quicker access to the things they're looking for. 

Greg: 

You mentioned search, GEO yet another initialism in our ever-growing pile of initialisms and acronyms. GEO is generative engine optimization. And it's giving marketers some angst. Kristen, let's address that. What is it? 

Kristen: 

At its simplest, it's just optimizing your site so that you'll show up in an AI generated result. It's the first thing you're going to see when you type something into your search engine, and you want the content from your website to show up in that. And so that's very simply what it is. to piggyback on what Matt was just saying though that I think is really great is that content really, really matters for GEO in a way that it doesn't for SEO. So, I'm a little bit of like an SEO naysayer anyway, so I should say that upfront. I would not be sad to not have to deal with SEO and all of our web analytics, but SEO is like you have to have some like cheesy buzzy keywords to make sure that Google sees it, and they might not actually like match the voice of your brand, but for GEO or just to show up at all in a in a generated result. It's about actual usable content, so that the searcher can get their answer immediately. And so right now at least, AI rewards good content in a way that SEO didn't. 

Kevin: 

I'm laughing a little bit at that because I, I too, am an SEO naysayer, but I've always just been saying the same thing. You build it and they will come, right? You build the good content. You have it semantic in your HTML, and you have good copy and good content on your site, and eventually the search engines will find it, and the people who are playing the games and putting in stuffing in the keywords. 

Don't forget on the SEO side, Google has a financial incentive to ensure that none of those work because they want to sell you ads, right? And Google can't sell you an ad if you can get the same thing, meaning a good search engine result for free, right by playing the games. 

So, I trust that Google is going to win that game, that we are never going to be able to win that game when it comes to GEO, I would say the same thing. Keep with the good content, keep with what you're doing. But I also want to kind of riff on what Matt was saying about how. 

I think we have to be careful about lumping all websites into this discussion because I mean there are plenty of websites that don't by design have answers and the, the whole notion of content for AI being able to answer questions in my mind only applies to a certain subset of websites out there. 

I would say that, you know, a high-end whiskey brand. There would be no expectations that they would show up as an answer in AI content. At least that's how I would pitch to them, because to me, their website is more about their branding, and I don't envision AI results, or at least I haven't seen AI results that are providing specifically, you know, which whiskey should I drink? And then saying you should get this brand of whiskey. They might be able to answer the difference between a rye and a, you know, a bourbon or, you know, whatever it is. 

And if you have that kind of content on your site, that's really great for this kind of thing, but It also you just have to be careful about where you are putting your focus, in terms of having that content or what maybe it's not relevant to you. 

Kristen: 

Although counterpoint to that, your, your high-end whiskey brand could relatively easily just throw an FAQ page at the end of their site that has some facts about like the differences between rye and whatever other kinds of whiskey there are, and then suddenly that brand is showing up and maybe getting people's attention.

Kevin:

A great point. 

Matt: 

I think it. This conversation really exposes that, you know, content creators are going to be challenged with like how do they think about content, you know, because I think that if you kind of have to get in that framework of like how does this answer a question rather than, you know, because I, I guess, you know, 3 for 3 we're all skeptics about SEO and that you know it's from the very beginning it's been this sort of system that can be gamed and there's a whole industry around trying to do that. 

And I think with GEO it's going to be a lot more challenging. You know, you're going to have to know your customer really well, you're going to have to understand what they want to know rather than just, you know, like you said, stuffing a bunch of keywords into a site and hoping that they land at your destination. 

Another thing I think is kind of an interesting opportunity that I think a lot of people are going to innovate around is like how do you turn your brand into answers, you know, how does that fulfill the kinds of searches that people are doing. 

So, it's also early days on this, so I don't, I think we're going to see a lot of innovation and a lot of exciting new opportunities, but it's all getting built right in front of us, you know, you talked about 18 months. I’d change that to weeks. The rate of pace or the, the pace of change is so fast that whole business models are arising and collapsing within 6 months. It's the wild west like you said, Kristen.

Greg: 

So, I don't have to rush out and rewrite my website. Necessarily right now, as long as I feel good about the content that's in there. But it sounds like to me that it's something that the marketers could be really hopeful about in terms of their content on their website, being able to address the more nuanced question now thanks to GEO and getting results that look deeper into sights and find the, the way that rye is, whiskey is produced in a unique sort of way over their competitor. It might find that now, whereas it may be challenged through traditional SEO. 

Kevin: 

Yeah, that’s a really great point because to answer your question, if you were building a website that was working well for SEO. Because you were following the rules of writing good content, you will succeed in GEO is, is my understanding at least of how GEO is working, but it's new, so we're all learning kind of along the way. But that doesn't mean that you wouldn't have an opportunity now to enhance your website with some of that stuff that in the past we may have kind of thought of as ancillary content, you know. It's not just the buy now button, it's, it's other things. 

And so now you have an opportunity to tell, tell more stories, to get that branding in a more emotional and, in a more emotional way that can appeal to people's, things that they're looking for beyond just how much it costs. Slop. 

Greg: 

Well, that, that brings up another slop, which I was saving in terms of safeguards for the internet. Let's put that aside for a second. I want to just follow up on this point about gatekeeping and generative engines now more like the front door into a website. 

Matt: 

The way I would look at it is to use your doors analogy. There are a lot more doors, you know, where it used to be all about getting the viewer to your site to be able to get your content and now it's going to be able to surface in a lot of other ways. 

In fact, you know, if you think about the way agents might be deployed, there can be scenarios where the agent uses your content that the user never even sees to make decisions, to make recommendations, so that idea that there's just going to be a lot more access points, I think, I think that's definitely going to be the future, that it's just going to continue to grow, and I think that there's, you know, for marketers who embrace this and get really good at telling their story and really their customer, I think it's going to be a huge advantage. You talk about slop, which I think you could kind of translate into mediocrity. I think that if you're playing in that mass middle, in terms of like rankings and the kinds of connections people are making, I think you're just going to further fall behind in brands that do a great job of this. They're going to be able to take advantage of all these new doors, as ways to get, you know, people into their content and interact with their brand. 

Again, the tools just keep changing so quickly, you know, I think there's going to be, you know, dynamically generated content will be a part of this story as this evolves, you know, where sites will be able to. 

You know, respond to who's visiting and what they and create an experience that's unique to them. I think it's still really early days on that. There's kind of some, you know, unproven technologies out there that are being developed, but I think that that will increasingly be the baseline where people are having this more personalized experience. 

Kristen: 

And I, I hope, I just want to add to that, like, I think there's people that are like some of our clients that are starting to panic a little bit because they see so much less traffic to their website. And so, like, you can see paid search costs are going way, way up because everybody is trying to fill in that gap with paid search, which isn't going to work because they're getting their information from AI anyway, but I think it's a better view of it then, oh my gosh, nobody's coming to my website anymore. How do I resolve it? Well, you don't, you can't because people are going to get a lot of answers they weren't getting before from their AI agent. So, the website has to evolve or evolve to that, but also you have to understand that people are going to be exposed to your brand without you tracking it through your website visits. And there's still a lot—the gaps and how you can track people that are getting referred via an AI engine, but I'm sure that those will get filled in like that. So right now it's a blind spot, but eventually it won't be. 

Matt: 

From that analytics perspective, what do you think will have to change? Because I think people will still want to measure how things are performing and a lot of them are measured by how they perform. 

Kristen: 

Yeah. You'll just have to be able to attribute back to those AI engines and you're starting to be able to see a traffic referral source and if you look at that, it might show you like chat GTP. It just doesn't show that all the time. So, there's, you're probably undercounting how much traffic is coming from an AI engine right now, but that'll get better over time. 

And then there's also less granularity right now, so you can't see things like what geography you're showing up in in a particular AI generated search result, but I have to believe that over time they'll resolve that too, and we'll be able to attribute that the same way we would to a paid ad or an organic listing showing up. 

Kevin: 

Right. And I think another interesting point is that we have been living in this monolith of Google for quite a while now, and The AI results, some people are using co-pilot, some people are using chat GPT, some people are using perplexity. 

There are enough real players out there that it's going to be important to try for us as an agency to hopefully get our clients not to freak out, right? And, and, and to help them understand that things are changing, we can't, we don't have a silver bullet at the moment. They can fix all their problems because the world has changed from not just the monolith of Google but the idea of search engine result pages just aren't a thing that are as valid as they used to be and you compound that with the fact that the Balkanization of where those agents are living right now, there's no big player, and so, or there's no one player, I guess is a better way to put it. Any kind of solutions that are going to come up in, in how we do reporting and how we do traffic analytics and all of those kinds of things. Something may work for GPT traffic, but it may not work for perplexity traffic. And so it's going to take a while for that to shake out in terms of being able to get that reporting, get that understanding. 

Greg: 

Now Kristen, did I understand you to say that you are now seeing results even in these early days of generative engine search website traffic falling off? 

Kristen: 

Absolutely. Yes, especially from sites that rely heavily on organic search traffic that organic search traffic is dropping on some of our sites by as much as 25%. And that's not because of bad SEO. That's just because that's not how people are getting their information anymore. 

Greg:

So does that speak to the need for better digital presence, more awareness of that just can't be in terms of branding. 

Kristen: 

Yes and no. So, yes, your brand needs to be there and on all of the social whatevers and you need your influencers, and it's really, really important that you have a good mixed digital strategy to make sure you're out there. 

However, websites don't play a less critical role than they have in the past, and it's just that they're playing their role differently. So, you, I think you really do want to make sure that you're showing up in those results, and the only way you're going to do that is with really, really good web content. So, it's harder, it's hard to reconcile that when you see less traffic on your site. 

But I really, really would like recommend to all of our clients, don't put less energy into making sure the site is really, really good, because it actually does matter, even though you're maybe seeing less traffic come through. 

Greg: 

As a writer, I like hearing that. 

Matt: 

I would say it's kind of a yes and situation, you know, to reiterate your point, it's just as important, it may be getting more and more important. It's just that there are all these other channels that you have to take into consideration because AI search favors, you know, things that it considers to be credible. 

So, if you have information that's being presented consistently across multiple platforms, that's going to be more likely to be pulled by an AI search as an answer. So, you guess it's more thinking holistically about like what is the whole marketing universe, and I think brands can't afford to kind of ignore any of these channels because it's the aggregate that gives them the advantage so it's sort of like things like Reddit, for example, have kind of risen in value as a place to put content in part because it's one of the places that's still open to all these different AI, you know, LOMs that are out there, so all of a sudden you need to be thinking about well how does Reddit fit into my strategy, and, and, you know, and other content sources like that as well, so it, it's going to create more work I think for, for folks, but, you know, generative content will help to fill that gap. So, I think it's yes and more. 

Greg: 

Yeah, a little more work, but also a little more help too with tools that help you present your content like you've never been able to present it for and perhaps be more effective in that result. 

Kevin:

I did want to just chime in that as important as the content is, the presentation still is important as well. And you still have to have a good-looking website. You haven't been able to be a company for 20 years without having a website. You still have to have that. It still has to be good. It has to be usable by everyone. It has to be fully accessible, it has to work well on all devices. You still have to do all of that. 

If the code behind all of that is handcrafted or it's done without, you know, relying on AI vibe coding or anything like that, you're going to succeed better because the those the search engines and the GEOs are going to be able to find that content in a better way, and they're going to be able to present things like Kristen earlier mentioned FAQs. If we can do some structured data and make it clear both to users and to the AI engines, then that's great and you're really going to succeed. But you can't be a brand and just have a bunch of text on your website as good as that content is, it's not, that's not good enough. You still have to, it still has to be there, there still has to be a real website out there. 

Greg: 

We keep pointing the finger at AI as the catalyst for change on websites of the future, but it's not all about AI. There are other factors, changing consumer habits, people leaving brick and mortar and going to digital, experiences. Expectations for personalized experiences are also driving change.  So, I just don't want to throw AI. Under the bus or elevated. I'm not sure which is going on here… 

Kevin:

I think 1 issue to think about also is that we are now seeing the first generation of people who have grown up with the internet completely. People who were born in the late 90s are getting to the point of being real consumers now. And so I think there's a maturity, at least I hope that people aren't, if they want to get a You know, a shower fixture, I assume they're not Googling Home Depot, you know, they're going to Home Depot.com or, or at least if they do Google Home Depot, then they're clicking on the first link and it's taking them to Home Depot if they if they think of Google as the internet. 

Matt: 

Yeah, I think to your point, Greg. AI is a tool. It's a, it's a means of doing things rather than destination on its own, and I feel like. The things that we build still must be outstanding experiences for humans, you know, if we build a flawless technically correct system that is optimized for AI search, for example, and it just falls flat with people, then it will be a failure. So, I think there will be actually increasing demand for emotional connection and empathy, which isn't something that AI is necessarily super good at. So, I feel like that's an area where human content creators are, are going to continue to have an important role is to kind of create that, you know, human interface I guess to your brand and your content. 

I'm pretty excited about where things might evolve into the future, at least as far as the opportunities for people to do things they've never been able to do, like, like what's happening with AI video where people with basically Almost no resources are creating these things that are getting close to broadcast quality, and soon will be. It's really empowering people to take their ideas and run with them. 

How that shakes out as a, as a business I think is TBD, but I think a lot of us, especially in marketing, we're getting a direct benefit from the literally billions and billions of dollars that are being poured into these technologies by investors. And it's kind of a really exciting time because as they fight it out for who's going to be the leaders, the costs are dropping, the accessibility is going up. So I think that for folks who embrace what these things can do, you know, it's just going to be really interesting opportunities. And I'm excited to see what the people who've grown up with this where like you said, it's just normal, how they start running with it and making new things. It’s going to be exciting and maybe a little bit scary as it rolls out. 

Greg:

What do we need to do to protect the integrity of content of websites? And the online experience. In the future with so many tools available to, honestly, bad actors too who are out there, you know, doing their thing, will only feel perhaps more emboldened with AI. 

Matt: 

There's a huge IP fight coming. It's inevitable. When, Chat GPT or OpenAI released Sora 2, they tried kind of an old school trick that the industry's been using for a long time, like, well, you'll have to tell us you're going to opt out,, they rather quickly had to change that policy, and I think you're going to see deals getting done where the people who own these intellectual properties are going to work out licensing agreements because I think it can be a situation where it's winners all around, but if people, if, if the perception is just theft of these valuable assets there's every incentive to go after these companies, so there I think there will, you know, the, the legal process is slower than the technology process, but I think there's going to be a shaking out, where that will be, I think, be part of what creates winning brands in these AI platforms is. Who has these great content deals, I think that's going to emerge as time goes on. 

Kristen:

The other part of that is I think that we can influence it more than we've ever been able to before because we are part of training all these AI models. And so like speaking of good content, if we're good stewards of our content, even In our literal day to day, here in our offices, if we're really thoughtful about how we design our own website, for example, like, that has an impact on how the AI learns and judges content. So to me, every single person that's creating content is accountable to making sure it's good. Quality content and if enough people take on that accountability, maybe that's more content than the bad actor content that's out there. Kind of overwhelmed with, you know. 

Kevin: 

I think one of the silver linings for me as a web developer who cares a lot about accessibility and performance, I think one of the real benefits of this is that for the first time that I can remember, we have had a really great Arrow in our quiver to let clients know that content matters and that if they're going to be spending money on a website and they say we want all of this animation, we want video, we want all of this, but we only have this much budget. 

Then maybe we can go and we can say Chat GPT is text-based and if you have really good content and if you focus your dollars on doing that and getting a good writer and telling a story, that's where you're going to succeed because the people who are coming to your website or people might not be coming to your website at all. And if you can get your content out there through these text-based mediums, then I think that's a real, real great thing. And so maybe we might end up seeing fewer sites looking like Apple, for example, you know, and where everything is, you know, there's, there's obviously always opportunity for that, and it depends on the brand, but if you're not Apple, well then maybe you don't need all of that, and that may be a minority view. The designer in the room might be grimacing at that, but for me, performance and accessibility are just as important and if we have the opportunity to say, If you focus on those with really good content, you're going to succeed in this world, as opposed to some big, let's say a 3D island of content that is on your website that people, oh, it looks really cool, but that's not really helpful in this day and age anymore. 

Greg: 

That's a great point. Accessibility could be one of the great innovations of future websites. Accessibility in the context of the ADA, for example. 

Matt: 

Yeah, I think that being able to do things like voice navigation on a site, being able to have dynamic content that's created for people maybe who have disabilities or, you know, special needs, the reader experience I think can be improved through some of these technologies. 

I do think there's going to be improvements, that make it easier for all sorts of people to be able to get what they need to off of websites, as we talked about a little bit earlier with that mobile inflection point, you know, that was one of the first times where you saw a really big shift in how sites were designed, you know, with responsive design to be able to work well in any platform and I could see things around accessibility, improving in a similar way, folks who have vision issues or they, have hearing problems. I think that there's going to be a lot of interesting ways to present information to those people that, gives them a richer experience. 

Greg: 

I'm hearing a lot of upsides about the websites of the future. 

Matt: 

I did have one thing I want to throw out there about AI slop because slop is not new, there's always been this like the path is self-optimization and we just look at the numbers and that's how we win and I think that's only half the story. I think if you don't have quality, if you don't make that human connection, then you fall into that range of mediocrity and become forgettable. So, I, I think it's somewhat self-correcting because I think It's going to deliver diminishing returns over time because the noise will just get louder and louder. So, if you don't have something that breaks you out of the pack, you're just going to disappear. So, quality wins I think is one of the takeaways from this conversation. 

Kevin: 

Yeah, and I would suggest that if quality has always won, hopefully, we were in a little bit of a unique place or a new place anyway, where quality plus content wins in a way that it hasn't in the past. Now we, we have a, I don't know if opportunity or a curse is the right word, but we have to be there now with the content as well. The word quality can't just describe what it looks like, it has to describe what it actually says, in a way that has never needed to really be that way in the past. 

Kristen:

I think this kind of brings a full circle back into that centralized versus decentralized conversation. Because right now, in a slightly more decentralized world than we're used to, you see some of that garbage rising to the top, especially not just in an AI search results, but if you're in an actual like, speaking with an actual AI and getting weird responses or dated responses, there's garbage in there for sure, but I think Like I mentioned at the top, is it moves back into a little bit more of a centralized place, as the quality AI rises to the top, then that good content winning piece starts to happen too, and we start to trust those with at least the same level of trust we give all our Google search results, which again, there's a lot of trash out there and there's always going to be a lot of trash out there, but we'll develop some level of trust once things settle down a little bit. 

Greg: 

Well, is it safe to assume that the search engines of the future will do what they did to keyword stuffing? Those algorithms will get dialed in a little bit more for the websites of the future to reward better content and recognize slop. 

Kevin: 

Yeah, and we really aren't saying anything that we haven't been saying for 20 years, right? It really, it really is good content, well presented, performance, accessible. If you weren't doing a website like that in 1999, you were doing it wrong then too, and if you're or in 2007 when you're when people started looking at your website on a phone or today when you're getting AI results. So, if you have those things, you're doing it right and the way it's consumed by AI is new and that's different and the way consumers consume, whether it's chat GPT or AI mode in Google or whatever it is. It all just still boils down to those same things good content, performance sites, semantically presented so that those automated bots or whatever that are scraping the site can find what you want them to find. Maybe it isn't as much of a revolution. 

Matt: 

It's still an inflection point for sure because it's how people are interacting with it, but the rules about what make a good website, in my opinion, just haven't ever changed. Plus, they're measurable. 

Kristen: 

Yes, we've been measuring them for 20 years and we'll keep measuring them for the AI. 

Greg: 

So, this fear that some people might be feeling about the future of websites, I don't want to say it's not genuine, but it's probably more about the unknown. In terms of what it's going to look like and how it's going to function. 

Kristen: 

Yeah, and soon we'll be able to collect the right AI data to prove that out. It's very close. 

Greg: 

You can't wait. I can tell. 

Matt: 

Well, I think to a point that Kevin made earlier too, the last 20 years, all these patterns have emerged that we all understand how to use, you know, and I don't think those are going away, they're just being supplemented and enhanced by these other opportunities. You know, I don't see a total revolution in shopping carts. They were figured out, you know, they're, they're probably going to be similar in the future as they are today, but how the person found the product that they put in the cart, that might be a little bit different experience, and there might be different channels that, you know, become more important that, you know, are merging as all of this develops. 

Greg: 

If you're a marketer, why wouldn't you be excited about the future; the new tools that you have emerging?  There are some concerns. But there's also a huge upside, it sounds to me, agreed? 

Panel:

Agreed. Yes.

Matt: Yeah. I feel like any big technology change like this always has, you know, there's the destruction side of it, and then there's all this new stuff that emerges, that, creates a whole bunch of new opportunities. 

Kristen: 

Just a dash of healthy skepticism… 

Matt: 

The hype machine, yeah, take that into account for sure. 

Greg: 

We should all, we should definitely question the motives and we should question to the extent that we need to understand how do we apply it in a way that makes sense for what we do and for our clients even after we're dialed in and approaching our next inflection point. I wonder what that's going to look like. 

Matt:

Brain implants! 

Kristen: 

Don't stop using your human comprehension. 

Greg: 

Let's get through this first one first. Panel, why don't we workshop some key takeaways for this episode in real time? 

Panel: 

Absolutely. Sure. 

Greg: 

Let me look at my notes here. 

OK, 1) Websites and the internet are reaching another inflection point— Yes, but that's OK. We've been here before. We'll be fine. 

Panel: Correct. 

Greg: 

2) While traffic may taper a bit, websites will not become obsolete in the face of AI agents acting as your front door, but it's likely they will be more important than ever when those and other doors open. 

Panel: 

Yes, absolutely. 

Greg: 

3) Website design, UX, development, and content will certainly evolve as the pathways of the customer journeys get rerouted, but in the end, good content wins, as always. 

Panel: 

Right. It's true. 

Greg: 

And 4) Something you can think about now or in the near future, enhance your site with content that answers the questions people have about your product or service in greater detail. Focus more on rich and revealing sentences and content, and not so much on keywords. 

Does all of that work? 

Panel: 

Yes, yes, good, completely. 

Greg: 

Kristen Crandall, Kevin Bolduan, Matt Trinneer, great conversation. Thank you. 

Panel: 

Thank you. 

Greg: 

If you have questions for our panelists about your website of the future, feel free to drop us a line at podcast@DCGONE.com. 

Thanks very much for listening to the whole idea podcast. Our producer is Kelsey Brewer. I'm Greg Oberst. Stay tuned to this channel for more insight and inspiration for Whole ideal marketing. 

Take care.