# The future of the website > [!question] Lingering Questions > - What canonical business facts are currently duplicated across pages, schemas, feeds, and profiles on a given site — worth an actual inventory before applying the "one source of truth" recommendation. > - How does MCP compare with a plain read-only API or feed for a single real business task? Worth testing before choosing a protocol. > [!tip] Article Ideas > - "One source, many renderings" — the article's clearest architecture rule, generalized past websites to any content system that needs to serve both human and machine consumers. > - "Authenticity as infrastructure" — the strongest differentiation claim in the piece; needs careful treatment of fairness and resistance to fabricated evidence before publishing. > [!link] Cross Reference > - [[3. Resources/MOCs/AI & the Future of Knowledge Work MOC]] > - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Product & Startup Instincts MOC]] — the canonical-source architecture argument is a product/platform decision, not just a content strategy > [!quote] Vocabulary > - **E-E-A-T** — Google's Experience-Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trust framework, contrasted here with directly-verifiable provenance as a competing model of "trust." ## Metadata - Source: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Full Document Contents/Articles/The future of the website]] - Author: Joost de Valk ## Author's thesis (Adler Q1+Q2) De Valk argues websites are evolving from human-facing HTML destinations into verified, machine-readable business home bases serving people, search engines, and action-taking agents alike, because discovery and conversion increasingly happen in AI answers, chats, and agent-mediated transactions rather than on the site itself. His prescription: keep one canonical source of truth, generate every interface (human and machine) from it, make claims verifiable across the web, and invest in real people, work, and reputation rather than generic generated content. ## Key arguments (≤3) 1. **Bots are a long-standing audience, not a new one** — the practical implication is exposing the same facts through machine-parseable structures, not abandoning human pages. 2. **Conversion is moving off-site**, into AI answers, chat interfaces, and agent-mediated transactions — the website becomes the canonical source for decisions made elsewhere. 3. **Authenticity becomes verifiable infrastructure** rather than a marketing word — identity, provenance, and trust need to be checkable, not just claimed. ## Claim atoms ### One source should generate every website interface > [!quote] ID:rw_1 > "The answer isn't a second website. It's one source of truth with multiple renderings." Where/why: the article's clearest architecture rule — applies to HTML, structured data, feeds, APIs, and agent interfaces alike. ### Website conversion shifts into external agent surfaces > [!quote] ID:rw_2 > "More and more buying decisions happen away from your site: in AI answers, in chat interfaces, in agent-mediated transactions." Where/why: reframes the website from final destination to canonical source for decisions made elsewhere. ### Websites become bundles of human and machine interfaces > [!quote] ID:rw_3 > "The durable point is this: a website is becoming a bundle of interfaces." Where/why: the protocol-independent version of the article's MCP-specific recommendation. ### Authenticity becomes verifiable infrastructure > [!quote] ID:rw_4 > "Authenticity stops being a marketing word and becomes infrastructure: identity, provenance, trust." Where/why: the strongest differentiation claim in the piece; requires careful work on fairness and resistance to fabricated evidence. ## Permanent candidates - **Canonical sources reduce interface drift** — a business should store governed facts once and generate each human or machine interface from that source. See [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Canonical Sources Reduce Interface Drift]]. - **Verifiable authenticity becomes a system property** — trustworthy digital identity depends on consistent provenance and corroboration across owned and external sources. See [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Verifiable Authenticity Becomes a System Property]]. ## Processing checklist - [ ] Inventory canonical business facts currently duplicated across pages, schemas, feeds, and profiles for one real site. - [ ] Compare MCP with a plain read-only API/feed for one real business task before choosing a protocol. - [x] Connect into the relevant MOC — [[3. Resources/MOCs/AI & the Future of Knowledge Work MOC]] ## Links - [[3. Resources/MOCs/AI & the Future of Knowledge Work MOC]] — agent-mediated discovery and conversion is a direct instance of AI reshaping how knowledge/content work gets consumed - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Product & Startup Instincts MOC]] — the single-source-of-truth architecture recommendation is a platform/product decision with real engineering tradeoffs