The Future of the Website  🔗 **Source:** [The Future of the Website](https://joost.blog/future-of-the-website/) > [!note]+ Document Notes > --- > tags: [agent-ready-web, website-strategy, machine-readable-content, digital-authenticity, ai-discovery] > author: Joost de Valk > source: Joost.blog > reference: https://joost.blog/future-of-the-website/ > date created: 2026-07-22 > --- > # 🏷️ Title: The future of the website > ## 🧭 Table of Contents > - [🔗 References](#-references) > - [📝 Summary](#-summary) > - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) > - [📚 References](#-references-1) > - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#-paraphrase) > - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) > - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) > - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) > - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) > - [❓ Questions](#-questions) > - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) > - [💡 Implications](#-implications) > - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) > - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) > - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) > - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) > - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) > - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) > - [🔄 Refactor Appendix](#-refactor-appendix--the-future-of-the-website) > ### 🔗 References > - [Source article](https://joost.blog/future-of-the-website/) > - [Agent-ready websites](https://joost.blog/agent-ready/) > - [AI optimization is replaying early SEO](https://joost.blog/ai-optimization-is-replaying-early-seo-just-faster/) > - [Agent-native websites](https://joost.blog/agent-native/) > - [Website specification](https://specification.website/) > ## 📝 Summary > - **What happened:** Joost de Valk argues that websites are evolving from human-facing HTML destinations into verified, machine-readable business home bases serving people, search engines, and action-taking agents. > - **Why it matters:** Discovery and conversion increasingly happen in AI answers, chats, and agent-mediated transactions. A site must supply trustworthy facts and interfaces even when the final decision happens elsewhere. > - **Stakeholders:** Site owners, publishers, ecommerce teams, local businesses, developers, SEOs, AI-agent builders, customers, standards groups, and platform vendors. > - **Risks and tradeoffs:** Separate agent sites drift; interface standards will change; machine optimization can distract from human value; technical perfection may become commodity work; authenticity claims can become another gameable checklist. > - **Bottom line:** Keep one canonical source of truth, generate multiple interfaces from it, make claims verifiable across the web, and invest in real people, work, and reputation rather than generic generated content. > ## 📖 Main Content > ### 🗒️ Notes > #### Websites serve humans and agents > The article reframes bots as a long-standing audience rather than a new one. Search engines learned to interpret human pages through extraordinary investment, while newer agents often need explicit, predictable surfaces. The practical implication is not to abandon human pages but to expose the same facts through structures agents can parse and act on. > #### Discovery surfaces change without permission > The movement among Google, Bing, ChatGPT Search, GEO, and AEO shows that site owners do not control which discovery surface matters. Optimization therefore shifts from one dominant crawler toward portable content, structured facts, and observable retrieval across several systems. > #### One source should produce several renderings > The m-dot and AMP analogy supports a strong operational warning: parallel content stores diverge. Human HTML, structured data, feeds, APIs, MCP tools, and command-line interfaces should be projections of the same governed content model. > #### Technical correctness becomes cheaper > Agents can read specifications and audit implementations, reducing the scarcity of standards knowledge. Technical quality still matters, but it moves toward a baseline. Strategy, original evidence, judgment, and genuine differentiation become more valuable. > #### A website is an interface bundle > The durable claim is broader than MCP: a website becomes a collection of interfaces. Human visitors read and browse; agents query availability, book appointments, or place orders. Standards may change, but the need for safe, governed machine actions persists. > #### Conversion moves away from owned pages > The site remains important even when a buyer never visits it. It becomes the canonical system that feeds facts, policies, inventory, identity, and evidence to third-party decision surfaces. > #### Authenticity becomes checkable infrastructure > The article treats authenticity as consistency across identity, provenance, customer evidence, external references, and owned content. Agents can compare claims across sources cheaply, making contradictory or synthetic brand narratives easier to detect. > ## 📚 References > - de Valk, Joost. [“The future of the website.”](https://joost.blog/future-of-the-website/) > - de Valk, Joost. [“Agent-ready.”](https://joost.blog/agent-ready/) > - de Valk, Joost. [“Agent-native.”](https://joost.blog/agent-native/) > - de Valk, Joost. [“AI optimization is replaying early SEO, just faster.”](https://joost.blog/ai-optimization-is-replaying-early-seo-just-faster/) > - [specification.website](https://specification.website/) > - Search Engine Journal. [ChatGPT Google-search fallback report](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/chatgpt-appears-to-use-google-search-as-a-fallback/552089/). > - Suganthan Mohanadasan. [ChatGPT source-selection research](https://suganthan.com/blog/how-chatgpt-picks-sources-part-2/). > ## 🗣️ Paraphrase > 1. The author asks what a website becomes as AI changes discovery and interaction. > 2. His answer is a business home base that people and agents can read, use, and verify. > 3. Bots have always consumed websites, but modern agents often lack Google’s mature ability to infer structure from human-first pages. > 4. GEO and AEO reflect a fragmented discovery market rather than a wholly new practice. > 5. Retrieval providers can change rapidly, so businesses need portable, well-structured source material. > 6. Building a separate agent site repeats the maintenance failures of m-dot sites and AMP; shared content with several outputs is safer. > 7. Agent-assisted standards work makes technical correctness easier to obtain and less differentiating. > 8. Websites matter differently by business model: a local tradesperson may not need more demand, while a global brand depends on a universal digital storefront. > 9. A serious website will expose action-capable machine interfaces in addition to HTML. > 10. Purchasing decisions increasingly happen outside the site, turning the site into a system of record for other surfaces. > 11. Generic generated content loses value because it is abundant; verifiable real-world evidence becomes scarce and valuable. > 12. Authenticity depends on consistent identity and third-party corroboration, not self-assertion alone. > 13. The future website remains alive but changes into a technically sound, agent-readable, demonstrably real home base. > ## 📰 Newsletter > The website isn’t dying; it’s getting more jobs. Joost de Valk’s useful frame is that your site becomes the canonical home base behind human pages, AI answers, and agent actions. Don’t build a second “AI site” that drifts out of sync. Keep one governed source and publish several interfaces from it. Technical correctness is getting cheaper; real work, real people, and claims that survive cross-checking are becoming the hard advantage. Start with [the article](https://joost.blog/future-of-the-website/) and its companion pieces on [agent-ready](https://joost.blog/agent-ready/) and [agent-native](https://joost.blog/agent-native/) sites. > ## ✅ Action Items > #### DevRel > - Publish a reference implementation showing HTML, structured data, API, feed, and agent interface generated from one content model. > - Teach threat modeling and authorization for action-taking interfaces, not only discovery metadata. > #### OSPO > - Track open standards for agent discovery and actions; avoid binding core business data to one vendor protocol. > - Encourage reusable open schemas and conformance tests. > #### Community > - Collect case studies from small businesses, publishers, nonprofits, and global brands so “the website” is not defined only by ecommerce and enterprise needs. > #### WordPr 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 have that. Most AI tools are, frankly, not that good at figuring out what’s on a page that was designed purely for human eyeballs. Maybe they’ll get there. But at least for the foreseeable future, your website needs [surfaces that are easy for agents to parse and use](https://joost.blog/agent-ready/). The sudden [rebranding of SEO into GEO and AEO](https://joost.blog/ai-optimization-is-replaying-early-seo-just-faster/) tells the same story. SEO was always really “Google optimization”. There were other surfaces, and good SEOs optimized for them too, but the Google work had by far the highest ROI, so that’s where the focus went. The new names mostly reflect one thing: we now have to optimize for more surfaces than one. The work itself is the same as it always was. What changed is that Google is no longer the only surface worth the effort. A recent example of how quickly this shifts. When ChatGPT search launched, it grounded its answers in Bing’s index, and suddenly everyone was scrambling to figure out how they were doing in Bing. They always should have known. But for years the ROI on Bing was low, so nobody bothered. Then ChatGPT was [caught quietly pulling Google’s results](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/chatgpt-appears-to-use-google-search-as-a-fallback/552089/) instead, and just these past few weeks [Bing showed up again in its retrieval traffic](https://suganthan.com/blog/how-chatgpt-picks-sources-part-2/). Three swings in under two years, none of them announced. That’s the new reality in one anecdote: which surface matters is no longer your call, and it can change overnight. Before you rush off to build a separate site for agents: we’ve done that before. Remember m-dot sites? Remember AMP? Parallel versions of your website always drift out of sync, and then they die. The answer isn’t a second website. It’s [one source of truth with multiple renderings](https://joost.blog/agent-native/), where the machine-friendly surface is generated from the same content the human one is. #### A technically perfect website is now a choice Building a technically correct website was always absurdly hard. You had to actually *know* the spec of a good website: the standards, the edge cases, the intricacies underneath, and how these standards interact. Very few people ever did. The best SEOs in the world, and that’s about it. That’s changing fast. This is exactly why I built [specification.website](https://specification.website): point an agent at the spec and let it go nuts. What used to require rare expertise is becoming something you can run. So technical excellence is no longer a rare skill; it’s a choice. That doesn’t mean everyone will make that choice, certainly not yet, so for the moment there is still real advantage in being one of the few who do. But the direction is clear: the bar keeps rising, and what used to win markets slowly becomes the baseline. The lasting value moves to the questions machines can’t answer for you. Does a website even matter for your business? Do you have anything real to say on it? #### Websites don’t matter equally, and that’s fine Where I live, a plumber, carpenter or electrician who is good at the job and can communicate half decently will be busy year round, with or without a website. Could a good website make them even busier? Probably. Do they want that? Many don’t, and that’s a perfectly rational choice. For a brand, it’s the opposite. The website is probably more important than the most chic high street store they could open. Partly for the experience, but mostly for a brutally simple reason: there are only so many high streets, and your potential buyers live everywhere. #### The website becomes an interface bundle A website used to be an HTML thing, in some cases with an API. That’s no longer enough. If your website matters to you, it should at the very least [also be an MCP server](https://joost.blog/agent-native/), and in many cases even ship a command-line client. That way agents can interact with your business directly: check availability, place the order, book the slot. The specific standards will churn. MCP is today’s answer; something else will come after it. The durable point is this: a website is becoming a bundle of interfaces. One for humans, several for machines, and the machine ones don’t just answer questions, they take actions. #### Conversion is leaving the website More and more buying decisions happen away from your site: in AI answers, in chat interfaces, in agent-mediated transactions. This is the uncomfortable one. You can rage against it or you can plan for it. The website doesn’t die in that world. Its role shifts. It becomes the canonical source of truth about your business: the system of record that feeds every surface where the actual decision gets made. If an AI assistant recommends you, it’s because your home base gave it every reason to. Thin, stale, machine-hostile websites simply won’t be recommended. #### Authenticity is the only moat left One thing ties all of this together: generic AI slop will get you nowhere in this world. Everyone can generate it, in infinite quantities, which makes it worth exactly nothing. The only thing that can’t be generated is being real: real work, real people, a real voice, real customers who really vouch for you. In an agent world, authenticity can’t just be claimed, it has to be checkable. An agent choosing between two suppliers can cross-reference everything, cheaply and instantly. Does the story on your site match the trail you leave everywhere else? Do the people actually exist? Do the reviews hold up? SEOs will recognize the goal: this is what Google’s E-E-A-T was always reaching for. The difference is that Google estimates trust from signals; an agent can simply go and check. Authenticity stops being a marketing word and becomes infrastructure: identity, provenance, trust. Proving you are who you say you are is about to become the most valuable layer of the web. You can’t build that layer on your own site alone: you also need to exist elsewhere on the web, and you need others vouching for you. Whether we call that link building, PR or something else doesn’t matter. It needs to be done. And the proof isn’t only technical: a genuinely good about page, real people with real faces and a real story, does the same work. It might be the best page on your site. #### So where does that leave the website? Not dead. Not even close. But different: the website is becoming the verified, machine-readable home base of a business. It feeds every other surface. It answers agents and takes their orders. It proves the business is real. And it still, sometimes, gets visited by an actual human, who had better find something authentic when they arrive. The websites that thrive in this world get three things right. They’re technically excellent: now a choice, and for the moment still an edge. They’re easy for agents to find and read: a plumbing problem. And they’re unmistakably real: the hard part, and it always was., The Future of the Website, https://joost.blog/about-me/, 01ky4t3jq4z575zrx9sj9ka1c9.