What’s the future of a website? It’s an interesting question in this day and age, where AI is slowly dominating us.
But I want to push this a little further ahead on the calendar. Think about “Star Trek”, “Star Wars”, “Battlestar Galactica”, et cetera. The people in those eras, what did they use? Did they still have websites? Was HTTPS (the secure protocol your browser uses to load a web page) still a thing in that era?
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.
There was probably a bot, a person, or whatever it was, and you simply interacted with it, like the computer on the Holodeck in “Star Trek”. You asked, it answered.
We are not at that stage yet. So I asked myself, today, in 2026: what is the future of websites? I’ve been asking this question here and there, and reading about it on Reddit and other forums.
Static Websites Will Die Their Own Slow Death
It seems that informational websites with static content will be dead in a few years, if not earlier. They will just die their own slow death.
Why? Because the AI robots will have already consumed all of that information. And more and more people will rely on AI to find information.
Why? Well, let’s say you want to research a certain subject, and there are 10 websites on this subject.
If you research manually on Google, you have to rely on the Google results, and those results may be biased by SEO (search engine optimization) activity, et cetera. Let’s say that out of the 10 websites, you find only three on the first page of Google results. The remaining seven sit on pages four, five, and six.
So you would only see them if you clicked through to pages four, five, and six and happened to discover them.
But here’s the other question. You don’t even know if they are on pages four, five, or six. Maybe they are on page 8 or page 10. And how do you even know that there are only 10 sites on this subject? Maybe there are 12. Maybe there are 16.
You don’t know that part.
And Then You Have to Find the Right Page
The second part, and this is the most difficult part, is that you need to go to that website, to that particular page, to that particular section, to find the information you’re looking for.
You don’t even know how to get there. Maybe you trust Google, maybe you don’t. Maybe the navigation is very intuitive and takes you there in one or two clicks. Maybe it’s not that intuitive. Maybe what you want is buried in between other functions, other pages, and other sub-pages, which you may or may not read.
All of this takes a long time.
The Librarian That Has Read Every Book
Now take AI. You ask it. It can pull together information from several sources and present it to you right there.
Think of a library with thousands and thousands and thousands of books. The AI goes in, pulls the 10 books you need, opens them at the right pages, takes the right information, and puts it in front of you, right there, for you to devour.
You have to understand: that cannot be beat.
That’s the way it’s going to be. We go from a society that is very inefficient when it comes to the web to a very efficient one.
Sure, there will be areas the AI misses. But you can always ask it to present more information, to elaborate more. You go from a summary, to a CliffsNotes version, to another resource, to the actual resource itself. You can keep expanding on it.
That is the future of static information websites.
What Might Survive?
Well, dynamic websites. Transactional websites. Websites where you put something in and something comes out. Those may survive the initial AI onslaught.
I say the initial AI onslaught. I don’t think they will survive later on, because your AI bot will be able to do everything, considering we are already testing agentic commerce (where an AI agent shops and pays on your behalf) and everything else.
I am already using AI agents to clear my backlog and testing how much of my daily work they can automate. Navigating a website is one more task I can imagine handing over.
The other thing that may survive for a short while is information that AI has not crawled, or is not allowed to crawl.
And then there is opinionated information. Question-and-answer websites, experience websites, review websites.
Take Trustpilot, for example. Trustpilot is Trustpilot. You can’t AI it, if you will. People going to TripAdvisor, or Trustpilot, or Booking.com, or whatever it is, are looking for a hotel or some sort of reservation. Before they make that reservation, they want to know: what do others think about it? That’s where they find that information. They want to read that review.
So opinions will probably survive the next few years.
But Even That Can Change
A new classification system may come up. Or you could just go to your AI and say:
“Hey, listen, show me a hotel in the range of US$80 to US$90, in the safe part of the city, where the Trustpilot is better than 4.2 stars, where they’ve got a good breakfast, and where I don’t have to pay for water at night.”
And that’s it. Your reservation is done, because the AI did all of it.
So it’s a very bleak future for websites.
The Gentle Gust of Wind
We may not know it yet. There’s this famous saying: “Even the most powerful storms announce themselves with a gentle gust of wind.”
I think what we are experiencing right now might be the gentle gust of wind. The storms will come, and the storms are going to go after websites.
They already are going after websites.
Look at Wikipedia. After updating how it detects bots, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that human page views were down roughly 8% compared with the same months in 2024.
Others, who I sort of know personally, used to get something like 100,000, maybe 250,000 page views a month on their very specific websites. They are now at 30,000 page views a month, and even that figure is dropping.
Traffic is being lost.
Google Is Summarizing Everyone Out of Business
Google’s on-page AI summaries give people fewer reasons to click. In a Pew Research Center study, users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits with an AI summary, compared with 15% of visits without one.
It used to be that you went to Google, very normally, and asked for something. That is still the case for a lot of people, but it’s not that evident anymore. Like I told you, you had to go to Google and find the website in question. Hopefully, that was the website in question. You may have had to find five, or six, or seven, or eight of them. And that is how Google sent those websites their traffic.
But now Google summarizes it for you. Everything is right there on the main page. The websites that used to get that traffic don’t get it anymore.
This entire summary, or synopsis, is what’s killing the traffic.
And while we have all these coalitions coming together on AI, and what Cloudflare is doing to give publishers control over AI crawler access, et cetera, I think publishers have sort of discovered that the game is now coming to a close, and a new model has to be thought of.
What that new model is, I don’t know.
So what does the future of websites look like?
Very bleak.