The future of business websites in an LLM and AI search world

Let’s say you are a non-technical startup founder and you want to find startup developers in Sydney. You’d probably jump on to Google Search (as we know it in October 2024) and search 'startup developer Sydney' or some variation of that key phrase.

But with the rise of large language model (LLMs) search engines like Perplexity, artificial intelligence search is becoming a big thing.

So big in fact that Google is currently rolling out their AI Overviews product which lets you browse using generative AI. It’s called Search Generative Experience or SGE. Bing also has their own AI Search backed by ChatGPT.

UPDATE - 01 November 2024: ChatGPT has just launched their Chrome Extension, called ChatGPT search which sets your default search engine in Chrome to ChatGPT. To use it you need a ChatGPT Plus account.

So, while you might be using traditional Google search today there’s a high chance you’ll be using AI search in the near future.

What does generative AI search mean for business websites?

If you own a service business, like Launch Lab, or a tech business (eg: Saas) then your website traffic from search will also likely decline. But, there is a silver lining for service and product based businesses.

The silver lining - information trumps branding

But, I’m also time poor and sometimes I need quick answers rather than clicking through a website’s pages to understand their brand, product, USP and overall tone. That’s where generative search comes to the fore.

To outline what I’m talking about let’s circle back to the Google search example I started this post with. The screen grabs you see below are from Perplexity to show how searching for a business service, using an LLM, can return very quick results in a summarised fashion without the need to visit the service providers website.

In fact, as you can see below, as I asked more questions in Perplexity about one of the service providers I kept getting helpful answers that would probably have taken longer to surface when sifting through a website.

Prompt 1: My first prompt was to find service providers for a specific task in a specific geographic area:

Prompt 2: I then asked the LLM why the company that was first in their list is the best suited to this task:

Prompt 3: The service provider seems like a good fit so I then asked Perplexity how I can contact them:

As you can see, I had no need to go to that company's website (ok, yes, it is our own) as I now had enough information to know that they were a good fit for what I was looking for. I could have continued asking questions to surface information like portfolio work or ask to see testimonials etc.

Is this the dawn of the death of web design?

What happens when an LLM cuts the need for a user interface out?

What happens when these AI platforms achieve their desired state of cutting out the middleman to ensure their user simply gets the answers they are looking for directly in the LLM’s chatbot interface (like in the example above)?

Will creative design still be needed?

Will there be a need for business websites as we currently experience them?

In my opinion we’ll see the following shift in the future of business website design:

• simpler, more minimal, website designs with a focus on key information
• a larger investment in content at the expense of the web design budget. For example, there will need to be a focus on AI friendly SEO. Instead of writing for current SERPs, websites will need to be optimised for optimal rankings by LLMs.
• a larger investment in structured data. While structured data and schema have been around for a long time and widely used for technical SEO, there will probably be a higher importance placed on schema and structuring data in an optimal way for LLMs to parse the content faster and more accurately.
• The user journey will largely be guided by an LLM using chatbot-first navigation (either typed or voice activated). For example, websites might offer a user interface experience more like the Perplexity, or ChatGPT, chatbot experience. ie: rather than scrolling a website and navigating through pages you might ask the chatbot on the homepage of the website to tell you about the company, and or product, in a few short sentences.
• Web designers and UX designers will no longer dictate your experience on the website they've designed. Your own journey as a user will be guided by what your LLM of choice knows about you. When you conduct a search in your LLM, or AI generative search tool, it will have gained information about you and may guide you down a path that is most suited to your preferences and known problems.

As an aside to the bullet point above, for a bit of fun, if you've been using ChatGPT for a while ask it this question: "based on the prompts I've given to you, what do you know about me that I might not know?"

Business websites are here to stay

After all, websites offer a great way to store content and to structure it.

Plus, despite all of the above, people will still visit websites for decades to come (phewww, bold prediction) so the importance of brand and design still remain but probably in a more minimal way with a different user experience than what websites currently offer.