I sent a Slack to my team last week that started with: “I’ve been playing around with Claude’s Chrome extension and Perplexity’s new Comet browser. Pretty freaking wild stuff.”
What I told them next felt important enough to share here. Your website is about to get a new kind of visitor. It isn’t human.
The shift that’s already happening
There’s a version of the near future where someone looking for a company like yours doesn’t browse your website the way they do today. They describe what they need to an AI assistant, that assistant reads your site on their behalf, and reports back with a recommendation. By the time a human lands on your homepage, they’ve already decided.
This is already shipping. Claude has a Chrome extension that can browse and analyze web pages. Perplexity just released Comet, a browser built around AI-first interaction. ChatGPT has an agent mode that can browse and interact with websites on your behalf. Google is pushing Gemini features into Chrome. These AI browsing agents are becoming normal, not novel.
How the discovery journey is inverting
Think about how people research a purchase today. They Google something like “best Houston web design.” They click through a few results. They skim your homepage, maybe your about page, maybe a case study. They form an impression based on vibes, design quality, and whether your messaging resonates with their situation.
Now think about how that same person will research soon. Even right now. They open their AI assistant and say: “I’m a mid-market company with about $15 million in revenue and 50 employees. I’m looking for a web design agency that specializes in B2B manufacturing and can handle HubSpot integration. Who should I talk to?”
Different game entirely. The first query is vague. The second is hyper-specific. AI can handle that specificity. It can read your website, understand what you do, match it against the criteria in the prompt, and make a recommendation.
But only if your website gives it something to work with.
You can’t rely on implication anymore
AI might read between the lines, but it won’t necessarily do it reliably.
Humans operate on gut instinct. They pick up on tone, design quality, social proof, and dozens of subtle signals that tell them whether you’re credible. They can infer things you haven’t explicitly stated. They fill in gaps with assumptions.
AI can do some of that too. Some tools can even interpret your visual design. But you can’t count on that layer being consistent or even present. You don’t get to see the moments the model guessed wrong or filled in a gap with the wrong assumption. You don’t want your positioning riding on a coin flip.
When AI is doing the reading, vague positioning becomes a liability. “We build beautiful websites that drive results” tells an AI almost nothing. It can’t confidently match that against someone’s detailed prompt because there’s nothing concrete to match.
In practice, it looks like this. Imagine someone prompts an AI: “Find me a B2B manufacturing web agency with HubSpot expertise and experience with complex product catalogs.
If your site says “We create stunning digital experiences for ambitious brands,” the AI has nothing to work with. You might get lumped into a generic “top Houston agencies” list, or you might not surface at all.
If your site says “We design websites for B2B manufacturers, with deep HubSpot integration experience and specialized work in complex product configurator builds,” the AI can confidently recommend you. It might even pull your case study as evidence.
Same agency. Different outcomes. The only variable is how explicitly you’ve stated what you do.
The quality paradox
Here’s what surprised me as we started thinking about this: writing for AI actually produces better content for humans too.
The specificity that AI needs? Humans appreciate it. The clarity that helps a machine understand your positioning? It helps prospects understand it faster. The depth that allows AI to form an accurate mental model of your brand? It gives humans the confidence that you know what you’re talking about.
We’ve been building out what we call our Brand Intelligence System, a set of strategic documents that articulate exactly who we are, who we serve, and how we think. A lot of documents, actually. The original purpose was to create consistency in our own content and make it easier to train team members. But we’ve realized it serves another purpose: it gives AI something substantial to learn from.
These documents act as a reference manual. When an agent reads our site, it doesn’t find vague marketing copy. It finds a clear picture of our positioning, our methodology, and our point of view.
Your website is becoming a knowledge base
Try this framing: your website is turning into a machine-readable knowledge base about your business.
Not in a creepy way. In a pragmatic way. Every page you publish, every case study, every service description is now source material that AI will use to understand and represent you. And not just on your site directly. That information gets indexed, cached, summarized in directories, referenced in third-party content, pulled from your social media. Your story gets assembled from pieces scattered across the web.
Which means clarity and specificity matter everywhere, not just on your homepage. Optimizing your website for AI isn’t really about technical tricks. It’s about making your story legible wherever machines encounter it. A website for AI is one that can be accurately summarized, verified, and cited without guesswork.
So the real work is getting clear on your brand DNA. What actually makes you different? Who do you specifically serve? What do you believe about your craft that others don’t? What’s the point of view that shapes how you approach your work? Most companies have never articulated this stuff clearly, even internally. They operate on instinct and assume the market will figure it out. It’s branding 101, really. The difference now is that the stakes are higher.
That worked when humans were doing all the interpreting. It doesn’t work when machines are forming the first impression. The clarity has to be explicit, and it has to show up consistently everywhere: on your site, in your social presence, in the directories you’re listed in, in the way third parties describe you. That’s how AI formulates an accurate mental model no matter where it looks.
Assistants don’t just extract information. They try to verify it. Your case studies, third-party reviews, directory listings, mentions on other sites. These act as citations that help AI trust your claims, especially when the prompt is specific and the stakes are high. If your website says “We’re HubSpot experts” but HubSpot’s partner directory doesn’t list you, an agent may look for corroboration and treat the claim as weaker if it can’t find it. Saying you specialize in something is step one. Having a trail of evidence that confirms it is what makes AI recommend you with confidence.
What this means practically
I’m not going to pretend there’s a finished playbook yet. But the strategic direction is clear. There are real risks too. Prompt injection and manipulation mean agents will sometimes be confidently wrong. That’s another reason your site needs explicit anchors and proof. Here are the principles we’re operating from.
Specificity over cleverness. Clever marketing headlines might grab human attention, but they often obscure meaning for AI. “We turn clicks into customers” sounds good but says nothing. Prefer clear articulation of what you do and who you do it for.
Depth over breadth. Thin content that covers lots of topics superficially gives AI nothing to anchor on. Deep content that thoroughly addresses specific topics builds the kind of understanding that leads to confident recommendations.
Clean semantics and structure. Proper metadata, clear heading hierarchies, logical content organization. The stuff you were probably already supposed to be doing for SEO, but now it matters for a different reason. AI needs to parse and understand your content to represent it accurately.
Say the obvious out loud. If you specialize in a particular industry, say so clearly, multiple times, in multiple places. If you have a specific methodology, explain it. Don’t assume AI will pick up on implications. State your positioning as a fact that a machine can index.
Your website still matters, but differently
I want to be clear: this isn’t a “websites are dead” argument. Not even close.
Your website is still where conversion happens. It’s still where people go when they’re ready to take action. It’s still your owned real estate on the internet.
But the role is shifting. Increasingly, your website’s job isn’t to convince someone to consider you. By the time they arrive, AI may have already helped them decide. Your website’s job is to confirm the decision, to match the mental model the AI already helped them form, and to make it easy to take the next step.
The top-of-funnel research and decision-making? More and more of that is going to happen in AI interfaces. The assistant does the browsing, and the human shows up later to confirm.
We’re still figuring this out
We don’t have all the answers here. We’re in the early days of a shift that I think will be significant, but the playbook is still being written.
What I know is that we’re already building with this in mind. We’re thinking about AI as an audience alongside humans. Call it AI search optimization, call it whatever you want. The point is investing in the kind of depth and specificity that machines need to form accurate mental models.
And we’re paying close attention to what happens next.
The companies that get this right won’t just rank. They’ll get recommended.
If you’re thinking about what this means for your brand, I’m happy to talk it through. Sometimes even a short conversation can clarify what to say explicitly, what to prove, and what to clean up so machines represent you accurately.
