by: Ryan Sargent

I’m hearing a lot these days about how websites are relics of the past. 

AI bros crow about how everything happens in an LLM and agents are just seconds away from flying us to Mars. Brand marketers keep showing us carousels where 10 B2B brands use the same verbiage to describe something that doesn’t really matter. We should be building Zero-Click Content because distribution channels don’t ever want folks to visit our site.

I agree that we’re drowning in a sea of sameness and AI is not helping, but I come away from these discussions feeling that websites are more important than ever.

Your website is still a practical, powerful tool for talking to your entire audience – both the humans and the robots.

Your website still matters, and I can prove it to you

1. LLMs depend on your website

AI will either learn about your brand or it won’t. If it doesn’t, you’re missing out. If it does, it will learn from your website or from somewhere else’s.

If LLMs don’t learn about you from your own website, you’re missing out on an opportunity to control the narrative.

2. No one converts from an LLM

Yes, everything AI-related is growing. Ads. Monthly users. Personalization. But LI warriors somehow jump to the conclusion that, because of AI’s influence, brands have lost agency over their own customers’ buying journeys.

I still don’t know anyone who was persuaded to buy something (especially something important/expensive) entirely on the recommendation of AI. We use AI to start fact-finding, as an idea machine, to set us on a path. Even when we use LLMs as a sort of review-site amalgamation by typing in a 50-word prompt in an effort to personalize our answer, we’re still evaluating the outputs.¹

That means marketers still have influence between Moesta’s “Struggling Moment” and an eventual purchase decision. In 2026, many of those moments happen on your website (even as we live through The Great Clickpocalypse). 

For B2B brands, this is even more pronounced. Any serious B2B purchase has stakeholders – plural.

Beating good defense requires precise offense

When website visits come at a premium, you have to make the most of each visitor. I’ve always been fascinated by how many levers, knobs, and dials marketers have at our disposal. We can get more purchases by increasing the total number of visitors, or increasing the conversion rate of our existing traffic.

Fewer website visitors means we have to work even harder to support, persuade, and delight the folks who do show up.

LLMs don’t offer future buyers much value

A duality I’ve struggled with recently: most of the traffic being slurped up by AIOs and LLMs wasn’t all that valuable (it was folks skimming a longwinded skyscraper of informational content and bouncing) but we still need to Leverage Brand Marketing to Influence Future Demand™️ (i.e. build stuff for people who aren’t ready to buy yet). For more than 10 years, that ToFu tower was our vehicle for brand recognition.

The way out is to reject the premise that the traffic from old SEO articles was somehow creating brand value. Brand recognition from sheer volume isn’t “value” – after watching the Olympics and seeing that hideous Svedka robot commercial 2,543 times in the past 10 days, I can promise you I have no desire to drink Svedka.

Brand recognition from sheer volume isn’t “value.”

LLMs seek to answer your question as quickly as possible using their bag of words and a search API. That’s only as valuable as skimming the ToFu article was before, and as marketers, we can find more fruitful opportunities to support our audience. The lesson plans I wrote for teachers when I was an edtech marketer in 2017 offered way more value than a “what is [keyword]” post.

What I’m trying

Here’s what I’m doing these days to try and make websites as relevant as possible.

VX

When a human actually shows up on your site, do they have a Valuable Experience?  

You want them to stay! You want this real human to tell their real human friends about how great your website is! 

Ideas you can get approved²:

• Improve your blog’s search function.
• Actually put your pricing on the pricing page.
• Make it easy for your current customers to answer their product-related questions (or submit a ticket to CS).
• Get job applicants to a specific part of your site so you can filter their visits out of your reporting.
• Internal links that help answer the next question a visitor might have.

Niche down

Fewer people are visiting, so make sure they see themselves in what you produce. That doesn’t mean one-size-fits-all; it means having every size in stock.

Ideas you can get approved:

• More case studies. A lot more case studies. Make them hyper-specific.
• Set up a “choose your own adventure” approach so that you can be very specific about your value prop(s).
• Make your middle of funnel content (templates, not just listicles) work for hyper-specific product use cases.

Throw the robots a bone

I’m not suggesting you go chunk yourself here, but keeping your technical house in order helps with SEO and AEO and gives you a shot at controlling the narrative in LLMs, not just making your website work for people who actually end up visiting.

It’s easy to get caught up in website redesigns and the idea that algorithms are all that matter. But your website is more valuable than ever. ■

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1.  It’s very possible that in the future the AI will literally make the decision for us like some kind of optimized autopilot. I’m not looking forward to that and will certainly set guardrails for myself if we get there.
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2.  No promises. ↩︎

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Ryan Sargent is VP of Product at Ten Speed, an organic marketing agency, where he designs, builds, and leads content marketing services of all shapes and sizes. He made the leap from music to marketing more than ten years ago, but still plays trombone all over Colorado when he isn’t leading content teams or puzzling on jobs-to-be-done.