AI has changed websites forever, but not in the way you think

So AI has changed websites, but probably not in the way that you think it has. And if you're about to design and build your own website, or if you're about to hire an agency to do it for you, you need to watch this video and learn exactly what I have to say about how AI has changed websites and what comes next. Because in this video today, I am going to say exactly the three things that I think AI has had the biggest impact on when it comes to designing and building websites. Hold on. I need to open this door.

I'm going to talk about what comes next. Now, AI has pretty much dictated that we design and build websites with it. And yes, that does mean that we're going to get less traffic to our websites. And I'm also going to talk about, well, does it even matter now? Do you even need a website anymore because of all this stuff?

And once we've gone through that, I'm actually going to say how you can take advantage of this right now and what you can do to change your website today after watching this video to make sure you stay relevant. But first of all, I should probably give you some proof that I know what I'm talking about. So, I've designed and built websites for over 25 years now, and I've run a website agency for 16 years. At this point, I've probably designed and built hundreds of websites, if not thousands of websites. And I've been in the industry since we were designing and building websites with bloody tables.

So, let's start with the simple stuff, then. how AI has changed the entire website world and how AI has such an impact now on your website. I think the first thing to say here is what AI has done whether you're designing and building with Claude or whether you're designing and building with Codex or whether you're kind of using a mix of all of the above. AI has made all websites look good. It's pretty difficult now to make a looking website.

I think we can all agree. And even though Claude and Codex and all these other things have kind of very specific tells when it comes to designing websites, you can pretty much just sign up for a Claude subscription and you can guarantee that the website's going to look pretty good. The thing that AI has brought around to the website world is that you used to be able to tell a website from a good website because the good website looked good and the bad website looked But now the problem is is that every website looks good, at least on the surface. So, we need to do other things to be able to figure out what a good and a bad website is. The design of the website used to be the thing that dictated really the amount of money that you chosen to spend on a website.

If you'd gone to an agency, it was usually pretty obvious that you'd gone to an agency, at least if it was a good one, because they designed you a good website. Now though, it's not as immediately obvious. So, if all the websites look good, then what does that mean that the differentiator is? Well, the biggest differentiator I'm seeing is the information that's on it. If you can just out a good-looking website in Claude in 10 minutes, let's say, but the information on it wrong, that's the big issue.

Because the big change with AI now is that everybody's using AI to find out information, too. What time does my local restaurant open? You might say to ChatGpt. How much does it cost to go visit my local restaurant? You'll probably say to ChatGPT.

And what ChatGPT does is go over to those websites to find out that information. And if that information on those websites is out of date, then there's a big chance that ChatGPT is also going to be incorrect when you go over to those websites. So, not only has AI meant that all design of websites look the same or at least pretty good, it also means that now there's a standard for the level of information that you need to put on your websites. And to be honest, a lot of businesses are not meeting that standard. With all the websites that I look after, we look after about 80 to 100 websites every month.

A lot of those websites don't do a very good job of keeping that information up to date. And between AI overviews, Google's AI overviews and ChatGPT and even using Claude or Perplexity or many other AI services, the information on your website absolutely has to be up to date. We're going to come back to that a bit later on though. So, if all the websites are looking the same now and information is an issue, what other way is AI affecting websites? The big thing I'm seeing that's being caused by AI generating the same slop websites over and over, but to be honest, they look okay, is that we now need to figure out a way to make our websites look unique or be unique in some different way.

For example, with our website that we've got online now, if you go over to geniusdivision.com, you'll see a website that looks absolutely batshit crazy, but that's for a reason. I get so many comments on Instagram about our website, how our website looks, uh how it works, it's too noisy, it's too bright, it it just it's it's a mess. That's what a lot of people say. But the weird thing about our website is I always get lots of positive comments as well. And I actually get people using the website.

I get people using the roast tool and it's actually generating a hell of a lot of leads for me. And the reason I think it does is because the website is different. It doesn't look the same as every ChatGPT or every Claude-generated website out there. So one thing we have to do more than ever now because of the AI's influence over websites is to make our websites unique in some way. That might be through the words that we choose to use on our website.

That might be through unique features. I mean on our website we have an audio guide on a museum page which is me talking about the history of Genius Division and I recorded those audio files and put them on the website. It was a human touch on a website to try and make sure everybody doesn't realize that everything's just AI generated now. So between words or images or whatever we choose to do because AI has such an impact on websites. We have to figure out a way to make our website unique and to add a personal touch with it.

I don't think there's any problem designing or building your website with AI, but you still have to have a human touch. You have to figure that out. The easy way to do that is to write all the words yourself, take the photos yourself, or have videos of you on there that are yourself. Again, I'm saying yourself too many times, but you need to figure out a human touch, especially when you're using AI. And in amongst all that, obviously, we have to work out what comes next.

I think the biggest influence right now that AI is having on websites is that we're getting less human traffic to websites. What that means is people are visiting websites less and less and less. And I am seeing this in analytics on a lot of our websites. The traffic is dropping on the websites. Humans are not visiting the websites anymore because they're doing the thing I said earlier.

To get opening times, they just go to ChatGPT. To get a lot of the information, they just use AI overviews on Google. People are not visiting websites for basic information anymore because well they don't need to. It's quicker to just use AI overview or ChatGPT. And because of that very reason, it's leading I think and what this is what's going to come next to way more AI crawlers than we've ever had in the history of the internet.

I was looking at the server logs on it last month and the server logs on the website said ByteDance, so TikTok's AI scraper tools had visited the website 250,000 times in about 10 days. So, one thing that we're going to see more and more and more over the next coming months and probably the next couple of years is AI crawlers visiting your website to a multitude of millions of times more than the humans are visiting that. But I don't think that's a problem and we're going to talk about that in a little while. But because AI crawlers are visiting the websites more and more and more and more, that's going to mean that your website, the design of it, the words, the videos, the images, everything on it is going to get copied more and more and more and more. There's not really much we can do about this.

The only thing we can do is just stay relevant, keep making new content, keep our websites updated, keep changing things, and stay ahead of the copying. If we're in a world now where you can put a nice new designs website online and then within a couple of days if someone likes it, they can just say to ChatGPT, go copy the design or the flavor of this website because I like the look of it and do it on my website. It's going to lead to more copying of pretty much everything. I don't really have a solution for this right now. I'm only saying what's coming next.

But trust me, this is coming next and this is already happening now. And because of all this stuff that I was talking about, the common denominator of this video is AI. We're going to have more AI crawlers interacting with our websites. We're going to have more AI people copying our websites in different ways. That's going to mean that we're going to have more people interacting with our websites with AI more than ever, too.

Which leads me to the next question that I want to address. If AI is pretty much the only thing that's visiting our websites now, does our website even matter anymore? I mean the short answer is yes, but here is the slightly longer answer. A lot of people are saying, well, if AI is crawling our website and it's only AI that's coming our to our website, what's even the point in us bothering to spend money on a new website? What's even the point in having a website at all?

Now, the first and most important thing to understand here is how AI crawls your website. It to be honest works a little bit like a search engine as in it comes to your website in a certain period of regularity um it finds the information on your website and crawls it and saves it to its database exactly the way that Google works. Sometimes when some people perform specific searches so for example if someone searches for your opening times the AI crawler comes to your website in that instance and wants to find out the most updated information right at that moment. Now the key word there is coming to your website. And if we consider that there's a world where we wouldn't have a website any longer.

There wouldn't be a website for AI to come to and that would mean that AI wouldn't be able to find out the most accurate information. And that would mean it would be a little bit and your business might go under. You'd go bankrupt and then there'd be nothing left. Something to that extent. If I was to talk less dramatically about that situation, what I might say is that you need your website more than ever.

I'm trying to do that on our website right now with certain things like how much does a website cost in the UK and I'm already seeing it working. If you go into Google Search Console, you can see our website is now appearing in AI search for terms exactly like that and the impressions are at thousands a month. So when we talk about is our website relevant, I actually think having a good website right now is the most relevant thing that you can do. Number one is putting more information on your website. I think it's more important than ever that your website is packed full of information.

Weirdly enough, blogs are more important than ever now, right? Because blogs and your industry opinions and all that other good stuff is the exact kind of information that AI search is gobbling up right now. Think of your website now as more of a PR tool rather than just a a search ranking tool. We're trying to influence the opinions of people who are using ChatGPT to find out certain things. So, in my instance, I want to influence people's opinions on how much a website should cost in the UK or even globally.

And that's why I write about it a lot on our website. And it's why I talk about it a lot on social media and YouTube. Because if I get my opinion out there, it will trickle down to AI search. And then when somebody's searching for that kind of message, how much does a website cost, my opinion will appear amongst other opinions inside ChatGPT. That's why I said it's a PR game.

We're changing the opinions of people. Not just appearing for a certain word and then hoping somebody clicks. We're actually changing people's opinions and then becoming cited resources in these things. Number two is the other thing I mentioned. If every website looks the same and acts the same now, it's more important than ever that we don't look the same.

Oh, this chair turns around. We have to really try hard to not be the same as everybody else. And that can be done as simply as possible, right? It can be done by writing unique words. It can be done by creating unique images.

It can be done by creating unique video or creating a unique design or a combination all of the above. But we need more than ever to keep our websites updated and as free from AI as possible. I know that sounds strange when I've spent the entire video talking about the power of AI. I think a lot of us can tell AI written content and a lot of us can tell AI generated images and by the way don't use AI generated images and I think a lot of us are starting to pick up the patterns that AI design produces too. So it's our job with our websites if we want to stand out from the AI generated slop that's out there that to be honest actually looks pretty good.

We need to make our website different from everybody else's. And to do that well you need to just use less AI. Yeah. So, on a video that I've just spent 15 minutes talking about AI, I'm just going to tell you to use less AI. Yes, I am.

Use less AI. And if you found this video useful talking about AI, I think you should go watch this one next where I talk about how I built my new website with AI, about 95% of it. And does that make my website mine and what was the results of that experiment? Go watch that. It's up there now.

Go on.