Threat Level Red

All websites will lose half of their traffic in the next five years.

That’s the blunt reality I presented during a consulting engagement recently. In the very near future, users will not use a keyboard or mouse to interact with the web, they will speak to an LLM that will use the data and functionality of the web on the user’s behalf. Tools such as agent.exe, Operator, and others are already the avant-garde scoping out the landscape before the general public floods in.

The future of success on the web lies in LLMO not SEO ¹. Data wants to be free but LLMs will prioritize the free-est data. Put yourself in the shoes of an LLM trying to get a recipe for smash burgers as I did last evening (yes I know, I’m kinda dumb). As an LLM you can do one of two things, you can either ping a well-documented API for the recipe, receive a predictably formatted response, then parse through that response to return a well-formatted recipe, or, you can do the following:

1. Go to google.com
2. Search for smash burger recipe
3. Click the first link that looks good, for my search that’s this link: https://www.onceuponachef.com/recipes/smash-burgers.html
4. Page loads, holy shit there’s popups everywhere, where is the fucking burger recipe.
5. Close the mailing list modal, close the small Firestone tire video at bottom right, close the bottom banner for Canva.
6. Let’s look for that recipe, I see a div class called content let’s grab the text content.
7. This is a short story about the author’s son moving to college. angrypepewithgun.jpg
8. Surgically extract the recipe, it’s quite well marbled with shit that my user doesn’t care about.
9. Format and return to user, “here ya go m’lord”

Sorry to call out onceuponachef.com but seriously fuck you if you have that many popup ads. I’m guessing you’ve had the same experience but haven’t had a ton of good alternatives. An LLM does though, and those alternatives are things that speak the machine languages, RSS feeds, APIs and the like².

Example

If you’re interviewing someone for a role and you’d like to brush up on their LinkedIn details before their interview, these details will be automatically surfaced to you via audio chat or on screen, likely some kind of simple headworn AR display, at the proper time before the meeting. You will never visit LinkedIn via the web UI again.

Takeaway

If you are still fiddling with your site’s color palette instead of exposing your data directly you’re already behind the curve. There are only a few exceptions to this rule, the biggest being large legacy industries. There are sufficient enough network effects and legal regulations in place to retain the hegemony of the UI in those few, very highly regulated industries. Healthcare, finance and defense are great examples, when things go wrong in defense people get hurt, when they go wrong in finance people go broke, when they go wrong in healthcare, either could happen. Some fields are simply too high risk to automate with LLMs at present-state, even a .01% error rate could have catastrophic affects in some fields. For your generic SaaS or e-comm operation though? The tradeoff of .01% risk to obtain 10x site visits is an obvious one to make!

Real-World Case Study: Exposing the Data

I recently consulted for a mid-sized e-commerce firm that saw a 40% drop in monthly visits over six months. We discovered that 65% of their potential customers were now relying on AI-driven product searches rather than browsing (data derived via user-agent strings).

The CEO insisted on doubling down on “better visuals” — precisely the misguided approach that sank them deeper³.

I reflected upon this for some time. I love user interfaces and product design more broadly to the extent that my three year old daughter grabs the Dieter Rams design book off of the shelf each evening and sits in my lap so we can look at hundreds of design iterations on radios, record players, and other consumer electronics. I know that I must resist solving everything with user interfaces in order to remain balanced.

The realization hit me in a moment of drifting. I was draped over my Eames chair trying to nap one afternoon as I often do when I decide a problem can’t be solved by thinking or effort. I was kind of dreaming and kind of awake when the phrase “don’t make me think” hit me. The book of the same name by Steve Krug sits on a bookshelf within my line of sight from my recliner so that’s probably how the phrase got there before I started to nod off but there are many books on the shelf and this was the one that caught in my mind on the way down while falling.

As I turned the concept over in my mind a bit I found clarity in two questions: who shouldn’t you make think and what is thinking? They’re such stupid questions I had overlooked them. In our site traffic crash it wasn’t a human that was thinking, it was an LLM, it wasn’t the way we think, it’s the way an LLM thinks. In order to properly serve the site’s users we needed to serve the proper users! The data needed to be exposed in a way that is easy for an LLM to access.

In 30 days, we launched a robust API & an RSS feed for top products. Within three months, traffic from AI-driven referrals jumped by 200%.

The Brutal Future: LLMO

LLM Optimization will unseat Search Engine Optimization as the chief concern of websites and webapps seeking users⁴⁵. LLMs prefer clean, structured data — think curated RSS, polished APIs, and well-labeled schemas.

75% of content queries will come from AI aggregators within the next two years (my projection based on market trends and plain common sense).

Action Items for You

• Implement a simple, well-documented API to serve your core data.
• Generate and maintain an RSS feed or JSON feed.
• Stop burying your content behind 15 layers of navigation. LLMs won’t jump through those hoops, and neither will your users⁶.
• Promote it. Make sure every major AI aggregator knows you exist. For now that’s existing indexers but stay nimble, this will change very soon.

The “Cincinnatus Moment” for Website Owners

In the same spirit that Cincinnatus dropped his plow and saved Rome, website owners must drop their obsession with shiny UI fluff and save their traffic. “Return to your farm,” so to speak, by stripping back to essentials: structured data, authenticity, and direct content access. Just like our heroic Roman farmer turned dictator, the best sites will flourish by focusing on what matters and discarding the nonsense.

Conclusion: Adapt or Perish

Webmasters who cling to fancy visuals will be overshadowed by those who feed the AI revolution.

It breaks my heart to write this but the age of web UI is ending, the long bloodred sunset. This is not a gentle evolution, like the setting sun it will start slowly then accelerate towards the horizon.

If these words sting, good. Pain is a motivator. Do something now, or watch your traffic dwindle and your business fade.

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Citations

Footnotes

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13101 ↩

2. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18339 ↩

3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277250302400032X ↩

4. https://searchengineland.com/generative-ai-impact-website-rankings-traffic-443624 ↩

5. https://ai.northwestern.edu/research-applications/study-impact-and-implications-of-ai/the-impact-of-ai-on-journalism-and-media-content-generation.html ↩

6. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X22000650 ↩