It’s time to go our separate ways
Dear traditional website
We have had some good years together. You helped brands explain who they were, show their products, guide customers, answer questions and create one digital home where everything could live. For a long time, you were the centre of the brand’s digital universe.
But something has changed. Actually, a lot has changed.
The first date is no longer happening on your homepage
People no longer discover, explore and evaluate brands the way they used to. The first part of the customer journey is rapidly moving away from the traditional website and into AI-driven interfaces. People ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for inspiration, recommendations and comparisons. They do not always want to visit ten websites to build an opinion. Increasingly, they expect an intelligent interface to do the first round of research for them.
The numbers already point in the same direction
According to Adobe Analytics data reported by Reuters, U.S. online spending reached $11.8 billion on Black Friday 2025, while AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites increased 805% compared with the year before. Google is also rebuilding search around more complex behaviour. With AI Mode, people can ask multi-part questions that previously required several searches, while Google breaks those questions into subtopics and searches across multiple sources at once.
So no, this is not just another digital trend. It changes the role of the website completely.
The relationship became too complicated
For years, we have tried to make one website serve everyone and everything. It had to inspire humans, satisfy search engines and support e-commerce. It had to be emotional and efficient, beautiful and measurable, brand-building and conversion-optimized. It had to do all of this inside the same structure, the same templates and the same increasingly narrow idea of what a “good website” should be.
The result is not necessarily bad. Many websites perform well. They are fast, functional and optimized through thousands of small improvements. A button has been moved. A headline has been tested. A checkout flow has been shortened.
But somewhere along the way, the fun disappeared.
Performance won. Personality lost.
Many brand websites have become highly efficient, but deeply uninteresting. They may convert, but they rarely create real preference. They may guide the user, but they do not feel like a place you want to return to. They may present the product clearly, but they no longer feel like a true reflection of how humans explore, desire and connect with brands.
We have become too settled. The modern e-commerce website is often the result of so many rational decisions that the emotional experience has been slowly optimized away. Everything is familiar. Everything is safe. Everything is expected. And when everything is expected, very little is remembered.
Humans need more than a product grid
We need attention, atmosphere and surprise. We need digital brand experiences that understand who we are, what we care about and why a product might matter in our lives. We need websites that feel alive again.
The human-facing part of a brand website should be allowed to break more rules. Not basic usability rules, but the boring template rules that have made so many digital experiences look and feel the same. It should be creative, adaptive and personal. It should recognize the returning visitor and build the experience around that person’s needs, interests and history.
In many ways, it should feel closer to the old promise of multimedia, where image, film and sound created a real sense of entering a world. Not because we need to return to slow, chaotic, overdesigned websites, but because we need to bring back experience.
Machines do not need atmosphere. They need structure.
At the same time, there is another side to this break-up. The machine layer has also been trapped inside the traditional website. It has been forced to interpret pages that were primarily designed for humans, shaped by brand guidelines, campaign logic and inconsistent product information.
But machines do not need atmosphere. They need complete product data, clear comparison logic and verified proof. They need to understand exactly what the brand offers, who it is for and when it should be recommended over a competitor.
The machine layer should not have to pretend to be a brand experience. It should be allowed to go all in on clarity, performance and precision. It should be factual, structured, constantly tested and updated at high speed. Nothing should be left to chance, because in the AI era, a brand will increasingly be judged by what machines are able to understand, retrieve, compare and recommend.
The website does not need to disappear. It needs to split.
That is why I think the traditional website needs to split. Not disappear. Split.
The future brand website should be built as two connected but very different layers: a human layer and an AI layer. The human layer exists to create desire, emotion and preference. The AI layer exists to create clarity, retrievability and machine recommendation.
The human layer should be expressive, sensory and personal. The AI layer should be structured, factual and brutally efficient. The human layer should make people feel something. The AI layer should make machines understand everything.
One brand. Two (inter)faces.
When we force those two needs into the same interface, both sides lose. Humans get a website that has been optimized into boredom. Machines get a website that is too messy, too inconsistent and too brand-polished to interpret with complete confidence. The brand ends up with a compromise that may perform in the short term, but does not build enough distinction for the future.
The better model is what I would call the split web.
One brand. Two interfaces. One for humans. One for machines.
The human layer earns attention
The human layer is where the brand earns attention. This is where the experience should become more alive, emotional and memorable. It should invite people into situations and personal journeys instead of pushing everyone through the same product grid. It should remember what people care about and give them a reason to come back.
The AI layer earns recommendation
The AI layer is where the brand earns recommendation. This is where every product, claim and proof point must be structured so clearly that AI systems can understand and use it without confusion. This layer should be updated frequently, tested constantly and optimized based on what machines actually retrieve, summarize and recommend.
This is not a redesign. It is a reset.
For humans, websites need to become more human again. Less template thinking. Less generic e-commerce logic. Less pretending that a product grid is enough to build brand preference.
For machines, websites need to become more machine-readable than ever before. Less ambiguity. Less scattered information. Less compromise.
The old website tried to make one experience do everything. The next generation of brand websites should stop trying to compromise and instead let each layer become the best version of itself.
Let the human layer create preference. Let the AI layer earn visibility.
Let the human layer be a place people want to return to. Let the AI layer be a source machines can trust.
Thank you for everything
Dear traditional website, thank you for everything. We had a good run. But we are growing apart, and it is happening faster than most brands want to admit.
It is time to go our separate ways… together.
Sources and links
The Black Friday 2025 numbers are based on Adobe Analytics data reported by Reuters. According to the article, U.S. online spending reached $11.8 billion on Black Friday 2025, while AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites increased 805% compared with the year before.
Reuters: AI helps drive record $11.8 billion in Black Friday online spending
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-consumers-spent-118-billion-black-friday-says-adobe-analytics-2025-11-29/
The point about AI changing search behaviour is based on Google’s own description of AI Mode. Google explains that AI Mode supports more complex, multi-part questions and uses query fan-out to break a question into subtopics and search across multiple sources.
Google: Expanding AI Overviews and introducing AI Mode
https://blog.google/products/search/ai-mode-search/
