He may not represent your ideal customer profile (ICP), but Kyle Rose can help you understand one of the biggest challenges enterprise marketers face.
Kyle is a systems engineer working in the public service, and last October, he published a post on his personal blog lamenting how online browsing has evolved.
“The internet used to feel like a place; it was messy, diverse, and human. Now it is a product. It’s optimized, sanitized, and owned,” he wrote, harking back to the days of GeoCities pages and early message boards. “Back then, the internet was the wild west: no rules, no SEO hacks, just people building pages about what they loved.”
Kyle’s sentiments reflect a key finding in the latest research from WordPress VIP. According to the Future of the Web report, 74% of consumers say the internet already feels less human than it did 10 years ago. Design your website to revive that feeling of personal connection.
AI now lets anyone get fast answers to almost any question, but people want to know what those answers are based upon.
Whether they’re reading one of Google’s AI overviews or a summary from ChatGPT or Perplexity, 33% of consumers say being able to see and click a source is their single biggest trust signal online. Another 42% say unattributed AI answers are their No. 1 frustration online, even above privacy concerns.
For most of web history, the website was a starting point: someone searched, found you, arrived cold, and the site’s job was to earn trust from zero.
That’s not how high-intent traffic arrives anymore. AI is making warm introductions to prospective customers, who are arriving on your site to confirm what they’ve been told and to learn more. 86% of consumers always or sometimes click through to the original source after an AI summary.
Once they’ve landed on your site, visitors are looking for more trust signals. That includes:
AI search shapes expectations before visitors arrive. Enterprises that neglect it risk losing people who might convert into long-term customers.
People need to feel confident about a brand before they convert into paying customers: 33% say the click-through moment is their top trust signal. Yet the Future of the Web report found just 17% of enterprises said their owned website is a top priority for the coming year.
Meanwhile, enterprise teams spend an average of 16.6 hours a week on AI visibility, where content is optimized to be scraped by LLMs and cited in search.
This is a misallocation that’s hiding in plain sight: digital investments shouldn’t be stacked entirely on the discovery side of the funnel. If your website doesn’t live up to the credibility the AI implied when it cited you, you’ve failed at the most important moment in the funnel, which is when the consumer was already halfway convinced.
The scale of that imbalance just got starker. According to Cloudflare Radar, bot and agentic traffic has now officially surpassed human traffic for the first time in internet history, arriving years ahead of Cloudflare’s own 2027 projection. Human visits aren’t declining in absolute terms, but as a share of total web traffic, they’re a shrinking minority. Every human visit is now higher-stakes than ever — and a website that fails them is a costly mistake.
When a consumer clicks through from an AI summary to your website, they’re checking whether your brand is real — whether the voice and specificity match what the AI cited. Thoughtful content in a consistent brand tone does that.
Websites have always existed to serve two audiences: people and search engines like Google.
Brands start off creating content that will help their target audiences, but SEO techniques were born out of a recognition that search engine algorithms will determine what URLs show up when people look for information online. AI answer engines represent how that search experience is changing, how brands need to adjust their websites in response.
Many business leaders are already seeing the signs:
While AI agents reward structured, open, machine-readable information, converting a prospective customer depends on how credible they feel about what they see on your site. The rise of social media, AI providers, and other internet shifts is making them more skeptical by nature:
You can only address those concerns by presenting them with a website that fulfills their expectations when the click lands.
The experience should never feel generic, outdated, or inconsistent with the credibility the AI’s citation implied. Otherwise you might as well not have been cited within AI search at all.
Pew Research Center is a clear example of what this looks like in practice: open and structured enough for AI to parse, fresh enough to stay surfaced, and human enough to convert when someone arrives.
Like many enterprises, Pew needed to make sure its research was accessible to LLMs and structured clearly enough to preserve accuracy. By working directly with a WordPress VIP Frontend Deployed Engineer, Pew improved LLM crawler handling and visibility, as well as content representation for factual accuracy.
This means Pew’s research will be properly attributed with the right number when it gets summarized in AI search. Once people click through, Pew earns trust by presenting a variety of tools to search through and explore its authoritative data, along with connections to real-world experts and quizzes that personalize its research.
Brands like Pew know that developing these experiences doesn’t happen through AI bolt-ons. It requires a content infrastructure designed, from the ground up, to serve both audiences without compromise.
Brands that build this infrastructure now compound their advantage over time. Best of all, your website will look and feel as human as the people behind it, which is the best way to attract the people who will support your business.
This speaks to the critical role websites continue to play in B2B discovery and research. For most of web history, the website was a starting point: someone searched, found you, arrived cold, and the site’s job was to earn trust from zero.
That’s not how high-intent traffic arrives anymore. At its best, AI is making warm introductions to prospective customers, who are arriving on your site to confirm what they’ve been told and to learn more. This explains why 86% of consumers say they always or sometimes click through to the original source after an AI summary.
Once they’ve landed on your site, visitors are looking for more trust signals. This could include human elements like:
AI search is like a new front door. Your website represents what people will experience when they pass through it. Enterprises that neglect it risk losing people who might convert into long-term customers.
People need to feel confident about a brand before they convert into paying customers: 33% say the click-through moment is their top trust signal. Yet the Future of the Web report found just 17% of enterprises said their owned website is a top priority for the coming year.
This compares with enterprise teams who said they are spending an average of 16.6 hours per week on AI visibility, where content is optimized to be scraped by LLMs and cited in search.
This is a misallocation that’s hiding in plain sight: digital investments shouldn’t be stacked entirely on the discovery side of the funnel. If your website doesn’t live up to the credibility the AI implied when it cited you, you’ve failed at the most important moment in the funnel, which is when the consumer was already halfway convinced.
When a consumer clicks through from an AI summary to your website, they are, consciously or not, checking whether your brand is real. Whether it has a point of view. Whether it feels like a company staffed by people who know what they’re talking about. You don’t demonstrate that through structured content but by thoughtful content presented in a consistent brand tone.
Websites have always existed to serve two audiences: people and search engines like Google.
Brands start off creating content that will help their target audiences, but SEO techniques were born out a recognition that search engine algorithms will determine what URLs show up when people look for information online. AI answer engines represent how that search experience is changing, how brands need to adjust their websites in response.
Many business leaders are already seeing the signs:
While AI agents reward structured, open, machine-readable information, closing the deal with a prospective customer depends on how credible they feel about what they see on your site. The rise of social media, AI providers, and other internet shifts is making them more skeptical by nature:
You can only overcome those concerns by presenting them with a website that fulfills their expectations when the click lands.
The experience should never feel generic, outdated, or inconsistent with the credibility the AI’s citation implied. Otherwise you might as well not have been cited within AI search at all.
Pew Research Center shows how the smartest organizations aren’t treating people and AI as separate workstreams but are building content architecture that handles both jobs natively: open and structured enough for AI to parse, fresh enough to stay surfaced, and human enough to convert when someone arrives.
Like many enterprises, Pew needed to make sure its research was accessible to LLMs and structured clearly enough to preserve accuracy. By working directly with a WordPress VIP Frontend Deployed Engineer, Pew improved LLM crawler handling and visibility, as well as content representation for factual accuracy.
This means Pew’s research will be properly attributed with the right number when it gets summarized in AI search. Once people click through, Pew earns trust by presenting a variety of tools to search through and explore its rock-solid data, along with connections to real-world experts and quizzes that personalize its research.
Brands like Pew know that developing these experiences doesn’t happen through AI bolt-ons. It requires a content infrastructure designed, from the ground up, to serve both audiences without compromise.
Building this approach to content operations now will have a structural advantage that compounds over time, making it easier to maintain trust and the kind of customer loyalty that fuels long-term growth. Best of all, your website will look and feel as human as the people behind it, which is the best way to attract the people who will support your business.
Future of the Web 2026 Report
Author
Shane Schick
Founder, 360 Magazine
Shane Schick is a longtime technology journalist serving business leaders ranging from CIOs and CMOs to CEOs. His work has appeared in Yahoo Finance, the Globe & Mail and many other publications. Shane is currently the founder of a customer experience design publication called 360 Magazine. He lives in Toronto.
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