The internet is undergoing a major shift, with publishers, ecommerce platforms and everyone in between struggling to grow visibility and remain relevant in an AI-dominated era.
Today, AI overviews and summaries dominate traditional search, while agentic assistants autonomously browse the web for consumers who have already shifted their browsing habits to their favorite chatbot.
But for decades, the web has been designed for human visitors, with search engines acting as intermediaries that help direct human traffic toward specific web pages. With more and more online content now being consumed by machines and AI taking over the decision of which information and products reach consumers first, traditional SEO alone is over.
GEO, or generative engine optimization, is already a term that publishers are throwing around, but few are certain of what it means and how they should balance it with their SEO strategies.
Publishers need to target two audiences… but humans are no less valuable
According to new data from WordPress VIP, nearly three in four enterprise decision-makers now consider AI discoverability and attribution a significant priority, with three in five seeing increased traffic from AI search engines and third parties – so the shift is well underway, and companies are already starting, or trying, to adapt.
Per the report, nearly twice as many enterprise decision-makers now plan to prioritize investments across social platforms (32%) and AI engines (30%) compared with conventional owned websites (17%).
But amid this machine revolution, consumers are still pressing for human connections, with nearly half (42%) saying they trust unattributed AI-generated answers less than the likes of confusing privacy policies.
Today, publishers face a battle between AI optimization and visibility, and personalization and human-ness.
But WordPress VIP isn’t too concerned about the challenges, seeing them as temporary and familiar. CTO Brian Alvey even believes they mirror previous shifts brought on by social media.
So to understand what this AI revolution means for publishers, brands and the future of the web in general, I sought advice directly from Alvey.
- Brian, the report you published mentioned that online properties like TechRadar need to serve two masters: AI scrapers and human audience. How is that being done in real life by brands that are looking to juggle both?
For decades, we’ve all built websites for Google. Sure we write for other people, but we format content for search engines and social networks. But Google and social were just top of funnel sources for getting visitors to your site. But now there’s an actual second audience.
Our more innovative customers are already building sites for both humans and agents. And they’re doing it in the block editor. The same way you can tell a three-column block to reformat and stack the content for display on mobile, these customers are making content blocks that reformat as markdown for agents. Now all of their data-filled interactive charts are no longer just for a human audience. Their content is agent-native. And the wild thing that’s happening as they make their content easier for AI agents to understand is that they’re seeing a lift in SEO.
And this totally new version of their website isn’t doubling their work. It’s just built into their workflows.
The website is no longer just a destination for people. It has already become a source of information for machines acting on behalf of people. And the sites that aren’t simple for agents to consume will effectively be invisible to this new half of the internet. Companies that can serve both human and agent audiences will be the ones that survive.
- One fact that caught my eye was that the majority of consumers trust unattributed AI answers with a huge portion (86%) bothered by searching for the original source after scanning an AI summary. What do you make out of it? How does the future look through that lens?
This might sound crazy with all the fear and hate AI is getting these days, but AI might actually be the best thing that ever happened to trusted brands. When an answer engine chooses you as a source, that’s a powerful endorsement. Sure, the clicks might not be there right now, but the credibility boost sure is. We’ve been worrying that AI would cut brands out of the conversation. What our data shows is that the brands people already trust are the ones AI keeps going back to.
Your goal has never changed: be the most trusted business in your space. In an AI world, that trust will get you cited. And the brands that get cited will be the only ones that still exist for customers when the AI answer engines fully take over the internet.
- Another finding from your report that shocked me was that only 17% of enterprises in the report will prioritize investments in their own websites in 2027. It’s shocking as it means that instead, they will rely on social media and search engines to bring in audience. What are your thoughts about this?
That 17% number shocked me too. Did all these companies learn nothing from search and social? It’s not surprising that marketing teams are chasing where the audiences are going. But that means they’re giving up on having strong direct relationships with their customers. Being satisfied with getting roughly 60% of your audience reach from third-party platforms isn’t healthy. That’s a lot of dependency on platforms you don’t control.
Even if you use email as your primary channel of communication, which is a fantastic direct connection to your audience and customers, you still can’t process a sale or sign up a new subscriber in an email message. Your website still matters. The companies that win will be the ones that treat AI, social and search as distribution channels while continuing to invest in customer experiences they own and can constantly improve.
- 35 years ago, the open web was merely a pipe dream. CompuServe, AOL and a bunch of other gated communities dominated the landscape. Fast forward to 2026 and it seems that we’re gradually slipping into an era where the open web – as we know it – is set to disappear. Tech giants are “encouraging” audiences to produce and consume content on their proprietary platforms. Is it too late to do anything?
No, I don’t think it’s too late. If you look at the history of the internet, we’ve gone through versions of this before. Thirty years ago you only had closed systems, which were a great first step for getting the world online. The web opened things up, but then search and social became the new gatekeepers. AI is creating another layer of gatekeepers but what’s different this time is that we’re ready.
The consumers we talked to crave attribution. They care strongly about open access to information. They need to know where the answers they’re getting come from. The web won’t disappear, but it does need to evolve. These are the conversations we have every day with the people who run the world’s biggest and most important websites. We all agree that the only thing that matters is whether publishers, creators, and brands can maintain a direct relationship with their audiences and customers as these new pathways emerge.
- The general consensus is that the web (and our email infrastructure) we know wasn’t built for AI. I remember the days of Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Are we already in the Web 4.0 era? How do you evolve this hybrid ecosystem bearing in mind what we discussed in Q1 and the previous one?
Because we’ve been through this before with the rise of search and the rise of social and the big “pivot to video,” we’ve never been more prepared to adapt. The difference this time is the speed and the scale. While search and social disrupted the top of the marketing and sales funnels, AI agents are disrupting nearly the entire funnel. And the disruption won’t be slow this time. Agents are crawling sites at rates that are orders of magnitude bigger than search and social combined. And agents are disrupting every facet of websites, from creation all the way through to consumption. It’s total disruption. The good news is that your business hasn’t changed. What you make and who you make it for hasn’t changed. But how you make it and how they buy it has changed for good. If AI is 80% threat and 20% opportunity, then your job is to dive into that 20% and make AI work for you.
- Your study indicates that the average internet user hits “bot fatigue” in just 40 minutes, and almost three-quarters of the respondents say the internet is significantly less human than it was a decade ago. Can anything be done to change that course or it is just too late, meaning we have to just go with the flow.
In some ways, we’re never going back. AI is already part of every product and every workflow. The good news is that the fatigue you mentioned and all this distrust are reversible, but only for the brands willing to actually be human about it.
A certain volume of AI content is expected now. There is no excuse to publish slowly anymore. But what’s missing from that AI-boosted content production? Specificity is what’s missing. A real take, a weird opinion, someone who you can tell actually knows what they’re talking about. The brands cutting through the fatigue are the ones with actual voices, not mindless content machines. I’d rather read one paragraph from someone who’s lived it than ten paragraphs of well-organized AI vanilla bullet points. That’s what people are hungry for. The antidote to bot fatigue is just humans being human.
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desire.athow@futurenet.com (Desire Athow)
