AI for CRO
Will websites, pages and Landing Pages become irrelevant?
Last week’s Google I/O keynote reinforced a thought I’ve been having often: websites as we know them today are going to lose a lot of relevance.
The fine-grained control brands have over users’ experiences on their sites (what they see, how they see it, when they see it, how they interact, etc.) will gradually be lost to innovations using generative AI.
IN USER ACQUISITION
The game is no longer “just” ranking pages ahead of competitors on Google.
Increasingly sophisticated AIs will need to be convinced that your product is relevant to the SPECIFIC need of a user they know MUCH more about than Google Search does today.
Silly hacks on pages still increase exposure in AI responses. But soon they’ll be useless, and optimizing visibility will become much more complex.
It will be less about pages “optimized for SEO” and more about having a real solution to the user’s problem. And for that, you probably won’t even need a website.
The SERP is being crushed by AI, and Google Search will look more and more like Gemini.
It’s only a matter of time before we talk nostalgically about the days when Google returned a list of pages for our searches.
IN ACTIVATION AND CONVERSION
Say Google/Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude mentions your brand in a response. Today, the expected next step is for the user to go to your site.
Soon, it won’t be.
Users will trust AIs’ increasingly better answers more. And even if they decide to buy, they won’t need to leave the AI. They’ll probably prefer to do everything inside it.
This isn’t even an exercise in futurology. In January, Google announced the “Universal Commerce Protocol.” An open standard for the entire purchase process (discovery, payment, after-sales) to happen through AI agents.
Yes, the entire process. Without the user having to visit your site.
And in that process, you no longer control how your brand is presented, which alternatives are suggested, or how you’re compared with them.
If you’re lucky, the most control you’ll have is the AI opening your “app” inside its interface, as ChatGPT already does with Zillow and Canva.
This scenario will hit transactional B2C hardest first. B2B with long sales cycles, premium brands, and high-trust niches will have a longer curve. It’s worth separating these cases before generalizing.
But notice that in these scenarios, the entire purchase journey happens without any need for a website. That goes for e-commerce, SaaS, lead generation...
And that raises several questions:
What happens to those funnels when the website is no longer the main destination?
What happens to the SEO team?
And to CRO/Experimentation work?
Do those teams disappear? Do they start optimizing agents’ “experience” instead of people’s?
And measurement/attribution? Who controls the data?
Curious to see what comes next in Marketing.