By Kimber Spradlin, CMO at Graylog
The digital landscape is going through a monumental change that is keeping businesses and marketers alike on their toes. With the rise of digital engagement channels, and AI-driven search, the website – once one of the pinnacle assets of digital marketing strategies and touchpoints – is becoming arguably obsolete.
While a website still forms the digital presence for a brand, it is increasingly becoming a component that will power the back-end information that fuels AI-driven tools and interactions, rather than a regular touchpoint with visitors navigating their way through menus.
Beyond just a technological evolution, this is part of a complete reimagining of how businesses connect with their audiences in an AI-first world.
Death of the destination website
For over two decades, one of the main goals for marketers has been quite straightforward – drive traffic to your website, keep visitors engaged with an immersive experience, a clear user journey – and convert them into customers.
Businesses invested heavily (and continue to do so) in improving the website customer experience, SEO (search engine optimisation), and conversion rate optimisation. It also provided a critical link between different marketing channels, such as social media, to drive traffic to the website to browse and buy.
However, AI has changed the game entirely. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Google’s AI overview about a product, service, or piece of information, they’re not clicking through to multiple websites to compare options. They’re getting answers from a variety of different sources, often without the user knowing which websites have provided the information.
A company’s website is still being visited – but not just by humans. AI tools are now also on the scene – crawling, indexing, and evaluating the site’s content to determine whether it is reliable, accurate, and relevant. It’s not about whether people can navigate a website easily anymore – it’s all about whether AI can understand, trust, and cite your information.
The impact on the marketing function
This change has placed a new and unexpected responsibility on marketers themselves. While developers focus on implementation and execs debate strategy, marketers find themselves in the trenches of content creation, data analysis, and AI optimisation.
This means that the marketing role itself is evolving beyond recognition as a result. Traditional responsibilities associated with the role, like campaign management and lead generation, are now expanding to include data architecture strategy – how content is structured so that AI can easily scan, understand, and verify it.
It also goes beyond optimising information for Google’s algorithm to encompass AI relationship management, with the growing need for marketers to understand how different AI models read and evaluate information
Ambitious marketers who look at expanding their skillsets and embracing these new responsibilities early will become invaluable strategic assets, bridging the gap between traditional business operations and the new world of AI-based processes.
Defining a new competitive edge
The key to making AI tools work effectively for your business is having a trusted source of data for actionable insights. As the lay of the land has shifted from search engine results pages to AI training datasets and instant queries, this is the direction marketers will need to go in.
However, there is one key aspect that businesses will need to address in order to get the most out of these tools. There is a tension between what a visitor/potential customer wants from a visit to a B2B vendor website (information, answers) and what a vendor wants to deliver to them (messaging, conversion).
The visitor is there to get their questions answered about what exactly the vendor does such as: Is this the right product/service for what they need? What is the product’s functionality? What does the product/service cost? They aren’t really there to navigate a website menu, click on cross-links, or respond to CTAs – they just use those to get what they really want.
To be successful, marketers will need to ensure the AI interfaces answer the visitors’ questions successfully and succinctly so that their queries are addressed.
The ease and convenience of this will mean strong customer experience is delivered and can likely lead to an uptick in conversions.
