Further on the theme of what jobs will AI displace or radically change, I have been thinking about Walmart’s recent announcement with OpenAI, to enable customers to buy products directly within ChatGPT. Seems far removed from any care-abouts in electronic design but bear with me. We’ve been hearing about sizeable layoffs at Amazon, Bosch, Dell and other tech companies. Little mention of what roles are being cut, though notably Walmart cuts included tech and e-commerce, perhaps an indicator for where others might be cutting.
We know in our neck of the woods we already have too few hardware and software engineers and are instead emphasizing productivity enhancement. (Programmers shouldn’t get too comfortable. They too may be replaced if they aren’t yet onboard when peers begin to show higher productivity using AI.) What other roles in tech are looking shaky? I argue that website development may be a leading candidate.
Websites already look like yesterday’s marketing tech
We have been trained to believe that our website is the primary customer/ investor/ analyst-facing view of our company. We agonize over how it should look and how it should be organized. We agonize over how we can populate the website with content: customer endorsements, blogs, thought-leader articles and much more. All understandable, but have the goal posts been moving while we have been agonizing?
I have two pet peeves important in the discovery phase of my web searches. I am guessing these are widely shared. The first is search itself. I have yet to find search capabilities in any website (outside native browser searches) which are anywhere close to what I can easily do in a browser, much less a chatbot. Even for the big social platforms, search is hardly worth using. My default now is to search in a browser, then drill down in whatever website in the most promising website recommended.
My second peeve is ease of use, and relevance. Every website owner wants to believe that their organization of information is carefully crafted for ease of use and user friendliness. But when I’m in discovery I want to retrieve information from multiple companies which might have a match to what I need. Each has their own view of ideal website organization and what kinds of exploration might be most friendly to my immediate needs (or their promotion objectives). All mutually incompatible. This approach to promotion is setup to fail for anyone in discovery.
There is still high value information contained on the website – the leaf-level content. Product images, specs, white papers, blogs, even prices if appropriate. It’s much of the superstructure that is becoming less useful, apart from storefront/persona promotion: big picture vision/mission, values, investor information, etc..
GenAI search and SEO versus content
SEO (search engine optimization) has dominated the world of website/content design for many years. The idea behind SEO is that you can “game” your content to have it appear at the top of the first page of a search or at least somewhere on the first page. You do this by carefully structuring all kinds of meta-data: SEO title, meta-description, and high-scoring keywords. A lot of work goes into getting this right and the field abounds with books and training courses. You can get the impression (unfortunately many do) that optimizing your SEO is much more important than optimizing your content.
I have views on this topic because for a few years I had to spend time adding and refining SEO information for my blogs. I hated it. It seemed like a superficial way to get high visibility in web searches, reinforced by the fact that much of what comes up in my searches is often not very useful to my needs. I have been happy to see suggestions and my own experience that I can now avoid much of this gaming, reinforced by my experience that clients no longer require me to add SEO dressing to my blogs.
Of course the SEO industry protests that they aren’t obsolete, only the nature of SEO has changed. Equally search giants don’t want to lose their advertising revenue so the SEO people have a point. But I hold out hope that SEO evolution will have to become much more content-centric and that market competition will reinforce content relevance over gaming tricks.
A common theme for content now is to be authoritative and original, supported by credible citations and references, which builds trust. This kind of content is likely to draw more views, in turn helping with ranking retrieval links (RAG) in GenAI searches.
AI-generated content is unlikely to clear this bar. Blatantly commercial sales pitches won’t either. The link in the previous paragraph and my own experience support the appeal of helpful articles and white papers, guides, FAQs and explainers (I’m especially fond of explainers). Readers want to find information that will help them understand key points to consider in planning, without needing to wade through self-serving commercials. The kind of information that will build confidence that you put your reader’s needs ahead of your own needs.
The emphasis shifts from website design to content, which you must continue to develop either through your own product/solution experts if they can write well or collaborate with respected content developers in your industry. I don’t see any other options, but of course I do have a vested interest 😀
What happens to websites?
Websites aren’t dead. They continue to fill an important role as the storefront for your corporate persona – who you are, what you do, investor support, that sort of thing. But they are hopelessly clunky in supporting early discovery for products, services, and technical insight.
In the late stages of discovery, a reader may want to understand more about your company and what other capabilities you provide. A traditional website in some form could continue to be useful in supporting this need, though I believe the product/service-centric kind of support could be better served through a chat interface with RAG retrieving appropriate content.
In other words, put all your agonizing into the storefront website and replace the rest of the structure with a chatbot retrieving all that great content you have built. And build more content!
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