Will websites be dead by 2028? A research chief at Gartner says AI agents will replace browsing. A marketing chief at Cloudflare says your site is now the source the AI reads before it talks about you. Alex, Jordan, and Nick debate both sides on this episode of the Web Guy Nick Podcast, with the numbers owners actually need: AI traffic up more than seven hundred percent in a year, and most business websites still written for a reader who now sends an agent instead. Listen on Spotify, and if your site needs to work for people and agents, start at webguynick.com.
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AI answers are not invented from thin air. They are built out of citations.
Jordan
Websites will not be dead by twenty twenty eight. But the website’s job has changed, permanently. It used to be a brochure that people visited. Now it is the source document the AI reads before it talks about you.
Nick
Build it for both. Clear service pages the AI can quote. What you do, where you do it, what it roughly costs, real reviews, real photos of real work. Every fact an AI might repeat about you should live on your own site first, in plain words. That is the whole game now. The website is your AI resume, and the AI is doing the interviews.
Nick
Full transcript
Alex: Before we start: this podcast is produced with AI. Jordan and I are AI hosts, and Nick’s voice is an AI clone of his real voice. Every story is researched from public sources, with links in the show notes.
Alex: Now here is a number that should get every business owner’s attention. When Google puts one of its AI summaries at the top of a search, the click rate on the regular results underneath it has fallen by about sixty one percent. That is not over a decade. That is basically since AI Overviews rolled out. So today we are settling the argument I keep hearing in marketing circles: will websites be dead by twenty twenty eight?
Jordan: And I am taking the other side of that bet, because I think the obituary is getting way ahead of the data.
Nick: And I am the guy in the middle who actually builds websites for a living, so I have skin in this game. I will give you my verdict at the end, and it is not the one either of these two expects.
Alex: Then let me make the case for the prosecution. Exhibit one: Seer Interactive tracked three thousand one hundred nineteen informational searches. When an AI Overview appeared, the organic click through rate fell from one point seven six percent to zero point six one percent. A sixty one percent collapse, just because Google answered the question itself.
Jordan: That is a real drop, I am not denying the drop. But keep going, because your next exhibit has a plot twist.
Alex: Exhibit two: Chartbeat, which measures live traffic for publishers, says Google search referrals through February of twenty twenty six were down about sixty percent for small publishers, forty seven percent for mid sized ones, and twenty two percent for large ones. Exhibit three: Pew Research looked at roughly sixty eight thousand searches. When an AI summary showed up, people clicked a result about eight percent of the time. Without the summary, about fifteen percent. And around sixty percent of all searches now end with no click at all. Jordan, if the answer is on Google’s page, nobody needs to visit the website. The middleman is being deleted.
Nick: Let me translate that into business owner language. A homeowner in Rialto Googles, best fence contractor near me. Old world, she clicks three websites, compares, calls one. New world, the AI writes a paragraph at the top, names two companies, and she calls one of those. If your company is not named in that paragraph, you were never in the race. That part of Alex’s case is one hundred percent real, and I see it with my own clients.
Jordan: Agreed, the race changed. But dead by twenty twenty eight? Here is the counterweight. Yes, referrals from ChatGPT to websites have grown more than two hundred percent. That sounds enormous until you hear the second half: they are still under one percent of total page views. Under one percent. The chatbots everyone is panicking about are a rounding error in actual web traffic today. Google is still the front door.
Alex: Today. The trend line is the story, Jordan. Two hundred percent growth compounds fast.
Jordan: It does, and here is the second counterweight, the one I think wins the argument. AI answers are not invented from thin air. They are built out of citations. Study after study of AI answers finds the same sources cited again and again: Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, and strong publisher and business websites. The AI is reading the web out loud. No web, no answer. The website is not being replaced. It is being promoted to source material.
Nick: And we got the funniest proof of that this month. Researchers at Fudan University planted a completely made up concept on the web. They called it the Cactus Gravity Protocol, total fiction, something about microgravity fuel tanks. They posted it on sites that AI tools already like to cite. Within seven days, four major AI search tools, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and Google’s AI, were citing those posts in their answers. The machines are drinking from the live web constantly, and they are not picky about whether what they drink is true.
Alex: Which honestly strengthens my side too. If AI will cite a made up protocol, imagine what it does with a business that has no website at all. It fills the gap with whatever exists. A competitor’s page. An old directory listing with your phone number from six years ago.
Jordan: That is not the website dying, Alex. That is the website mattering more, with higher stakes. And notice Chartbeat’s own numbers again: large publishers are down twenty two percent, small ones down sixty. Authority is the shield. A strong site with real expertise is holding up. What is dying is the thin website, the copy and paste blog post farm. Good riddance.
Nick: All right, verdict time, because this is where I land after hearing both. Websites will not be dead by twenty twenty eight. But the website’s job has changed, permanently. It used to be a brochure that people visited. Now it is the source document the AI reads before it talks about you. When somebody asks an AI for a contractor, a med spa, a print shop, the AI answers from the websites it trusts. If you do not have one, there is nothing accurate to cite, so you are invisible in the answer. And invisible in the answer is worse than page two of Google ever was, because at least page two existed.
Alex: So the practical version for a business owner is what, exactly? Build the site for the robot reader?
Nick: Build it for both. Clear service pages the AI can quote. What you do, where you do it, what it roughly costs, real reviews, real photos of real work. Every fact an AI might repeat about you should live on your own site first, in plain words. That is the whole game now. The website is your AI resume, and the AI is doing the interviews.
Jordan: I will concede this much to Alex: the lazy traffic is gone. Nobody is clicking your homepage just to browse anymore. The visit happens after the AI names you, when the customer comes to verify. Which is why the site has to close the deal in thirty seconds.
Alex: And I will concede the obituary was early. Dead by twenty twenty eight is too strong. Transformed by twenty twenty eight, that I will sign.
Nick: On to Higgsfield Corner, our quick look at AI creative tools. Jordan, what is the takeaway this week?
Jordan: Video, and it connects straight back to our debate. YouTube is one of the most cited sources across AI answers. So a local business that turns job site photos into a short video with an AI video tool, a finished kitchen, a before and after roof, is feeding two machines at once: the video shows up in search, and the transcript gives the AI something accurate to quote. One afternoon of filming on a phone now does the work a marketing department used to do.
Nick: I tell my clients the same thing. You do not need a film crew. You need proof of work, moving, with your voice explaining it. That proof is what gets cited.
Alex: Time for AI or BS, our quick fire game. Today’s claim: AI search will replace Google entirely by twenty twenty seven. Jordan?
Jordan: BS, and it is not close. Google is not being replaced by AI search. Google is AI search now. The AI answer sits on top of the biggest index on earth, inside the product two billion people already use. Something else does not replace that in fourteen months.
Nick: BS from me too. By twenty twenty seven, AI answers will be everywhere, but most of them will be Google’s, and every one of them still needs sources to read. A claim can be bold or it can be right. That one picked bold.
Alex: The panel is unanimous: BS. Which brings us to One Thing to Try This Week.
Nick: This one is mine, and it takes ten minutes. Open ChatGPT and Google on your phone. Ask them what your customers ask. Who is the best in your trade in your town? What does your business charge for your main service? What do reviews say about you? Then check every claim against your own website. Wherever the AI is wrong, vague, or names your competitor instead, your website is missing a fact or a page. Fix that one thing this week. That is the new search homework, and almost none of your competitors are doing it yet.
Jordan: Do it for your business name too. You might be surprised what the machines think you do.
Alex: So the headline from today’s debate: the website is not dying, it is being read by a new audience first, and that audience talks to your customers. If yours has nothing accurate to say, someone else’s will.
Nick: And if your website is not ready to be the source, that is literally what we fix at Web Guy Nick. Start at webguynick.com.
Alex: That is the show. Check what AI says about your business today, and we will see you tomorrow.
