There is a lot of concern among website builders about the impact AI will have on web traffic. AI isn't the only thing web developers have to worry about. Google will phase out third-party cookies by the end of 2024, social media referrals continue to decline, and mobile application platforms have a checkered history of supporting the Web. So can your website survive all of this?
One person watching these trends unfold more closely is the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Pantheon, which operates a SaaS-based website management platform (which they call “WebOps”). I'm Josh Koenig. Pantheon helps customers build, host, scale, and manage WordPress, Drupal, and NextJS sites. This is similar to Acquia, a company founded by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert. I also spoke with him recently about the future of the website.
The dangerous state of websites was highlighted in a recent survey of 1,000 consumers conducted by Pantheon and Hanover Research. A whopping 90% of respondents said they had experienced a “negative digital interaction.” The top complaints were spam emails (52%) and unhelpful customer service (44%), while the third biggest complaint was “issues with the brand's website” (41%).
AI and website integration
Yes, generative AI is a cause for concern for website builders. After all, why visit a website if you can get answers to most of your questions from an AI chatbot? A well-known backlash is that AI can hallucinate and wonder where the information comes from. The bottom line is that you can't trust it because you don't necessarily know. Mr. Koenig repeated that counterargument to me, but he maintained that the website was inherently trustworthy because of Google Search, an existing system for ranking websites.
“One of the ways Google has historically enabled […] provide a lot of value [is] Because we found a lot of answers to your questions and search queries.and we give you [answers] In the order we consider most authoritative. ”
Of course, it will be cold comfort if Google itself starts phasing out search lists in favor of omniscient chatbots. And Google has already hinted at this shift. So perhaps the answer is for websites to integrate their own custom AI experiences. Koenig said Pantheon is helping customers do just that. He pointed to Yale University's new site, askYale. It's an AI chatbot based on Yale University's web content (though it's currently limited to “hospitality-related information”).
“So I don't think chatbot user interfaces will soon obsolete all websites, because chatbots require a lot of effort to run properly,” Koenig said. “But for large organizations where a lot of information is really scattered, especially when part of the usefulness of a website is to direct people to the right information, it can be better organized. I also think it's an opportunity to make an effort to do that.'' You can get information faster. ”
Social media challenges
As for the continued decline in referral traffic from social media, Koenig blames the infamous “pivot to video” strategy of most social media services in part (X/Twitter (This is the latest example). But he also noted the diminishing effectiveness of “microtargeting.”
“As device privacy settings and other features improve, the usefulness of microtargeting via social platforms has diminished significantly,” he said. “So marketers are starting to realize that because a certain channel isn't working as well as it used to, they're spending less on that channel and getting less traffic.”
At Pantheon, Koenig said he expects the company to invest more in creating “interesting content and interesting experiences” for its clients, which will drive “earned traffic” to its properties. As a result, they're seeing customers looking to “pay” social media influencers less and instead use that money to attract users to their websites.
This kind of strategy seems to align well with the emerging Fediverse, where participants are encouraged to own their own content and connect to third-party services (such as microblogging Mastodon and photo-sharing Pixelfed). Masu. I asked Mr. Koenig if Pantheon customers were exploring the Fediverse. He thinks that's still a long way off.
“My next challenge is to […] Before we can realize that promise, we need to create a world where it's easy enough for ordinary people and ordinary marketers to participate in the field. ”
Jamstack for WebOps
Finally, since Koenig and I last spoke in August 2022, Jamstack has pivoted toward simplicity. While Astro and Remix seem to have established Next.js as a web framework, Netlify is promoting a “composable architecture” as an enterprise version of Jamstack. I asked if these things have changed the way Pantheon operates.
Koenig said about 90% of his company's work is still based on WordPress or Drupal, but it is building its own Jamstack platform. He said the initiative began a few years ago when he noticed customers using his company's WebOps platform to run headless CMS systems. While some of those customers were happy with Jamstack's approach, some were “recombining,” he said. [backend to frontend] Because after a year it was unmaintainable. ”
With these lessons learned, Pantheon hopes to provide solutions that return to the original promise of Jamstack. Koenig described Jamstack as “something you can run very quickly, build something very stable, and don't have a lot of overhead.”
So does Pantheon's Jamstack solution compete with the likes of Netlify and Vercel?
“We're extending the value of our web app platform to JavaScript-powered websites,” he answered. “So this is basically the same thing that Netlify and Vercel are doing at some level. You push your code to them and they deploy it to their CDN. My uncle. So we have the same ability. We're not as sophisticated and mature as they are because they start about eight to 10 years ahead of us. But we’re getting there.”
Koenig said his company's solution is similar to Contentstack, which he describes as a “fully automated composable DXP.” [Digital Experience Platform] Use a headless CMS. Koenig also likes the term “composable,” which in Pantheon's case refers to a bundle of third-party services that customers can choose from. He says it's about “choosing the best vendors and making sure they work well together.”
YouTube.COM/THENEWSTACK
Technology moves fast, so don't miss an episode. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to stream all our podcasts, interviews, demos, and more.
subscribe