Rewriting the rules of the web

What happens to your website when the interface becomes a prompt?

Short answer: it might die. Sound kind of apocalyptic? Sure - but we have been here before. The rise of AI agents mirrors another moment of digital disruption: the shift from desktop to mobile browsing. And it offers valuable lessons as to what comes next.

From WAP to Responsive: not a speedy transformation

Remember the mobile phones of the late 1990s, when suddenly everyone started getting one? Text-only, a handful of lines, tiny screens – Snake, if you were lucky. Mobile internet was barely conceivable. And then in 1999 came WAP: a dedicated “internet stack” for the mobile world.

It wasn’t exactly a revolutionary moment, though. It was too different from web developers’ current knowledge, too clunky for users, and offered too little reward for the effort. Mobile browsing stumbled through false starts: WAP, specialized browsers, etc. Eventually, the compromise was the slimmed-down “mobile.” website versions.

It wasn’t until the dawn of the iPhone in 2007 and the evolution of Responsive Design in 2011 that the mobile web truly took off: a full decade later than the arrival of the first mobile web discussion. It then took almost another decade for responsive and mobile-first to be the default in any web development.

The same story, only AI

Today, AI represents a similar paradigm shift. Instead of users moving from desktop monitors to handheld screens, they’re moving from websites rich in visuals to text-only conversations where an agent stitches together the answers.
At first glance, this seems like a downgrade. Why would anyone trade a beautiful, interactive site for a plain old block of text?

The answer is, of course, convenience.

Users don’t visit websites for the aesthetics. They come to accomplish something. To gather information, complete a task, make a decision. If AI can fetch that information faster while presenting it in a clear, concise manner, it becomes the go-to place for questions and answers.

And with the emergence of technologies like MCP (AI to system protocol), the agent can now perform tasks that would have been impossible in the classic web paradigm. Interactions like finding the most recommended product on one website, finding the best price on another, and actually buying it at a third can now be performed in one go by chatting with your agent.

So, what does this mean for the future of websites?

One option might be that we’ll follow the path of the responsive web, where an existing website is adjusted to work with the new interface: so more SEO optimization, more robot friendly annotations, and so on.

I’m not convinced about this path. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll still need the normal website, and SEO will still be important, BUT the benefits of feeding website content to AI in a different manner far outweigh the savings of having just one data representation. Another contributing factor is that, unlike the days of WAP, the web has matured: many platforms are already used to serve their content in different formats to different user agents (apps, social, feeds, etc.), so adding another layer for AI won’t be the hassle that it was in the early days.

The takeaway

The rise of AI agents is not an overnight revolution. It is a process, much like – yes! – the shift to mobile.

The internet as we know it isn’t going to suddenly vanish. But the signs of change are already here. Organic traffic is beginning to decline as Google answers questions directly in search results, and users increasingly turn to AI instead of visiting websites.

The lesson from history is clear: don’t be a late adopter (but also, don’t overinvest – the rise of successive technology and standards is still happening). If you haven’t already done so, it’s time to dip your toes in the AI water. And a great start might be to add an MCP service to your current website, give us a call, and we can help 😉