In the Age of ChatGPT, Do Websites Still Matter?
October 25, 2025
A personal reflection on creating websites in a world that no longer browses.
If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
Every day you discover something new about yourself. Some days you discover something that stays with you forever. A couple of years ago, I realized that I’m the kind of person who only feels satisfied when I’m being productive. I like figuring things out. I like making things. And I want to do as much of that as I can.
In the past few months, I’ve been building a few websites for friends and friends of friends. It’s becoming a sort of side job. But every time someone asks me to build one, I find myself wondering the same thing:
In the era of ChatGPT, does it still make sense to invest in a website?
The websites I usually build serve two purposes: either a simple showcase site for a service business (no transactions involved), or a full e-commerce. It’s the first type that raises more questions for me.
Nowadays —and increasingly in the future— we ask ChatGPT for almost anything, and it gives us a list of what it believes are the best options for us. You can go into as much detail as you want about what you’re looking for, even share a spreadsheet, and it will narrow down the range of possibilities. But the list of results it shows isn’t infinite. It always selects and prioritizes some options over others —and there’s a lot of opacity behind that selection.
On what basis do you recommend X over Y, when both have the same characteristics?
I’m not referring to the order in which it presents the results, but rather to the unselected options. And then—how do I optimize my website so that these chatbots actually consider it?
There are countless websites optimized around specific keywords for their industries and niches—trends that change over time. But how will they be able to maintain the same or greater visibility in the future?
It’s interesting because it feels like we’re moving from an optimization centered on users—built around the keywords people used to type—to one centered on AI agents.
The question shifts from “How do I rank in search?” to “How do I get invoked by the user’s AI?”
In 2024, 60% of Google searches didn’t result in a click. And it’s not a gradual decline—it’s a behavioral shift. A change in how we consume content and how we reach it. We’re leaving behind the era of clicks and entering the era of questions.
Traditional websites were built under the assumption that people enjoyed navigating complex architectures. But what people actually want today is a concise answer to their question—and if they need more details, a link that takes them directly there.
Still, there’s a whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs who keep investing in websites hoping to gain visibility. Unfortunately, most of them never will. And that makes me a bit sad, because my goal is to help them gain visibility and feel their investment was worth it.
How will websites and ChatGPT coexist ten years from now?
There are many possible scenarios. LinkedIn is full of “experts” claiming they’ve figured out the most likely one. But I think the future almost never looks like what experts proclaim. And to add yet another possibility, it could be that we’re overestimating the impact of LLMs—and that websites won’t actually disappear.
Who knows. What’s clear is that we’re in a transition phase. Many businesses will fade as a result—but at the same time, new opportunities will emerge for others.