As the owner of a digital agency, here's a question that keeps me up at night: what if nobody needs to visit your website anymore?

Not because you've done something wrong. Not because your website is bad. But because the entire premise — that people come to a website as a destination to get information — is becoming outdated. Like phone books, or maps you had to unfold, or knowing landline numbers off by heart.

The shift is already happening. When was the last time you actually went to a company's website to find basic information about them? Chances are you asked an AI instead.

I’ve always believed the best websites create an experience between humans and technology in a way that just... works. It might be a purely functional interaction so seamless it's almost invisible, or a brand experience that evokes genuine joy and trust. You know the feeling, when you land on a site and everything is exactly where your brain expects it to be. When the right information surfaces instantly, and the entire experience feels beautiful, smooth and effortless.

That's the craft. That's what we've spent years at Springload getting really good at: understanding what a person is trying to achieve and designing experiences that enable them rather than fighting them.

The thing is, we've always assumed that experience happens on a website. A place people visit. A destination you design from the homepage down through the navigation to the individual pages.

What if that assumption is now wrong?

Not that long ago, you’d Google something, click a link, land on a website, then navigate a series of pages until you found what you needed. That was the pattern. The website was the destination and you did all the work to find what information you needed.

Now? You ask Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or Perplexity or Copilot (or whatever your flavour is) a question and it just... answers. Right there. No clicking, no navigating, no destination. The AI has already read the websites, synthesised the information, and served it to you in the conversation. As if you’re talking to a human that knows exactly what you need.

And not just simple questions either. We’re researching companies, comparing products, making purchasing decisions, getting technical support, planning complex projects — all inside a conversation with an AI. The website ‘destination’ isn't even featured as part of the journey anymore.

So what happens to your carefully crafted digital experience when people aren't experiencing it? When the information on your website gets mediated through something else entirely? When the front door to your business becomes optional?

A good website has always been a vehicle and an opportunity for you to experience a company’s brand.

When you land on a well created website, you form an impression before you've read a single word. Every aspect of the design, user experience, page load speed, content and imagery tells you something. From the font size and weight, the colour palette, the amount of white space, the animated interactions that you don’t even notice but you ‘feel’, the style of photography or imagery used, the way elements are composed — all of this adds up to more than the sum of its parts, invisibly communicating who this company is and therefore what they’re like to deal with.

Is this company premium or accessible? Human or corporate? Innovative or traditional? You know within seconds, not because you've read their mission statement, but because good design speaks a language that bypasses the rational brain entirely.

But when someone's getting information about your company through a text conversation with an AI, where does all that visual ‘experience’ live? How do you communicate brand when there's no canvas to design on? How do you create that feeling of quality, or approachability, or innovation, when the interaction is just words on a screen?

We're potentially losing an entire dimension of how brands communicate. And I'm not sure we’ve yet worked out what replaces it.

Is an AI-enhanced website just a website with an AI powered chatbot bolted on? Like an extension of those "Hi there! How can I help you today?" chat boxes? It would be a disappointment if that’s as far as the near future for AI-enabled websites takes us.

It's like when companies first went online and just turned their brochure into a PDF on a webpage. Same content, wrong medium.

What would a genuinely AI-enhanced website actually look and feel like? Not a chatbot widget, but something designed from the ground up for how people want to interact with information now?

There’s a huge opportunity for an entirely new interaction paradigm to emerge here that I don’t think anyone’s really cracked yet.

So if the old model is dying and the current solutions aren’t yet working, what might actually emerge? Here are some scenarios — not predictions, just possibilities worth considering.

The chat interface becomes the new browser

Is this the next logical step? The ‘chat’ interaction with LLMs becomes a new type of browser? We're already seeing hints of this — AI platforms rendering images, creating interactive elements, displaying structured information visually rather than just through text. This chat interface could evolve into something genuinely experiential, not just conversational.

Websites that actually understand you

Imagine landing on a website that genuinely adapts to what you're trying to do. Not in a "creepy-how-the-hell-did-you-get-my-data” kind of way, but in a "I can see you want to find out about prices and benefits, here's what you’ll need to understand" way. The site doesn't make you hunt through menus or scroll through generic content. It meets you where you are, shows you what's relevant, and gets out of your way.

The interaction might be conversational, but it wouldn't feel like talking to a robot. It would feel like the website is actually paying attention to what you need. And crucially, it would still maintain the visual and experiential richness that makes websites powerful. You're not just getting text answers - you're getting a designed experience that adapts to you.

We’d still need to cater for both searching (when you know what you want to find out) as well as browsing (when you don’t).

Websites become showcases, not sources

Perhaps websites evolve into something more like showrooms than shops. Not the first place people go for information, but the place they go when they want the full experience. When they're ready to really engage, to see the craft, to immerse themselves in what makes you different.

Like how people might browse products on their phone but go into a physical store for the experience when they're ready to commit. A place where people come to actually feel your brand, not just learn about it. Where they can build an emotional connection through beautiful design, where the experience itself demonstrates your values and capabilities in a way that a text conversation simply can't. It's the difference between reading a description of a building and actually walking through it — both give you information, but only one gives you the feeling.

The website becomes the premium version of the brand experience, not the only version.

Here's what I keep coming back to. No matter how fast technology evolves, human brains evolve slowly.

There's still a human on the other end trying to achieve something. Whether they're navigating a traditional website, asking an AI a question, using some hybrid experience we haven't invented yet, or doing something completely different in five years — they still have a goal. They're trying to understand something, decide something, buy something, do something.

Someone still needs to understand what drives that person. Someone needs to make the complex feel simple, make the useful feel delightful, make the functional feel human.

And that means there's still a place for that visual and experiential interaction that websites are uniquely placed to deliver. The craft of creating great human-centred experiences remains, even as the canvas changes.

The question isn't whether websites have a future — it's what form that future takes. And the only way we'll find out is by being willing to experiment, to fail, to try things that might not work. By the time everyone's comfortable with the answers, we’ll be on to the next new thing.