sixball

AI-Optimisation may be the new SEO (AIO?). LLMs fill in the ontological gap of the Semantic Web ideal. Easily readable and writable by AI + humans, it might look a lot like Web 1.0. Wondering what this means for front-end devs.

Hearing some talk about how (LLM-based) AI was going to going to impact SEO triggered some thinking, packed into tweets above. I’ll unpack here.

To be clear, I’m talking about websites here rather than webapps (a whole other avenue). Websites can include simple call-to-actions: a purchase, reservation or subscription, say.

That said, I’m happy to wildly speculate that AI may do for the web what the web did for the internet (and the internet did for computers).

Cast your mind way back and you might recall the Web was originally about the sharing of knowledge via documents, with some simple interaction for querying and posting.

When commerce arrived, it picked up an e- and spawned particular strains of sales and marketing. Things got shiny, bouncy, zippy (‘rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket’), fast to not give the mark time to reflect, with pop-ups and consent forms, tracking. The finite supply of human attention was something to be attracted, captured and quite likely labelled and sold on to the highest bidder.

Short of an ad-blocker, the pain and distraction cost to the end user was an unavoidable cost to the end user who had no choice but to jump through hoops: consent to cookies, dodge distractions, exit-intents, and all the rest of it like an IKEA store from hell.

Humans are anxious, curious, vain, horny.

There was an idea of a machine-readable Semantic Web but it was a technical challenge and it was much more fun to show clients shiny sites.

Still, there is that pesky requirement to be friendly to Google’s bots and stick to the timeless principles of well-structured, informative websites with static content if you want to be well-regarded by the big G.

Google’s bots were fairly dumb, largely requiring humans to visit to make sense of the raw text snippets if they couldn’t be neatly ingested into Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Search Engine bots pave the way for human visitors until now. I’m suggested they might go in and get the job done entirely. You might be thinking you’d like to visit the site yourself

OpenAI has taken (presumably) similar content and run off it, leaping the ontological chasm of the Semantic Web in the process. Their success in being able to do that, on-demand, offers humans a viable shortcut and avoid the hassle of interacting with your website for mundane tasks: sending their AI agent. I’m founding this entire conjecture on the idea that much web interaction is tedious work and human are generally work-avoidant.

This may come as a shock but I don’t visit your site to admire the template and stock photos you paid good money for. I just want to know if you will clip my dog on Thursday and, if so, your address. If I can get my bot to do the research, book and update my calendar while I rub his belly then I’m sold. If you have to cancel for whatever reason then you can let me know by email or WhatsApp. My bot will be monitoring both while I’m out throwing a ball.

The good news is that you don’t need to learn any new tech, just let go of a few habits, instincts, and the odd framework. When my task terminator enters your mall with a mission clipboard, your buttery-smooth transitions and 200ms response times are a waste of effort.

You’d be better off just clearly labelling everything and getting the hell out of the way. Use plain, descriptive language to make it AI-ready – it’ll probably be summarised anyway, stripping out the puff and boilerplate – and it’ll also have the bonus of being backward-compatible, future-proof and accessible.

History may show this was the crest of front-end web development. Probably akin to the golden era of cars with tailfins, chrome bumpers and all.