It's probably quicker and more cost effective to just buy advertisements on ChatGPT. Let OpenAI deal with the technical problem of "how can we make AI able to use a website designed for humans".
Come on, cant you tell? LLMs will crawl your website over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and OVER AGAIN!
Businesses are generally in the business of serving human customers, not AI agents. Furthermore, if AI agents are so smart, surely they can figure it out for themselves.
Not really, business websites are generally in the business or serving user-agents like browsers that then convey the information to users.
If I tell Claude to go search the web and find me a bunch of links to the websites of restaurants in my neighborhood because I want to try something new do you think the restaurant wants to be on that list?
I would say that the restaurant would be wasting its time and resources by catering their website to hypothetical customers who are choosing to use inferior and overly engineered methods to find information about their physical surroundings out of technological fetishism. But that's just me.
These AI tools are taking over as the main search/discovery vector for websites. Engaging with it is just basic SEO. This isn't really that complicated.
For content or media sites it's a different story. But most websites direct people to commercial transactions, and that's the group I'm referring to.
As a user, why would I trust an AI agent that cannot consistently use non-AI-tailored websites? If it cannot even do that, who knows what other failure modes it may hit me with.
I agree, but do the potential customers of my business?
We need to meet the customer where they are and that means making our site more accessible to search engines, mobile devices, LLMs, or whatever comes next.