How AI is quietly rewriting the rules of search and why that changes everything about how we build websites
The first website I built was at the University of Liverpool in the late 1990s. It was for a project, and it was exactly what you’d expect from a late-90s student site: a few basic pages, a single photo (that took too long to load), and a hit counter proudly ticking away at the bottom of the screen.
It was primitive. But it did the job.
People found it the way everyone found things back then – they typed something into a search engine (Ask Jeeves, if you were fancy), clicked the homepage, and off they went. Simple. Logical. Linear.
Fast forward to now, and I’m leading the redevelopment of a new Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine website. But the task in front of us couldn’t be more different.
Because today, people aren’t visiting websites in the same way. In many cases, they’re not visiting at all.
Instead, AI search tools, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google SGE are doing it for them. Scanning, scraping, summarising. Students ask a question like “Which UK universities offer a master’s in global health?” and they don’t get a list of links. They get an answer.
Not a click. Not a session. Just a sentence.
That shift is seismic. Because it means we’re no longer just designing for humans reading web pages. We’re designing for AI agents deciding which answers humans get to see.
In this world, the landing page isn’t the front door anymore. It might not even be part of the journey. The path to our content is mediated by systems we don’t control, built on training data we don’t curate.
So the job of building a new university website in 2025 is no longer just about structure or design or user journeys, although those still matter. It’s about reimagining how we show up in a world where our audience might only ever meet us second-hand.
It’s about making sure our voice, our credibility, our distinctiveness survives the scrape.
That’s a scary thought. But it’s also freeing.
Because it gives us permission to think differently. To stop obsessing over tidy navigation menus and start focusing on meaning. Clarity. Authority. Connection.
To invest in content that answers real questions. To structure information in ways that make sense to people and machines. To speak in a voice that’s unmistakably ours – whether a chatbot or a teenager in Nairobi is doing the listening.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But if that student site I built in the 90s taught me anything, it’s that the best digital work doesn’t start with certainty – it starts with curiosity.
The tools are changing. The expectations are changing. The nature of search is changing.
But the opportunity? That’s never been bigger.
Because if we get this right, if we build a site that still informs, engages and earns trust even when it’s not the final destination, we’ll have done more than launch a new website.
We’ll have created a platform that’s ready for how people actually find and experience us in the age of AI.
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