The Website Is No Longer a Website

illustration

In 1987 Apple made a short film about the computer of the future and called it “Knowledge Navigator.” A university professor walks into his study, opens a flat device that looks like a book, and from the screen a polite young man in a bow tie addresses him. He reminds the professor of a lecture, summarises his mail, finds the right article, contacts a colleague, brings data on deforestation in the Amazon together into a single chart and arranges a meeting. The professor never once presses a button in the usual sense. He talks, and the assistant acts.

People laughed at this film for about twenty years, because in 1987 nothing of the kind could be done. Then they stopped laughing, and today it looks like slightly naive but fairly accurate documentation for what is happening right now to one of the most familiar things on the internet, the company website.

VideoKnowledge Navigator, Apple, 1987

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The website has already gone through two transformations in its life. First it was a page, an electronic brochure where a company told you about itself, showed photographs and left a phone number. Then it became an application: you could place an order, book, pay, check a status. The third transformation is beginning now, and in it the website becomes a participant in the business.

The first sign was that people are ceasing to visit websites. In July 2025 the Pew Research Center tracked how nine hundred Americans used Google search. When an AI-written summary appeared in response to a query, people clicked on links in eight cases out of a hundred, and without a summary in fifteen, almost twice as often. Links inside the summary itself were clicked by about one person in a hundred. Websites that had fought for years for a place in the results discovered that they were still being found, but by a machine, and the person no longer needed to visit.