your website gets more attention from ai crawlers than humans now.
most designers haven’t noticed this shift yet. they’re still optimizing for people who left three years ago.
when mobile happened, some teams wanted two websites. one for desktop, one for phones. responsive design won because it was one codebase, infinite screens. elegant solution.
but this time the problem isn’t screen size. it’s consciousness.
a human wants beauty, hierarchy, white space, the feeling of discovery. an llm wants structured data, semantic markup, clear relationships, no ambiguity.
these aren’t compatible goals. you can’t responsive-design your way out of fundamentally different intelligences.
the web optimized for google already killed a lot of good writing. everything became keywords and meta descriptions and “10 best ways to…” because that’s what ranked.
now we’re entering the phase where your primary reader can’t appreciate a clever turn of phrase. can’t feel the weight of a well-chosen word. just wants the information density maximized.
media queries for llm scrapes sounds absurd but so did mobile-first five years before everyone did it.
maybe we end up with two webs again. one for machines to parse, one for humans to experience. not because it’s elegant but because trying to serve both created something that served neither.
the robots want your content as data. the humans want your content as experience.
pick your audience.