For a long time, marketers could picture the website sitting pretty comfortably near the beginning of the customer journey.
Someone searches, sees a social post, or comes across an ad. They click. They land on the site. They learn about the company. They poke around. Eventually, ideally, they do something we can put into a report.
That version of the journey is probably a little tidier than reality. But today, it feels especially outdated.
People are learning about brands through AI search, social feeds, paid media, communities, online reviews, videos, colleagues and plenty of other places before they ever make it to a brand-owned website. By the time someone does arrive, there’s a decent chance they already know who you are, what you sell, and roughly why they might care.
That raises a useful question for marketers: If the website isn’t always the first touchpoint anymore, what does it need to do differently?
We recently spent an hour on exactly that question during our virtual panel, “Is the Website Still the Center of the Customer Journey?” You can watch the full panel discussion here and catch the key takeaways below.
Your website visitors may already know more
One of the biggest shifts is also one of the easiest to overlook: the person landing on your site may know considerably more than they used to.
They may have asked ChatGPT to compare your product category. They may have seen three LinkedIn posts from your team. They may have read a Reddit thread, watched a demo, or searched your brand by name after hearing about you somewhere else.
Rob Roll, Digital Platform Manager at Victaulic, summed up the website’s evolving role particularly well during our panel with, “It really stopped being the destination and started being a proof point.”
That changes the assignment.
A visitor who already understands the basics probably doesn’t need another 800 words explaining your category from square one. They’re more likely to be looking for the things that help them decide whether you belong on their shortlist.
What makes your approach different? What does the product actually do? What kind of results have you produced? How does implementation work? Can you handle their specific use case? What evidence backs up the claims they’ve already encountered elsewhere?
That’s a higher bar than simply being informative.
Generic educational content has a little less heavy lifting to do
For years, one of the default website and SEO plays was to answer every basic question a prospective customer could conceivably type into Google.
There was good reason for it. Search engines rewarded useful informational content, and brands could earn visibility by publishing the best answer.
AI search changes some of that behavior. Someone looking for a straightforward definition or introductory explanation can now get one without visiting ten websites first.
Patrick Whitener, Senior SEO Strategist at Liquid Marketing, made the point during the discussion that brands can spend more of their energy on content that is uniquely theirs. He said, “Now we’re going back to what really always should have been the goal: speaking in your brand voice, creating content that’s hyper-relevant to you.”
That doesn’t mean tossing every educational article into the trash on Monday morning.
It does mean taking a harder look at the role each piece of content is playing.
If a page offers essentially the same information that dozens of competitors, Wikipedia, and an AI-generated answer can provide, there may be limited reason for someone to seek it out from your brand specifically.
The bigger opportunity is farther down the specificity scale: original expertise, proprietary data, technical detail, useful tools, strong points of view, detailed FAQs, real customer examples, and answers to the questions your sales and service teams hear all the time.
Basically, give people something they couldn’t have gotten just as easily from everybody else.
Proof has a bigger job now
If visitors arrive already carrying a working impression of your company, the website becomes one of the places where that impression gets tested.
Does the site back up what they heard?
Does the company seem as credible as the recommendation made it sound?
Can they find evidence for the claims in the ad?
Does the product page explain why something costs more than the alternative?
Chase Lamb, Global Digital Campaign Manager at Essity, talked about the importance of evidence being “specific, relevant and independent.”
That’s a useful filter for almost any brand.
Depending on what you sell, that proof might include customer stories, reviews, performance data, certifications, research, demonstrations, comparisons, testimonials, technical documentation, implementation details, or examples of the work itself.
For marketers, this is also a good reason to stop treating case studies and proof points as nice-to-have content you’ll get around to once everyone has a little extra time.
They may be doing some of the most important work on the site.
And if you sell something complex, expensive, or meaningfully different from the status quo, they become even more important. Your clever headline may earn someone’s attention. The evidence underneath it has to survive the scrutiny that follows.
Your homepage still has plenty to do
There’s an easy conclusion to draw from all this: if customers are learning about brands elsewhere and deep links can send them straight into product or service pages, perhaps the homepage matters less.
Jason Mastroianni, Vice President of Creative at Liquid Marketing, pushed back on that pretty firmly during the panel: “The homepage’s role has not changed. At least a good homepage. But it actually has become more important in the age of generative AI.”
His reasoning makes sense.
Plenty of people still arrive at a homepage intentionally, especially after encountering a brand somewhere else. They may already have context, but they’re still using the site to orient themselves.
That makes clarity incredibly valuable.
Someone should be able to understand what your company does quickly. Navigation should help them move toward the information they actually need. The page should introduce enough specificity, personality, and proof to reinforce whatever brought them there in the first place.
It may also deserve more depth than the ultra-minimal homepages that were fashionable for a while.
An informed visitor isn’t necessarily an impatient visitor. If someone is actively evaluating your company, useful detail can be a feature.
Website metrics need a little more context around them
A messier customer journey also makes website performance harder to judge in isolation.
Traffic can fall while brand visibility grows somewhere else. Someone can encounter your company repeatedly without clicking anything.
The analytics platform will happily give you numbers anyway.
Patrick described the shift as “detaching ourselves from the click being the end all be all.”
That’s probably healthy.
Website traffic, conversion rate, engagement, and attribution still matter. They just need company.
Branded search demand, visibility in AI responses, lead quality, campaign reach, sales feedback, on-site search behavior, and other signals can help explain what’s happening around the numbers in GA4.
Chase described his approach as a balanced view of visibility, demand, action, and representation, which is a useful way to think about it.
It also helps prevent one volatile metric from sending everyone into a Slack spiral.
The important distinction: The website remains measurable. The entire customer journey never really was.
The website also can’t carry the whole marketing strategy on its back
This might be the least glamorous takeaway, but it’s an important one.
Sometimes a website isn’t performing because the website has a problem.
Sometimes the offer is weak. The differentiation is fuzzy. The traffic is poor quality. The campaign message isn’t connecting. The customer experience after the form submission is rough. Five departments own pieces of the site and nobody quite owns the outcome.
A redesign can solve plenty of legitimate UX, content, technology, and performance problems, but it cannot rescue every issue happening elsewhere in the business.
The panel spent a fair amount of time talking about the website as part of a larger ecosystem that can include marketing platforms, CRM systems, customer portals, product data and other technology.
That ecosystem also comes with humans.
Rob’s recommendation for teams wrestling with website complexity was wonderfully practical: “Fix the ownership before you fix the platform.”
That might mean getting clearer on questions like these: Who can request website changes? Who decides what gets prioritized? Who owns analytics? Who maintains key content? Who represents sales, product, IT, or legal when decisions need to be made? How often does someone actually look at whether the site is doing its job?
Where the website fits now
The website doesn’t need to be the center of every customer journey to play an important role in it.
In many cases, people will encounter your brand elsewhere first. They’ll collect some information, form an impression, and probably arrive at your site with more context than they had before.
That makes the website’s job more interesting.
It has to quickly orient people who already know a little. It has to prove claims made elsewhere. It has to provide the depth that abbreviated channels can’t. It has to give search engines and AI systems useful, specific information about the brand. And when someone is finally ready to act, it needs to make that part pleasantly uneventful.
Turns out, the website still has a pretty full plate.
If yours could be doing any of this better, let’s take a look together.