Shit’s about to get a little weird for brands.
A couple of bold and not-so-bold predictions from yours truly:
1. The vast majority of companies will effectively have two websites – one for bots and one for humans – within 1-2 years.
Bot traffic is growing like a gangly teen on a growth spurt, and now accounts for 51% of all web traffic. And bots don’t give a shit about pretty colours – they need it served up fundamentally different.
(And maybe as a prediction about this prediction: it will seem facile soon.)
2) Over the next 12 months, you are going to hear, more frequently, about oafish / boorish attempts by PR people to advance their clients’ interests on Reddit and Wikipedia (along with some other community-driven sites).
Wikipedia is scraped in a whopping 47 percent of ChatGPT answers, and Perplexity and Google both scrape Reddit more than any other source. It is going to be too tempting for PR people and brands to stay away.
Fuckups aplenty there SHALL be. These are community-driven places. The communities generally abhor self promotion and corporate bullshit – the stock in trade of a lot of bad PR.
3) More brands will start genuine media outlets of their own.
Lest we forget, bots consume content at SCALE. Which means, there’s so much potential value in having an owned site that can be heavily tailored for GenAI search purposes.
The incredible volume of high-end journalism talent that’s currently seeking work is going to make this irresistible. Heck, some of these things might even be worth reading.
I may be out to lunch here. Smack me around if you think so.