The web isn’t URL-shaped anymore – Jono Alderson
August 8, 2025
Half of your website’s audience isn’t human.Search engines, crawlers, bots and agents likely already consume more of your site than people do. And they don’t experience it the way humans do. Humans load a page at a URL and absorb the whole thing: design, content, messaging, intent. Machines treat that URL as an envelope – something to tear open, strip apart, and mine for meaning.
Websites have long had audiences other than humans, typically search engines. But it’s likely we’re going to see an explosion in not just large-scale agents run by organisations and search companies, but individual agents operating at the behest of individual users.
From both an engineering and a design perspective, we are going to have to start thinking about how we serve the needs of those users as well as our human users.
Here Jono Alderson thinks deeply about the implications of this. It’s definitely a topic I see us covering more at our events, and one I think that whatever your role in designing and developing for the web, you should start paying attention to.
