Drupal AI Initiative: Your next website visitor might not be human

The useful part

For most of the web's history, we have designed digital experiences around a simple assumption: a person will visit our website. That person might arrive through a search engine, follow a campaign link, scan a QR code, or maybe even type the URL into their browser. People are now asking AI assistants to research products, compare services, explain policies, recommend suppliers and complete tasks on their behalf.

How it works

• While human visitors use navigation, page layouts, graphic cues and calls to action, AI systems depend more heavily on structured information, descriptive metadata, cle...
• Sometimes, they might not even consciously choose AI and are simply guided by seemingly familiar tools like Google 'AI Overviews'.
• Either way, instead of visiting ten websites, a customer may ask one assistant to gather the relevant information and present a recommendation.
• In the near future, that AI assistant could be doing more than reading a web page: checking product availability, requesting information, preparing an application, arranging an appointment or even...
• Can AI systems understand our organisation, trust our information and interact with our services safely?

What to take from it

useful, AI assistants need to find the right information, understand its meaning and decide whether it is current and trustworthy. A prospective student asking an assistant to compare courses across several universities, a buyer requesting a shortlist of products that meet detailed technical, ethical and budget requirements.

Details worth keeping

both are now part of your website's audience.