The Web Is Splitting in Two

AI agents make hundreds of millions of website visits per month, but most sites were never built for them. Here's what that means for your business.

Mersel AI Team

November 20, 2025

7 min read

For 30 years, the internet had one audience: people.

People clicked links, read pages, compared products, and made buying decisions. Every website on the planet was designed for that workflow. And it worked.

That era is ending. Not because humans are leaving the internet, but because a second audience showed up, and it's growing faster than anyone expected.

AI agents are now the internet's fastest-growing visitor segment. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, AI shopping assistants, AI travel planners, AI research tools. They visit websites millions of times per day, scanning and extracting information to answer user questions.

The difference? They don't browse. They don't scroll. They don't admire your design. They read your raw HTML, pull out whatever facts they can find, and decide what to recommend.

And the numbers are already big. According to Similarweb, AI-driven search traffic grew over 1,300% between 2023 and 2025. Adobe reported that AI referral traffic to U.S. retail sites alone increased 4,700% year-over-year as of mid-2025.

This isn't a passing trend. It's a fundamental change in how the internet gets used.

AI Visits Your Website and Gets It Wrong

Here's the part most business owners miss.

Your website looks great to humans. Clean design, pricing cards, testimonials, feature comparisons, product pages with all the right details. Everything a potential customer needs.

But when an AI agent visits that same page, it often sees something very different: navigation menus repeated on every page, cookie consent banners, tracking scripts, CSS and JavaScript that hasn't finished loading, and content hidden behind client-side rendering.

So when someone asks ChatGPT "How much does [your company] charge?" or "Is this product HIPAA compliant?" the AI might answer incorrectly. Not because you didn't publish the information. Because the AI couldn't extract it from the noise.

That matters more than you think. Bain & Company found that 80% of consumers now rely on AI-generated answers for 40% or more of their searches. If AI gets your pricing wrong or your features wrong, that wrong answer reaches thousands of potential customers before you even know it happened.

Your Website Now Has Two Audiences

This is the shift. Every business website now serves two distinct readers with completely different needs.

Humans want beautiful pages, interactive experiences, videos, animations, smooth checkout flows, and modern design. They judge your brand partly on how your site looks and feels.

AI agents want structured facts. Clean text. Pricing in a format they can parse. Product features they can compare. They need "what matters" without the visual noise.

Here's the hard truth: AI does not care about your website design. It cares about whether it can extract accurate information. A gorgeous $50,000 website redesign is invisible to ChatGPT if the product data is buried in JavaScript that never renders for crawlers.

Why AI Search Changes Everything

For two decades, "search" meant Google. Ten blue links. SEO rankings. Blog posts optimized for keywords.

That model is breaking down. 60% of Google searches now end without a click. When Google's AI Overviews appear, that number jumps to 83%.

People are also skipping Google entirely. They ask AI directly: "What's the best CRM for small teams?" or "Compare these two project management tools." The AI doesn't return ten links. It gives one answer with two or three recommendations.

That changes the competitive dynamic completely. You're no longer fighting for a spot on page one. You're fighting to be one of the two or three brands the AI mentions at all.

And the conversion numbers back this up. ChatGPT referral traffic converts at 15.9% compared to 1.76% for Google organic, according to Seer Interactive. That's a 9x difference. Visitors from AI have already done their research inside the AI conversation. By the time they click through to your site, they're ready to buy.

Two Versions of the Internet

We're entering a world where every business effectively needs two versions of its web presence.

The human web is what your customers see today: your normal website with its design, branding, and interactive elements.

The machine web is what AI consumes: simplified, structured versions of your key pages. Clean text. Explicit pricing. Product specs in formats AI can parse without guessing.

Same business. Same information. Two formats.

Companies that only maintain the human version will gradually disappear from AI answers. Not from the internet itself, but from the recommendations people actually act on.

What This Means for Your Business

If AI can't read your website properly, the consequences are concrete:

You don't appear in AI recommendations for your category
Competitors become the default answer
Potential customers choose someone else before ever visiting your site
Wrong information about your pricing or features spreads at scale

This is the new version of being invisible on Google. Except it's worse. Google shows ten results, so even position seven gets some clicks. AI gives one answer. You're either in it or you're not.

What You Can Do About It

Three practical steps any business can start with today.

1. Test whether AI can actually read your site

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Ask them about your company. Ask about your pricing, your product, how you compare to competitors. See if the answers are accurate. Most businesses are shocked at what they find.

2. Create a machine-readable layer

This means structured data (schema markup), server-side rendered content, clean text versions of key pages, and formats like llms.txt that help AI crawlers understand your site. The goal: make it easy for AI to get your information right.

This is what we do at Mersel AI. We build and maintain an AI-optimized layer on top of your existing website, so AI agents can accurately read, understand, and recommend your brand. Your site stays the same for human visitors. AI just gets a version it can actually work with.

3. Start tracking AI visibility

You already track SEO traffic, Google rankings, and ad performance. Now you also need to monitor how often AI mentions your brand, whether those mentions are accurate, and how much traffic AI referrals actually drive. This is where the growth is shifting.

The Bottom Line

The internet is still your most important marketing channel. But the primary reader of the internet is changing.

It's no longer just humans. It's AI. And the businesses that make their information easy for AI to read will get more visibility, more recommendations, and more customers.

The businesses that don't will still have a website. It just won't show up in the answers people rely on.

If you want to see how AI currently reads your site, we can show you. The gap between what you think AI sees and what it actually sees is usually the eye-opener.

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