No More Homepages? How AI Might Eliminate Traditional Web Navigation
In the early days of the internet, the homepage was everything. It was your storefront, your welcome mat, your digital handshake. Today, it might just be on its way out. As artificial intelligence transforms how we access information, traditional web navigation could soon become irrelevant.
The Shift from Browsing to Answering
Search engines used to be about finding the right link. Now, they’re about delivering the right answer. With AI-powered tools like Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), ChatGPT, and Perplexity, users increasingly bypass homepages altogether. Instead of visiting a site to explore options, AI presents them with direct, summarised, and contextual answers.
This shift turns websites from destinations into data sources—back-end systems feeding structured content to front-end AI interfaces.
Voice and Conversational Search: Skipping the Clicks
The rise of voice search and virtual assistants has only accelerated this trend. Asking Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant to “find the best hotel in Marbella” no longer requires opening a travel site. The AI provides answers, often pulled from structured content like schema markup or FAQs, without ever showing the original webpage.
This reduces the value of a traditional homepage, which was designed for manual exploration. If the AI can answer the question, there’s no need to navigate menus or click through carousels.
The New Entry Point: Contextual Landing Experiences
As AI guides users directly to the content they want, landing pages, blog posts, product FAQs, and structured snippets become the new “front doors.” These pages need to be tightly focused, answer-led, and optimised for clarity and structure, because they’re now being interpreted by algorithms, not just humans.
That means visual storytelling, smart formatting, and rich data (think schema.org, metadata, accessibility tags) take priority over the traditional hero section or welcome text.
Implications for Designers and Developers
If users never see your homepage, what should you design for?
Intent-driven micro-pages: Each page should serve a single user intent clearly and completely.
Structured content: Make it easy for machines to interpret your content—using schema, heading hierarchies, and clean code.
Deeper UX thinking: Focus less on how users click around and more on how information is delivered, layered, and retrievable by AI.
Speed and accessibility: These are now as much for bots as for people. AI penalises clunky or inaccessible content.
The homepage might still exist, but more as a brand touchpoint or fallback than a primary gateway.
The Rise of Interface-less Interactions
Think beyond the screen. AI is also powering interface-less experiences: smartwatches, voice-only apps, car dashboards, even AR/VR environments. In these contexts, your website is never seen, but your content might be used.
To survive in this AI-driven ecosystem, your design and structure must serve both human and machine audiences. This means simplifying, clarifying, and structuring your site in ways that anticipate machine interpretation as much as human curiosity.
Are Homepages Dead?
Not entirely, but they’re becoming less important. As AI reshapes how people access information, the homepage is evolving from a centrepiece to a support role. It’s no longer the main event, but one of many pathways, often skipped entirely.
Designing for the future means thinking beyond pages and toward modular, intelligent content that can be repurposed, reassembled, and surfaced by AI.
Final Thought: What Comes After Navigation?
In a world where questions are answered before they’re fully typed and content is pulled contextually based on location, tone, or device, we’re not just redesigning websites, we’re redefining the entire user journey.
