In 1997, I built my first website. Typing HTML in Notepad, uploading via FTP, and then waiting for the world to find you. The web was an open playing field. Anyone with a domain name and an idea could join.
It is now 2026. And that playing field? It looks very different.
I will be honest: as someone who has spent 27 years in online marketing, built dozens of websites, and made a living from SEA and SEO for years, I could not have written this story fifteen years ago. Not because the signals weren't there, but because I didn't want to see them.
Now I can no longer look away.
The first crack appeared in social media
The major shift did not start with AI. It started when website owners moved their content from their own websites to platforms like WordPress, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and later TikTok and Substack. Why write a blog post that might attract ten visitors through Google, when you can share the same message on Substack with thousands of followers?
I saw webshops selling more through their Instagram shop than through their own site. Restaurants receiving reservations through their Facebook page without ever having had a website. Coaches and consultants running their entire practice from a WhatsApp Business account.
The numbers confirm this picture. The global social commerce market is estimated at $87 billion in the US alone in 2025, and is expected to exceed $100 billion in 2026. TikTok Shop has become a battering ram: the platform has grown to nearly 20% of all social commerce in America in two years, and expectations are that in 2026 half of all American social shoppers will buy there.
The usefulness and necessity of a website simply became less important for more and more groups.
And let's be honest: this is not new. Think of Booking.com. Hoteliers were already getting most of their bookings through that platform years ago, not through their own site. Platform dependency was already a fact for a long time. We just didn't call it that back then.
AI is only making it more painfully visible
And then came AI.
Google's AI Overviews give users a direct answer at the top of search results. No click needed. Zero-click searches are no longer a trend — they are the new standard. According to Semrush, nearly 60% of all Google searches now end without anyone clicking through to a website. Research from Similarweb shows that for news-related searches, this percentage even rose from 56% to 69% in just one year.
The visitor who never reaches your website has already received their answer. Summarised by an AI model that consumed your content without giving you a visitor in return.
Research firm Gartner predicted at the start of 2024 that traditional search volume would decline by 25% by 2026, as AI chatbots and virtual assistants take over queries. That prediction seemed bold at the time. Now, in 2026, we see the direction is correct: traffic from Google to publishers has already declined by roughly a third, according to Chartbeat/Press Gazette.
As an online marketer, I feel this shift every day. The channels that were reliable for years — Google Ads, organic search results, a well-designed landing page — are delivering less and less value per euro invested.
At the same time, social media platforms are building ever-greater reach. They are faster, more direct, and offer many business owners a shorter route to their customers than any SEO strategy. A Bain & Company consumer survey found that 80% of users now trust the answers that appear directly in search results for at least 40% of their searches.
But wait: not everyone can do without
I need to be honest here, because it is not black and white.
There are products and services for which a website with a good sales funnel is still indispensable. Think of financial products: taking out insurance online, banking services, submitting mortgage applications. Products where laws and regulations ensure the transaction can only be processed through the provider itself.
In that world — and I speak from experience — the website remains the heart of your sales operation. Social media is then a way to attract leads, a shop window. But the real transaction, with all the rules attached to it, takes place on your own platform.
The line is clearer than you think. Are you selling physical products or standard services? Then you can perfectly well find and serve your customers via social media. Your website is then at most a kind of digital business card. Proof that you exist, that you are real. But no longer the engine of your business.
Are you selling complex products with regulations attached? Then your website is not a luxury. It is your foundation.
The paradox no one is talking about
Now it gets really interesting.
Those AI models that are diverting more and more traffic away from websites? They were themselves built on web content. Every AI Overview that Google shows, every answer that ChatGPT or Claude generates: it is all fed by millions of web pages, blog posts, articles and product descriptions.
What happens when more and more parties stop creating content on their own websites? When the source dries up that the models learn from?
My honest expectation: the quality of AI answers will decline for a while. The supply of web content is partly running out. But I am not a doomsayer. Through the use of AI, models are also being trained in other ways: via conversations within the LLMs, via video, via new sources we do not yet fully understand.
It is growing pains, not a death sentence. But the paradox remains. And it is one that everyone working in digital should understand.
So: do you still need a website?
After 27 years in this field, my answer is clear.
A website with only generic information or contact details is unnecessary in 2026.
Only websites where a transaction must take place that cannot, for regulatory reasons, happen elsewhere — or where the customer experience is optimal — still have a right to exist. Although even here, developments are moving fast with the arrival of MCP, which makes it possible to take out insurance via an LLM. The Spanish insurer Tuio is a good example of this.
If you want to maintain control over your own data and not be dependent on the whims of an algorithm — then you still need a website. Your own website is the only part of the internet where you are in charge. No algorithm deciding whether your content is seen. No platform changing its rules tomorrow.
Data ownership is not a nice phrase for a slide. It is a conscious choice.
But to reach your customers faster and more easily, you do need social media. For that part, a website is no longer strictly necessary. Depending on where your revenue model sits, you may not need a website at all. And for a growing number of business owners and companies, that is simply the reality.
The website has changed from a must-have to a tool. And like any tool, you have to ask yourself: does this fit the job I need to do?