# Four phases every website is going through right now

> From the web for humans to a pure thought experiment: four phases explaining why machine-readable data is already the baseline, not an extra.

I believe we're only at the beginning of a shift that most people don't yet recognise as a shift at all. What we call a “website” — a bundle of designed pages for human eyes — is slowly fading into the background. What remains is something more sober: a connected, machine-readable data point. Here is how I see this development unfolding — four phases, from what is already everyday practice to what remains pure speculation.

## Phase 1 — The web for humans (Yesterday)

The classic internet: built for eyes and for search engine crawlers, which essentially just count and link pages. The guiding principle was “more traffic on the site”. You typed a keyword, clicked through ten blue links, and pieced the answer together yourself.

## Phase 2 — The hybrid web (Today)

The internet has gained a second audience that must be taken just as seriously as the human one: language models. This is where we currently stand. Ask a question today, and you increasingly get a ready-made, summarised answer, often without ever visiting a website. For an AI to give that answer correctly, it doesn't need a pretty design — it needs structured, machine-readable data.

To me, that's not an abstract vision of the future — it's exactly what we build into btlabs Core as standard: a foundation that feeds a website, a shop and AI agents simultaneously through open interfaces, with machine-readable profiles (\`llms.txt\`), so a language model can recommend a business without errors. Not as an add-on module, but as the baseline state.

## Phase 3 — The acting web (Tomorrow, estimated 2–5 years)

AI stops merely reading things out and starts acting: negotiating, comparing, booking, without a screen ever being touched. Here I leave solid ground and speculate — reasoned speculation, but speculation nonetheless. Whether and how quickly this arrives, nobody really knows. That the technical building blocks for it are already emerging today, I see in every project.

## Phase 4 — The distant picture (A pure thought experiment)

Classic websites largely dissolve, companies talk about their own small language models for internal use, and because a large share of the web may by then consist of AI-generated content, provability becomes the real currency. A picture I deliberately call what it is: speculation, not a forecast. Whether it turns out this way, I don't know. But the questions behind it — who an item of information truly belongs to — are already no longer science fiction today.

## What this means in practice

You don't need to be ready for Phase 4 to act correctly today. Phase 2 is no longer optional — it is the baseline equipment on which every later phase is built.

How well your own website already reads for language models can be checked in a few steps. In the [Guide to AI Visibility](https://btlabs.dev/en/posts/ai-visibility-south-tyrol-dach), I show exactly what matters here.

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Source: https://btlabs.dev/en/posts/four-phases-website
Last-Modified: 2026-07-23T09:02:13.834Z
Languages: [de](https://btlabs.dev/llms/de/posts/vier-phasen-website) · [it](https://btlabs.dev/llms/it/posts/quattro-fasi-sito-web)
See also: [llms.txt](https://btlabs.dev/llms.txt) · [ai.txt (Policy)](https://btlabs.dev/ai.txt) · [identity.json](https://btlabs.dev/identity.json)