We’re Building Websites Backwards: An Information-First Architecture for the AI Web
Most websites begin with a sitemap. Someone decides the company needs a homepage, product pages, an About page, perhaps some integrations, documentation, case studies and a blog. Designers turn those requirements into interfaces, developers turn the interfaces into components, and a CMS provides somewhere to store everything.
Only later do we begin describing what all of those pages actually mean. We add structured data so search engines can identify products, organisations and people. We create internal links to establish relationships between documents. APIs expose particular pieces of functionality. Search engines crawl the resulting site and reconstruct some understanding of the organisation from its pages. AI retrieval systems are increasingly expected to do the same.
I've started to think this process is backwards. The problem isn't that pages are the wrong way to present information to people; they're extremely good at that. The problem is treating the page as the canonical object and then repeatedly attempting to reconstruct the information underneath it for every other consumer.
A product is not a product page. A person is not an author page. A service is not a service page, and an integration is not an integration page. Those pages are representations of things that exist independently of the interface.
