Beyond the Build: Building AI-Ready Websites

Originally recorded: February 19, 2025 Guest: Mike Wills, VP of Technology & Kentico MVP

If you've noticed that your Google searches are answering questions without you clicking on a single link, you're already experiencing one of the major trends quietly reshaping digital marketing. It's called Search Generative Experience (SGE), and it's one of the most significant shifts in how users find and consume information online.

For the inaugural episode of Beyond the Build, I sat down with BlueModus VP of Technology and Kentico MVP Mike Wills to talk about what AI and SGE mean for the websites we build and maintain. You can watch the full recording here or read on for a recap of our conversation.

How AI Is Changing User Behavior

Search snippets and quick answers have been part of Google for years, but AI-enhanced search has pushed this much further. Users now routinely get what they need directly on the search results page. They don't click. They don't browse.

Mike put it plainly: "If someone's looking for help with something, they'll often get what they need right on the search page. That means fewer and fewer people are willing to click links."

The implications extend beyond traffic numbers. Users who do click through have been conditioned to expect instant answers. They don't want to navigate a content catalog. If a site doesn't immediately signal that it can help them, they'll hit the back button and try somewhere else.

The Website Experience Has to Match the Search Experience

Mike shared a real example that made this concrete. A BlueModus UX team redesigned a website for a company that provides ignition lock devices — the kind required for drivers with DUI convictions.

The original site was organized the way most sites are: navigation, service pages, "about us" content. Users had to browse to find what they needed.

The redesign led with the user's actual situation. Front and center: "I just got a DUI. What do I do?" and "I've been sentenced and need an ignition lock. How do I start?" From there, the experience walked users through next steps based on their state and circumstances.

No AI was required. Just a user-centered design that met people where they were instead of asking them to go looking.

This is the standard AI-enhanced search is setting. Users increasingly expect that kind of tailored journey from every site they land on.

Getting Your Content Into AI Search Results

Even if users aren't clicking through, you still want your content surfaced and cited in AI-generated results. That builds name recognition and trust, and the users who do eventually click are more likely to convert because they already associate you with the answer they needed.

To get there, Mike outlined two priorities:

• Write good content. This is foundational and worth a separate conversation entirely (see: our episode with content strategy expert Brandon Hess).

• Use structured data. Structured data follows schema.org standards and is embedded in your site to help crawlers correctly identify what your content is about. Types like FAQ, Event, Product, Service, and Research Report make it much easier for AI systems to interpret and use your content in search results.

The structured data piece is often overlooked. It doesn't change what your site looks like — it works in the background to make your content machine-readable in the right way.

What to Look for in a CMS

Not all CMS platforms are set up equally for AI readiness. Mike drew a clear distinction between two types:

Content-first platforms require you to define your content model, the types, structures, and relationships, before you build the presentation layer. This naturally encourages thinking about content as something that will be consumed in multiple contexts, not just displayed on a page. Xperience by Kentico is a strong example. You define reusable content structures first, then build templates and widgets around them. That process promotes semantic content types that map cleanly to schema.org.

Template-first platforms work the other way around. The CMS knows it has a template with fields, but may not actually understand what kind of content lives in those fields. Structuring that content for AI consumption requires more deliberate effort.

On the AI marketing front, Mike's advice was simple: ask whether a platform's AI features solve an actual problem you have. "All the platforms are going to be trying to have AI talking points," he noted. "The big question is: are they actually meeting a need I have?"

One use case he highlighted as genuinely valuable is AI-assisted visitor segmentation, where AI identifies behavioral patterns and groups contacts into personas automatically, rather than requiring teams to pre-define rules. As platforms mature, this kind of capability will become more accessible.

What to Do If You're Already Mid-Project

If your designs are already done, Mike offered two practical paths to make your new site as AI-ready as possible without designing new journeys:

First, take control of the content model even if the visual design is locked. Make sure content types map to schema.org standards. That can be done regardless of what the site looks like.

Second, consider adding a chat assistant. A well-configured assistant, with default prompts that reflect why people actually come to your site, can give users an immediate path to what they need without requiring a full redesign. BlueModus has developed a production-ready AI Assistant Framework that you can read more about here.

The Broader Shift

Users at every level, not just tech-savvy early adopters, are being conditioned by AI tools to expect instant, relevant responses. Amazon users type "my orders" directly into the search bar rather than navigating. TikTok users have never known a catalog-style interface. These behaviors move upstream.

"Your users use all of these websites," Mike said. "They're conditioned this way. And they have options."

The organizations that move toward AI-ready, user-centered design now will have an advantage as these expectations become standard. Those that don't will lose traffic, and more importantly, will lose the users who show up with high intent.

Want to assess how AI-ready your current site is? BlueModus can help you evaluate your content model, structured data, and platform setup. Contact us to start the conversation.