Your website is becoming a wire service

There's a piece doing the rounds this week from Slobodan Manic at Search Engine Journal, arguing that your website is now a source rather than a megaphone. The framing is right, and the analogy he reaches for — wire stories versus brochures — is the cleanest articulation I've seen of what's actually happening. But I think the piece stops short of the more uncomfortable bit, which is what this means for how brands have been structured for the last fifteen years.

The short version: most marketing teams, most agencies, and most CMS implementations are organised around an assumption that the website is the destination. Funnel diagrams point at it. Campaigns drive to it. Conversion tracking ends there. The website is the place the message lives, in its proper font, with its proper hierarchy, surrounded by its proper navigation.

That assumption has been quietly dying for two years. It's about to die loudly.

The reason it's about to die loudly is that the entire stack of news this week — Google's earnings, Microsoft's earnings, Google telling developers to build for agents, Preferred Sources going global — points in the same direction. Your content is going to be read, summarised, recombined, and quoted by systems you don't control, in contexts you'll never see, before a human decides whether to engage with you directly. The brochure model assumes you get the first read. You don't anymore.

The wire service shift

Manic's analogy is worth sitting with. A news agency writes a story. Reuters files it. Then the Times runs three paragraphs, the Guardian runs five, a regional paper runs the headline and the lede, an aggregator strips it down to a summary card, a podcast host paraphrases it on air. Every one of those surfaces is a different presentation of the same source material. The wire service doesn't get to control any of them.

What it gets to control is the source. The facts, the framing, the order of importance, the named entities, the key quotes. If the source is well-built, every downstream version still carries the message. If the source is poorly built — buried lede, hedged claims, missing attribution — the downstream versions get worse with every recompression.

Your website is now the wire service. ChatGPT is the regional paper. Perplexity is the aggregator. Gemini is the podcast host. Each of them takes your source material and produces a version of it for someone who will probably never click through to read the original. And the version they produce is a function of how well the source was built.

This is not a metaphor. This is mechanically what's happening. Google's own developer guidance this week — telling people to build agent-friendly websites with semantic HTML, stable layouts, and proper labels — is a tacit admission that the agent is now a primary reader, not an edge case. The accessibility tree, which most sites have treated as a compliance afterthought, is the high-fidelity map AI agents are using to understand your content. The hover states, the parallax sections, the carefully art-directed scroll experiences? Functionally invisible.

The brochure tax

Here's where I want to be sharper than the original piece, because I think there's a point being missed about who pays the cost of this transition.

The brochure tax is paid in deals you never knew you were in.

The brochure model isn't just a content problem. It's an organisational problem.

Most marketing organisations are still set up to produce brochures. The design team owns the look. The copy team writes to fit the design. The dev team builds it. The SEO team optimises it after the fact. Everyone reports against page-level metrics — sessions, time on page, bounce rate, conversions on this specific URL.

That structure produces websites that are visually coherent and informationally fragile. The copy doesn't stand alone because it was never asked to. The headings are styled rather than structured because the structure was an afterthought. The value proposition lives in a hero animation because the hero animation was the design centrepiece. Pull any single paragraph out of context and it collapses, because it was never written to survive being pulled out of context.

Now ask: what happens when a third of your prospects make their decision based on three paragraphs an AI extracted from your site, presented next to two competitors, with none of your design wrapper? You lose, because your competitors who structured their content for portability win the comparison even if your underlying offer is better. The brochure tax is paid in deals you never knew you were in.

I see this in client audits constantly. We pull a service page into a basic text-only view and the entire proposition disintegrates. Headings that were doing visual work but no semantic work. Bullet lists where each bullet only makes sense in sequence with the others. Pricing buried in an interaction. Differentiators hidden in iconography. The page works fine for a human who lands on it cold. It doesn't survive extraction.

What the earnings actually tell us

The Alphabet and Microsoft numbers this week back this up from a completely different direction. Google Search revenue grew 19% to $60.4bn. Bing hit a billion monthly active users. Search demand is at "an all-time high," per Pichai. The volume is there.

But Google Network revenue — the AdSense and Ad Manager line, which tracks ad spend on the open web outside Google's own surfaces — fell below $7bn for the first time, while the broader programmatic market grew 20%. Money is leaving the open web at the same time as queries are growing on the closed surfaces. I wrote about this in more detail on Friday, but the implication for this argument is specific: the value is increasingly being extracted on the AI surface, not delivered to the source page.

Which means the click is no longer the unit of value. The citation is. The summary that quoted you is. The comparison that ranked you is. If your business model and your content strategy are still optimised for the click, you are optimising for a unit of value that is shrinking even as the underlying demand grows.

The click is no longer the unit of value. The citation is.

This is the bit that the wire service analogy makes legible. A wire service doesn't get paid per reader of the downstream paper. It gets paid because it's the source — because publications that need quality material subscribe to it, link to it, credit it. Authority and citation become the economic basis. The reach happens through other surfaces.

That's the model your website is being pulled into, whether you like it or not.

Designing for extraction without losing the brand

There's a fair pushback to all of this, which is the one Manic anticipates: if I don't control the experience, how do I control the brand? It sounds like an excuse but it's a real concern. Brand isn't just a logo on a page. It's tone, framing, sequence, what gets emphasised, what gets de-emphasised. Strip all of that out and what you have left is a Wikipedia entry written in your voice for ten seconds before someone else paraphrases it.

I think the answer is genuinely uncomfortable for a lot of marketing leaders, and it's this: brand control in the AI era is upstream of presentation. It's in the words themselves, the structure, the named claims, the proprietary framings, the data you own, the language you've trained the market to associate with you. Not in the layout.

If your brand identity is mostly carried by typography and animation, you don't have a portable brand. You have a brochure aesthetic. The brands that survive recontextualisation are the ones whose actual content — the sentences, the claims, the proprietary terms, the named methodologies — carries the identity even when stripped of every visual cue.

Stratechery is a good example. Strip Ben Thompson's site of its design and the writing still sounds exactly like Ben Thompson. The aggregation theory framing, the strategic narrative, the way claims are structured. The brand is in the prose. You could extract any three paragraphs and a reader familiar with his work would recognise it.

Most corporate websites fail this test. Strip the design and what you have is generic B2B marketing copy that could be from any of fifty companies in the same vertical. The brand was being carried entirely by the wrapper. The wrapper isn't going to travel.

The practical shift

So what changes in how you actually run a content operation? A few things, and they're more structural than tactical.

First, the brief comes before the design. If "Lorem ipsum" appears anywhere in your website build process, the message came second and the layout came first — and that order produces brochures, not sources. The argument needs to be developed in prose before anyone opens Figma. If the prose can't carry the proposition without help, no amount of design is going to fix it; design will just hide the gap until extraction reveals it.

Second, every page needs to pass the extraction test. Pull any three paragraphs at random. Do they stand alone? Does the value proposition come through? Are the named claims attributable to your brand specifically? If the answers are no, the page is a brochure dressed up as content, and it will lose to a competitor whose content was actually built to travel.

Third, semantic structure stops being an SEO concern and becomes a brand concern. Headings that describe what the section actually contains, not what sounds clever. Lists that are lists because the items are genuinely parallel, not because the designer wanted three icons in a row. Tables when comparing structured things. Descriptive link text. The accessibility checklist that everyone has been ignoring for fifteen years is now load-bearing for AI visibility, and as I wrote on Friday about Google's agent-friendly guidance, this is the same checklist with new urgency behind it.

Fourth — and this is the one most teams will resist — measurement has to expand beyond the page. If you're only tracking sessions and conversions on your own site, you're measuring the surface that is shrinking in importance. You also need to be tracking citations, brand mentions in AI responses, share of voice in summaries. Most of this measurement infrastructure is still primitive, but pretending the click captures the full picture is no longer defensible. I've covered the measurement gap in more detail here for anyone trying to operationalise it.

The honest limits

A few things this argument doesn't cover, and where reasonable people might push back.

It doesn't apply equally to every business. If you're a transactional e-commerce business where the conversion happens on-site, the page experience still matters enormously. The wire service framing is most relevant for businesses where the discovery and consideration happen partly off-platform — which is most B2B, most professional services, most informational publishers, most considered-purchase consumer brands. If you're selling impulse-buy DTC products, the brochure still has its place.

It also doesn't mean design stops mattering. It means design has to do less of the work, not none of it. A well-designed page that also passes the extraction test is still better than an ugly page that passes it. The point is that design can no longer be the thing that holds the proposition together when nothing else does.

And the timeline is uncertain. The shift to AI-mediated discovery is real but uneven by vertical, by geography, by query type. Plenty of categories still see the majority of decisions made through traditional click-through behaviour. The brochure model isn't dying everywhere at the same rate.

But the direction is clear, and the businesses that are restructuring now — making content portable, brand-bearing, extractable — will have a meaningful advantage over the ones still treating the website as a destination. The destination model assumed you got the first read. The source model assumes you don't, and builds for that anyway. The first model is getting more fragile every quarter. The second is getting more valuable.

The wire service got it right a hundred years ago. The story has to work no matter who picks it up. We're just relearning it for a different generation of editors — ones that don't have a name, don't show up in your analytics, and have already filed the first version of your message before you've finished your morning coffee.