Building Your Website Into a Trust Validation Layer for Both Humans and AI

He may not represent your ideal customer profile (ICP), but Kyle Rose can help you understand one of the biggest challenges enterprise marketers face.

Kyle is a systems engineer working in the public service, and last October, he published a post on his personal blog lamenting how online browsing has evolved.  

“The internet used to feel like a place; it was messy, diverse, and human. Now it is a product. It’s optimized, sanitized, and owned,” he wrote, harking back to the days of GeoCities pages and early message boards. “Back then, the internet was the wild west: no rules, no SEO hacks, just people building pages about what they loved.”

Kyle’s sentiments reflect a key finding in the latest research from WordPress VIP. According to the Future of the Web report, 74% of consumers say the internet already feels less human than it did 10 years ago. Design your website to revive that feeling of personal connection.

The journey has changed — the website hasn’t

AI now lets anyone get fast answers to almost any question, but people want to know what those answers are based upon.

Whether they’re reading one of Google’s AI overviews or a summary from ChatGPT or Perplexity, 33% of consumers say being able to see and click a source is their single biggest trust signal online. Another 42% say unattributed AI answers are their No. 1 frustration online, even above privacy concerns.

For most of web history, the website was a starting point: someone searched, found you, arrived cold, and the site’s job was to earn trust from zero.

That’s not how high-intent traffic arrives anymore. AI is making warm introductions to prospective customers, who are arriving on your site to confirm what they’ve been told and to learn more. 86% of consumers always or sometimes click through to the original source after an AI summary.

What kind of trust signals should a business website offer?

Once they’ve landed on your site, visitors are looking for more trust signals. That includes:

• Profiles of your senior leaders and details about your mission, vision and values
• Case studies that show how you’ve solved other people’s complex problems that allowed them to achieve measurable results
• Blog posts and eBooks that show your team understands their priorities and have advice on how to tackle them
• Clear, easy-to-find policies that transparently show how you use AI and handle their personal information
• Contact information that makes it fast and simple to connect with your team

AI search shapes expectations before visitors arrive.  Enterprises that neglect it risk losing people who might convert into long-term customers.

What’s the best way to optimize for digital conversions?

People need to feel confident about a brand before they convert into paying customers: 33% say the click-through moment is their top trust signal. Yet the Future of the Web report found just 17% of enterprises said their owned website is a top priority for the coming year.

Meanwhile, enterprise teams spend an average of 16.6 hours a week on AI visibility, where content is optimized to be scraped by LLMs and cited in search.

This is a misallocation that’s hiding in plain sight: digital investments shouldn’t be stacked entirely on the discovery side of the funnel. If your website doesn’t live up to the credibility the AI implied when it cited you, you’ve failed at the most important moment in the funnel, which is when the consumer was already halfway convinced.

The scale of that imbalance just got starker. According to Cloudflare Radar, bot and agentic traffic has now officially surpassed human traffic for the first time in internet history, arriving years ahead of Cloudflare’s own 2027 projection. Human visits aren’t declining in absolute terms, but as a share of total web traffic, they’re a shrinking minority. Every human visit is now higher-stakes than ever — and a website that fails them is a costly mistake.

When a consumer clicks through from an AI summary to your website, they’re checking whether your brand is real — whether the voice and specificity match what the AI cited. Thoughtful content in a consistent brand tone does that.

How can websites be developed to serve humans and AI agents equally well?

Websites have always existed to serve two audiences: people and search engines like Google.

Brands start off creating content that will help their target audiences, but SEO techniques were born out of a recognition that search engine algorithms will determine what URLs show up when people look for information online. AI answer engines represent how that search experience is changing, how brands need to adjust their websites in response.

Many business leaders are already seeing the signs:

• 69% of enterprise decision-makers told us content that isn’t structured and open risks becoming invisible to AI entirely.
• Slowing down to fine-tune your site isn’t an option, though: 72% say publishing speed and freshness still matter for AI discovery.

While AI agents reward structured, open, machine-readable information, converting a prospective customer depends on how credible they feel about what they see on your site. The rise of social media, AI providers, and other internet shifts is making them more skeptical by nature:

• 75% are concerned online information is being controlled by platforms
• 80% of consumers say it’s important that information remains openly accessible online

You can only address those concerns by presenting them with a website that fulfills their expectations when the click lands.

The experience should never feel generic, outdated, or inconsistent with the credibility the AI’s citation implied. Otherwise you might as well not have been cited within AI search at all.

What’s a strong example of a human-centered website experience?

Pew Research Center is a clear example of what this looks like in practice: open and structured enough for AI to parse, fresh enough to stay surfaced, and human enough to convert when someone arrives.

Like many enterprises, Pew needed to make sure its research was accessible to LLMs and structured clearly enough to preserve accuracy. By working directly with a WordPress VIP Frontend Deployed Engineer, Pew improved LLM crawler handling and visibility, as well as content representation for factual accuracy.

This means Pew’s research will be properly attributed with the right number when it gets summarized in AI search. Once people click through, Pew earns trust by presenting a variety of tools to search through and explore its authoritative data, along with connections to real-world experts and quizzes that personalize its research.

Brands like Pew know that developing these experiences doesn’t happen through AI bolt-ons. It requires a content infrastructure designed, from the ground up, to serve both audiences without compromise.

Brands that build this infrastructure now compound their advantage over time. Best of all, your website will look and feel as human as the people behind it, which is the best way to attract the people who will support your business.