By Karen Fuller, Office Manager & Creative, Accent
Accent has been in business since 1990, and we have been building websites and helping businesses get noticed online since the late 1990s. In that time we have watched the route from "someone has a need" to "someone becomes a customer" change several times over. The latest change is the biggest yet, and it is happening quietly. Your website is no longer being read only by people. It is increasingly being read, interpreted and recommended by artificial intelligence, and that AI is now making decisions on your customers' behalf.
This article explains what that means in practical terms, where AI sits in the chain of events that leads to a sale or a new enquiry, and what you can do to make sure your business is understood, featured and represented accurately.
A Change I Have Seen Before
I have spent 27 years in the reprographics and photography industries, and much of that time has been about one thing: making sure an image or a message arrives at its destination exactly as it was intended. In print, a colour that shifts between the screen and the press, or a caption that drifts away from its photograph, can change how an entire piece is received. Every stage of reproduction is a chance for the original to be altered.
I mention this because the shift we are seeing with AI feels remarkably familiar. Your website is the original. Search engines, social platforms and now AI assistants are the stages of reproduction between you and your customer. The question has always been how faithfully your message survives the journey. What has changed is who, or what, is doing the reproducing.
Google and Social Media: The Introducers
For a long time, search engines and social media platforms acted as introducers. Someone searched for "accountant in Norfolk" or scrolled past a sponsored post, and the platform presented a set of options. A list of links, a map of local businesses, a feed of posts. The platform made the introduction, but the person still did the choosing. They clicked through, read your website, looked at your images, compared you with your competitors and made up their own mind.
For many years this was the only realistic way to capture attention online. If you wanted to be found, you needed to rank well in Google or perform well on social media, and an entire industry grew up around doing exactly that.
The difficulty is that these platforms are governed by algorithms, and algorithms change. Most business owners will have experienced it at some point: a website that ranked well for years suddenly slips, or social posts that once reached hundreds of people now reach a handful. It is very easy to get lost in the algorithm, and it often happens through no fault of your own. Even so, the arrangement was fairly simple. If you were introduced, the customer came to you and judged you on your own terms.
AI is the Middleman Who Makes Decisions
AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Claude work differently. They are not simply introducers presenting a list of options. They are middlemen who read the options for the customer, decide which ones are worth mentioning, summarise them in their own words and present a recommendation.
Ask an AI assistant to suggest a web design agency in Norwich, a reliable plumber, or the best family-run holiday company for a birdwatching trip, and you will usually receive a short, confident, conversational answer. It might name three businesses and explain why each one could suit you. That answer can be genuinely persuasive, because it reads like advice from a knowledgeable friend rather than a page of adverts.
For the business being described, this changes everything. The customer may never visit your website at all. They may form their entire impression of you from two or three sentences that an AI wrote, based on what it managed to find and understand. If the AI does not understand what you do, who you do it for and why you are good at it, you may simply not be mentioned. And if you are not mentioned, you are not in the running.
When the Middleman Gets It Wrong
There is a catch, and anyone who played Pass the Message as a child will recognise it. Every time a message is passed along, there is a chance it changes a little. AI assistants summarise, paraphrase and combine information from many sources, and in doing so they can make mistakes. They might quote an old price, list a service you stopped offering years ago, confuse you with a similarly named company, or fill a gap in their knowledge with something that sounds plausible but is simply wrong.
In print, we would call this a reproduction error, and we would catch it at the proof stage. With AI, there is no proof stage that you can sign off. The only real defence is to make the original as clear, consistent and unambiguous as possible, so there is less room for the message to drift as it is passed along.
Two Audiences, One Website
This is not a distant prediction. Cloudflare, the network company whose network sits in front of more than 20% of the web (and with whom Accent works closely), recently published research under the title "The Internet has a second audience". It makes for striking reading.
According to Cloudflare, more than half of the traffic crossing its network in 2026 was not human, the first time that has happened. Over the past year, daily requests from AI agents on its network grew by more than 1,700%. Cloudflare describes these agents as software acting on behalf of people: something between a human visitor and a traditional bot. They do not look at adverts, but there is usually a real person behind them who has asked a question or wants a job done.
Two of Cloudflare's observations are particularly relevant to the businesses we work with. The first is that agent traffic follows human routines, with a weekly rhythm and a dip over the summer holidays. In other words, behind most of these visits is a genuine customer. As Cloudflare puts it, if you turn an agent away, you may be turning away the person who sent it.
The second is that agents behave differently from the crawlers that collect content to train AI models. An agent comes back each time someone asks about your subject, so this traffic grows with the number of questions people ask, not with how much you publish. Every time a potential customer asks an AI about your sector, your website is effectively being interviewed again.
There is a less comfortable side to this too. Cloudflare reports that some heavily crawled sectors, including retail, software, IT services and financial services, have seen human visits fall by as much as 40% in under a year, as AI answers questions that would previously have sent people to a website. Being found and being visited are no longer the same thing.
This is why we now talk about websites having two distinct audiences. The first is the human visitor, who wants a clear, attractive, trustworthy experience. The second is the AI middleman, which wants clean, well-structured, factual information that it can read quickly and represent accurately. A good website today needs to serve both, without compromising either.
Where AI Sits in the Journey to a Sale
It helps to think about the customer journey as a chain of events. Traditionally, it started with a need, moved on to a search or a recommendation from someone they knew, then a visit to a few websites, a comparison, an enquiry and, eventually, a sale.
AI has inserted itself very early in that chain, often at the point of discovery and comparison. A potential customer may now ask an assistant to shortlist suppliers before they have visited a single website. By the time they arrive at your site, if they arrive at all, the AI may already have framed their opinion of you. In some cases, particularly with simple purchases and bookings, AI agents are beginning to complete the task themselves, comparing options and acting on the person's behalf.
That makes the AI's understanding of your business a genuine commercial issue, not a technical curiosity. It now influences who reaches your shortlist, how you are described compared with your competitors, and whether the enquiry ever comes your way. The businesses that do well will be the ones that are easy for both audiences to understand.
How to Get Noticed by Both Audiences
The encouraging news is that much of what helps AI understand your website is also good practice for human visitors, and for traditional search. There is no magic trick, but there are clear principles.
Start with clarity. Your website should state plainly what you do, who you do it for, where you operate and what makes you different. AI cannot infer what you have not written down, and vague marketing language gives it very little to work with. Specific, factual statements such as the services you offer, the areas you cover, your years of experience and the types of clients you serve are far easier for an AI to repeat accurately.
Consistency matters just as much. Your business name, address, contact details, services and prices should match across your website, your Google Business Profile, social media accounts and directory listings. When the information an AI finds is contradictory, the chance of errors increases considerably. Out-of-date pages are one of the most common sources of AI mistakes, so it is worth removing or updating anything that no longer reflects your business.
Demonstrate your expertise and credibility. Google's guidance on quality content centres on experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, and AI systems look for similar signals. Named authors with genuine credentials, case studies, client testimonials, accreditations and clearly dated content all help to show that your information comes from a reliable source.
Look at the technical foundations. Structured data (sometimes called schema markup) labels the information on your pages in a format machines can read without guesswork, such as your opening hours, your services or the author of an article. Fast, accessible, well-built pages are easier for both people and software to read. Cloudflare has even introduced tools such as Markdown for Agents, which lets AI read a page without the styling meant for human eyes, and WebMCP, which allows a website to expose actions directly rather than making an agent guess which button to press.
Finally, check what your website is allowing in. Many websites now use firewall and bot settings that may be blocking AI services without the owner realising. Cloudflare has recently replaced its single "block AI bots" switch with separate controls for search, agents and AI training, and in September 2026 introduced a way to remain visible in search while asking operators not to use your content for training. Deciding which of these to allow is a business decision, and it should be made deliberately rather than left to a default setting.
Where to Go From Here
The way customers find businesses is changing, but the underlying goal has not. You still want the right people to discover you, understand you and choose you. What has changed is that there is now a second reader between you and your customer, and that reader decides what gets passed along. Being understood by the middleman has become just as important as being understood by the customer.
The good news is that you do not need to overhaul everything at once to make progress. A sensible first step is simply to ask the AI assistants what they know about you. Ask them to recommend a business like yours in your area, then ask them directly about your company. The answers are often revealing: sometimes reassuring, sometimes surprising, and occasionally wrong in ways that could be costing you enquiries. Make a note of what they say, because it gives you a starting point to measure against.
Next, look at your website through the eyes of someone who knows nothing about you. Is it immediately clear what you do, who you do it for and where you work? Are your services, prices and contact details the same on your website as they are on your Google Business Profile, social media and directory listings? Are there old pages, past offers or retired services still sitting online for an AI to find? Tidying these up is rarely glamorous, but it is often where the quickest improvements are made.
It is also worth asking whoever manages your website how it handles AI visitors. Many sites have security or bot settings that were switched on for good reasons but may now be keeping AI assistants out entirely. Whether you welcome search, agents or AI training is a business decision, and it deserves a deliberate answer rather than a default one.
Finally, treat this as an ongoing habit rather than a one-off task. AI assistants update their knowledge, your business evolves, and the tools available to website owners are developing month by month. Checking how you are represented every few months, in the same way you might review your search rankings or your reviews, will help you spot problems before they cost you business.
To return to where I started: in print, the best way to guarantee a faithful reproduction is a clear, well-prepared original. The same is true here. The clearer and more consistent your website is, the less room there is for your message to change as it passes from one audience to the next, and if you'd like a second pair of eyes on any of this, we're always happy to help.
About the Author
Karen Fuller is the office manager and creative at Accent, based at the Enterprise Centre, University of East Anglia. She has worked in the reprographics and photography industries for 27 years, and holds a degree in fine art and qualifications and awards in photography and design. Her background in reproducing images and messages faithfully across different media informs her interest in how businesses are represented in a world increasingly mediated by AI.
A Note on How This Article Was Produced
The editorial position taken here is Karen Fuller's own, drawn from more than two decades of hands-on work in print reprographics and design. AI tools were used to help summarise research and to shape the author's views into a working draft. Every claim was verified, and the final text was reviewed and edited by a person, who takes responsibility for it.
Sources and Further Reading
Cloudflare, "The Internet has a second audience", Matthew Conroy, 30 September 2026: blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-web
Google Search Central, "Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content": developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content