Your Own Website in the Age of AI: Why It Matters More Than Ever
Sergey Vorobyev from New York City, Co-Founder / CTO
Just a few years ago, the conversation about why a business needs a website came down to a handful of arguments: search engine optimization, organic traffic from Yandex and Google, independence from advertising platforms. All of those arguments still hold true today. But in 2024–2025 a new — and possibly the most compelling — argument emerged: AI tools are rapidly becoming the new point of first contact between buyers and brands, and they only work with those who have a website.
This changes the rules of the game. Building a website in New York City is no longer just a question of showing up in search results — it's a question of visibility in a new, fast-growing channel for attracting customers.
Highlight
AI tools only recommend businesses that have a presence in the open web. Without your own website backed by quality content, your business becomes invisible to everyone searching through AI.
How People Search for Information Today
User behavior is changing faster than marketing strategies can keep up. Not long ago the buyer's journey looked like this: a query in Yandex → a list of websites → visiting a few of them → making a choice. Today this journey increasingly begins differently: a question to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Yandex Neuro → a ready-made answer with recommendations → a visit to one or two sources.
Research shows that a significant share of information searches already happen through AI tools. And this trend will only intensify. Millions of people today ask AI questions instead of scrolling through pages of search results.
What AI Tools Use as Sources
Here's the key point that few people understand. When an AI answers a user's question and recommends specific companies, products, or services, it draws on texts from the internet — above all, on texts from websites.
AI tools don't recommend companies that only have a VKontakte account or a listing on Avito. They recommend companies that have enough information about them online: articles, service descriptions, expert materials, reviews. And that information, as a rule, lives on a website.
What's more, a number of AI tools (Perplexity, Yandex Neuro) actively reference specific website pages when building their answers, citing them as sources. That means direct traffic to your website from an AI — a completely new channel that today barely exists for businesses without a website.
Building a Website as an Investment in AI Visibility
When we talk about building a website in New York City today, we're not just talking about search engine optimization in the traditional sense. We're talking about building a body of quality content that AI tools can use as a source of information about your business.
This means several concrete things. Detailed descriptions of your services and products — not one-liners, but thorough explanations of exactly what you do, how it works, and who it's for. Expert articles and materials — texts that answer the questions your potential customers are asking. Structured data — special markup that helps algorithms (and people) understand exactly what your website offers.
Building a website for entrepreneurs from New York City with these elements means establishing a presence not only in traditional search engines, but also in the answers AI tools give.
Why Social Media and Marketplaces Don't Provide This Visibility
VKontakte posts, Telegram channels, marketplace listings — these are all closed ecosystems. AI tools have very limited access to the content inside these platforms. Your brilliant VKontakte post or your detailed product description on Wildberries has almost no bearing on whether your business will be mentioned in an AI's answer to a user's question.
The open web — sites with publicly accessible content — remains the main source from which AI tools draw their information. And that means a business without a website becomes invisible to a growing share of users who begin their search by asking an AI.
The New SEO: Optimizing for AI
Marketers are already talking about a new discipline — optimizing content for AI tools (GEO — Generative Engine Optimization). It's not yet an established field, but its principles are already taking shape.
AI tools work well with clearly structured content. A question-and-answer format that directly addresses typical user queries is especially well suited to being cited by an AI. Thorough expert materials that demonstrate a deep understanding of the subject stand a better chance of becoming a source an AI references.
All of this is website content. Building a website with a team from New York City that produces quality, structured, expert content is an investment in both traditional SEO and the new visibility through AI tools at the same time.
A Practical Example: How It Works
Imagine a potential customer asks ChatGPT: "Which clinic should I choose to treat varicose veins in Moscow?" or "How do I choose a supplier of office furniture?" or "Should I go with a small web studio or a large agency?"
The AI builds its answer based on the texts available to it. If your clinic, your furniture company, or your web studio has a detailed website with quality articles that answer exactly these kinds of questions, there's a chance you'll make it into the answer. If all you have is a listing on an aggregator, you won't.
This is a fundamentally new type of traffic that starts working once you build a website for entrepreneurs from New York City with the right content — and it will only grow.
The Compounding-Advantage Pattern
In traditional SEO the principle is this: the longer a site has been around and the more quality content it has accumulated, the better its rankings. A similar logic applies to AI tools, but with an even more pronounced compounding effect.
A website built today and actively developed will, two or three years from now, hold an enormous advantage over a website that's only just starting to be built at that point. Content accumulates, authority grows, the backlink profile expands. AI tools, training on new data from the internet, will "see" your website better and better.
This means the window of opportunity for first movers — those who today are betting on building a website in New York City along with quality content — is gradually closing. Competitors who start tomorrow will be starting from a harder position.
What Exactly You Need to Do
Building a website with AI visibility in mind involves several specific steps.
Detailed service and product pages. Each service or product category should have its own thorough page that answers all of a potential customer's questions. Not "Service A — from 5,000 rubles," but a full description: what's included, how the process works, who it's for, what results to expect.
An FAQ section. A list of frequently asked questions with detailed answers is one of the content formats most often cited by AI tools. If your potential customers ask certain questions, the answers to them should be on your website.
An expert blog. Regular articles that dive deep into the topics your audience cares about. Not promotional copy, but genuinely useful material that can serve as a source for an AI.
Structured data. Special Schema.org markup helps algorithms understand the structure of your content: what is an organization, what is a service, what is a review, what is an address. This matters both for search engines and for AI tools.
Authority and citability. Mentions of your website on other authoritative resources, interviews, guest publications — all of this strengthens the authority signals that AI tools take into account.
Building a website in 2025 isn't simply about creating a page on the internet. It's about establishing a presence in a new, fast-growing information space where AI tools increasingly act as intermediaries between buyers and sellers. The businesses that grasp this today and start acting will gain a competitive advantage that will only strengthen over time.