Recently, I contributed an AI-powered Schema.org JSON-LD module to Drupal that uses AI automators to generate Schema.org JSON-LD, building a knowledge graph that improves SEO/AEO by making it easier for machines to understand your website. The module was built with AI in 4 days, whereas the Schema.org Blueprints module with a similar goal took 4 years. I have been so shocked by how efficiently AI can code and build software that I realized, "AI ate my work, and I need to be okay with that." I wrote about how I am adjusting to this new "AI" normal.

A slightly different reckoning is unfolding for our websites because AI is consuming our content, thereby reducing traffic. Providing Schema.org JSON-LD is one way to feed the machines. AIs are becoming the front page of most websites. To adapt to this new "AI" normal, where an AI is the gatekeeper to your website, we need to evolve our approach to building and managing our websites.

Personally, "adaptation" feels like the right word to describe the challenge and change we, developers, site builders, managers, and owners, are facing right now. Adaptation is forced upon us by external constraints or opportunities, depending on your point of view, to evolve our approach to building and sharing information. There is a much larger discussion about the impact of AI on who we are, what we are building, and how we build. For now, I want to focus on what Drupal-built websites need to consider to adapt and keep up with the rapidly evolving digital landscape, which is largely out of our control.

How AIs are consuming our websites is out of our control. If you look back at how websites continually bent and tweaked to get a bump in page ranking, implementing now-defunct things like AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) because Google told us to, means we are going to have to do back flips to feed the data-hungry LLMs.

As soon as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google says to implement this or that to get our content into an AI-generated answer, everyone will do it. Schema.org is already an established way to feed structured data to search engines and machines, and at this point in the evolution of the web, it is a requirement for any information-driven website that wants to be relevant in discussions among its consumers outside the website.

The AI Schema.org JSON-LD module is a simple solution that might not be necessary to implement, but it's important to understand what it aims to accomplish.

First off, it is nudging you to implement an AI provider on your website, which is a major task unto itself for most organizations. Yet having an intelligent assistant available on your website will be essential.

Second, there is no perfect one-size-fits-all structured data schema. At the same time, we all agree that structured data is vital, and Drupal excels at defining and building it. The AI automators powering the module's Schema.org JSON-LD field are examining and leveraging Drupal's structured data and token replacement to transform a site's content model into a more AI-friendly Schema.org JSON-LD format. Using AI to enhance content and data is one of the immediate use cases.

In the end, having intelligence available on your website and using it to manage, create, and transform your data ensures you have control over what LLMs consume. Sadly, by helping LLMs consume our data, we are also helping them to consume our users and site traffic.

For the record, adapting doesn't mean giving up and not fighting; it just means we have to change how we do things. There is a collective WTF about the drop-off in visitor traffic across all websites, and, frankly, most of the AI site optimization tips I am seeing are best guesses.

If AIs are consuming our information, the only value proposition we can offer is user experience. I suggest we move beyond the traditional concept of a website's user experience as something to navigate and search through, and make it an interactive, domain-specific experience.

At this point in the blog post, I am venturing into new territory for me, yet we need to discuss and identify a "North Star" for what we, as developers, site builders, and business owners, should be working toward. The only reason I'm going here is that I saw something amazing from ImageX at DrupalCon Chicago and again at the AI Summit in NYC.

The only other time I felt a similar "ahah" moment was 15 years ago at Do It With Drupal! in Brooklyn, when Ethan Marcotte showed the audience the Boston Globe's responsive web design. Responsive web design was our way to adapt to mobile devices, and we need to do the same for AI.

Currently, we are primarily interacting with AI through chat and some voice interaction. ImageX's presentation is aptly titled "Beyond Chatbots: Creating Smarter, Personalized Experiences in Drupal with AG-UI," which shows how what starts as a chat can be curated and personalized into an interactive visual experience.

Here is another way to show you what I think the future of digital user experiences will be…

I know you think I am joking, but if we step back and recognize how coding agents make it easy to experiment, explore, and prototype new ways for people to interact with software and a website. I don't think rich, multi-modal user experiences are science fiction.

What I saw in ImageX's AG-UI demo is a user experience that delivers information in an interactive, visually appealing way, tailored to a domain-specific audience. Building a domain-specific user experience is the best way to bring users back from the AI site traffic gatekeepers, or at the very least, to ensure that when a user reaches our domains, we provide them with a five-star dining experience.

Yes, a domain-specific user experience should be the equivalent of dining in a fine restaurant.

I am doubtful that many website designers have ventured into saying that a website's user experience should be like dining at a five-star restaurant in New York City, because the amount of tedious work, preparation, coordination, and collaboration to create a single perfect meal for a table of four was not conceptually possible without AI. Now, AI excels at tedious work, preparation, coordination, and collaboration, and also makes an excellent busser and dishwasher.

Websites and restaurants have menus, and previously, my analogy would end there. Unlike a website, a really good restaurant has a hostess who guides you to your table, waitstaff who help you make the best choices, and a sommelier who asks you questions before making recommendations. If there are any problems, everyone is there to fix them.

This is a wild metaphor for a "North Star" domain user experience that Drupal should strive for, and yet, with how multiple AI agents can collaborate to write software, it is not a stretch for multiple agents to help serve and satisfy a patron.

Drupal has been around for 25 years because we adapt, evolve, and improve our software as the internet has evolved. This moment is no different, except that it is happening very quickly and is not limited to websites.

Every aspect of Drupal, the community, and the software will have to adapt to AI. Adapting means rethinking what we are building, how we are building things, and who we are building for. We need to be prepared to adapt our structured data and APIs to feed the machines, but we don't need to let the machines control our customers' experience. We need to take back control of the user experience by providing something that can't be replicated.

As I worked on this post, I kept thinking about how Disney World is the only place I've been that strives to and knows how to create a magical experience for every guest. Coming back to technology, the introduction of iPhones represents a moment where Apple took something that was frustrating, mobile devices and their user experiences, and made them magical again. Maybe Drupal's adaptation to AI is cooking up something magical and serving it to our patrons at a five-star restaurant.

Staying with my dining metaphor, I hope at Drupal Pivot next week in Boston, some of the leaders in our community gather at a large table and come up with some great ideas they can write on napkins and take back to their teams and communities. Do you have any good ideas or thoughts you'd like to share with our leaders and community?