THIS WEEK: YOUR WEB PRESENCE > YOUR WEB SITE

🌟 Editor's Note

Thanks for reading H4CKER, my newsletter on AI, marketing, and growth hacking. These days there’s ALWAYS something crazy happening in this world, and I try to capture the most exciting (and actionable) new updates and strategies and share them here. Send me your feedback at [email protected] or on X at @nathanabinford.

⛔ No One Wants To Visit Your Website

The zero click web doesn’t start and end with Google. No modern platform incentivizes leaving the platform and going somewhere else. And with LLMs integrating with apps faster than websites (see OpenAI’s comprehensive Apps SDK vs their unimpressive attempts to automate browser use with Atlas), it’s quite likely that websites won’t remain the dominant digital interface for long.

Google loves authority for ranking but needs to establish trust first. Otherwise you could just buy a lot of links and rank, and any SEO will tell you it’s not that simple.

In local search, Google Business Profiles and citation consensus are the vectors for establishing trust —i.e. that you are what you say you are.

In traditional search, it looks like entity stacking on popular platforms and digital PR via trusted publications.

And over time the emphasis on authority has diminished somewhat and trust signals are picking up the slack.

Don’t believe me? Build a bunch of guest post links to your site without building foundational links like social profiles, etc first. They won’t do much…

But establish your brand as a trusted entity first, and THEN blitz guest posts and see what happens.

Looking at these disparate facts individually, you could be forgiven for thinking “it’s just more of the same”; but if you look at them as the network effects of a potential shift in search algorithms in response to AI, it looks (quite clearly) like a gradual move towards a web of walled gardens fighting over your attention.

And, as much as we love to dump our collective responsibility, the reality is that it’s not Big Tech driving this shift as consumer demand. Big Tech is, of course, making the most of it, but the impetus actually comes from our own dissatisfaction.

Your website sucks.

It’s not your fault. All websites suck.

They’re an objectively terrible consumer experience; and you can tell because the simplest, least aesthetically-appealing websites are the most productive (Craigslist, Wikipedia, Amazon, Google, etc).

Websites are digital brochures. HTML/CSS/etc… these are markup languages that don’t do anything useful. To make websites useful, we’ve had to shoehorn all kinds of other technology into them and the marriage has been awkward at best.

Just try to imagine an agentic web where agents have to learn how to navigate every website differently because they’re all trying so hard to be aesthetically pleasing that they aren’t functionally useful.

It barely makes sense with a human at the keys. It makes zero sense if agents are browsing the web for us.

The zero click web is what happens when you try to prepare the world for agentic browsing and the web is powered by technology from the 90s. Everything has to change from the ground up.

And the first victim of progress will be your website.

⚙️ Apps, Not Websites

This is all heading towards a cyberspace vs a “web”. Webs are interconnected. That’s not what we have.

We have a myriad of walled gardens connected by thoroughfares, gate-kept and managed by Big Tech behemoths (or the government if you live in China).

Each of these walled gardens has a “web” based surface that you connect to, but like an iceberg floating in the ocean, there is a much deeper reality under the surface you engage without realizing it.

That’s today. This is the actual infrastructure to the web as it is currently.

Where we go from here will be more API/MCP/SDK based and will look more like how every SmartTV has it’s own version of the Spotify or YouTube app, ported into their framework.

Code is cheap now, so having to build glueware to integrate your API/MCP with another potential marketplace will always be a small price to pay to expand your reach.

Think of it: finely-tuned interactive experiences that are seamless and native to their environment. 

Quick to build, custom-fit to platform, fast, seamless, and native. It’s an objectively better experience, from developer to consumer.

Instead of having all our eggs in one basket with websites, directing all our resources to driving customers to one central place to convert them, we’re going to realize it’s much easier to convert them where they are.

And the platforms will win.

🚨 Near Term: What Matters Right Now

All of that is still a few years away, so don’t ditch your Wordpress site for a Facebook Page. That’s not what it’ll look like anyway.

There will still be websites. They just won’t be major destinations anymore. But it doesn’t matter…

What matters is that, starting right now, your website is less and less important when it comes to visibility. Your web presence, however, is paramount.

In fact, it’s more important than your presence in the real world.

A Google Business Profile is not always accurate in describing the reality of how a local business operates; but it is the gatekeeper of your ability to let anyone know what you do through Google.

Reviews, from Google to Facebook to niche sites like Clutch, Homeadvisor, or G2, are the court of public opinion (authentic or not).

What randoms say about your brand on Reddit is more true than anything you can say about yourself.

And so on…

Here’s the reality (and it’s not changing):

Big Tech trusts big brands more than your little company. For better or worse, they are creating a cartel of consensus around the information they’re all consuming and training their AI on.

Any message that you want to share will be under-powered against these generative giants, whose agents summarize everything everyone consumes (with guardrails).

If you want to convince people, you’ll have to convince the machines first.

♻️ Time Is A Flat Circle

What SEOs have called entity-stacking for years is now going primetime as brand marketing.

Remember the years-long (and, in retrospect, incredibly dumb) argument we all endured about do-follow vs no-follow links and whether no-follows have any value?

I wish I’d trusted my instincts on this matter earlier.

Trust is more important than raw authority, in SEO terms. It’s not quantity or quality of links, in the sense of link juice and domain rank and all of that.

TrustFlow, Majestic’s metric, gets closer to the heart of the matter. What really helps you rank, are links from sites that Google already trusts. The more trusted the site, the more valuable the links, regardless of do-follow or no-follow status.

Not because of authority (do-follows always win there) but because of trust and indexability. Medium has very high authority, but it’s hard to get your Medium content indexed these days because Google has seen so much spam on the platform.

It’s still high authority, but Google trusts it less now.

Who’s trusted right now is a big of a popularity contest. Obviously Reddit, but there is an entire ecosystem of popular platforms more trusted than the average site where you can build links.

Pinterest, Quora, Houzz, Flickr, AI platforms, YouTube, social networks, and even news sites, are all trusted and easy to build links on.

We can see where all this is going simply by watching how Google responds to parasite SEO. They’re essentially doing nothing.

There’s really nothing they can do because trust by association is the only way they have to validate quality. And the platforms love the attention, so they’re not going to do anything meaningful either.

It’s becoming more and more difficult to tell free SEO parasite strategies from “outdated” Web 2.0 strategies, because they are, in effect, the very same:

Build out branded profiles on every platform that makes sense, link them together, and add links to your home page and other relevant pages from the most visible and trustworthy of the bunch.

This is entity stacking, branding, and AI SEO all at once (because they’re converging).

This doesn’t mean you should abandon your website or deprioritize it, but it suggests that the content on your website isn’t as important as the content everywhere else.

Websites are for converting now. Social media is for influencing. And discovery will happen far from your website, in chats between friends, in private discord communities, and heavily moderated subreddits.

You don’t have the gravity to attract them to your website. It simply makes more sense to meet them where they are, and that means having a web presence that extends to every major platform and micro-community you can find; for the immediate visibility and referral traffic AND the second-order effects of ranking in traditional and AI search.

This is how you win in 2026.

⚙️ The Laboratory: Building Websites With Codex & Cursor Composer

I’ve totally abandoned Wordpress Page Builders at this point. If you’re technically competent, they don’t offer any advantages AND they’re bloated, buggy, and slow AF.

Instead I’m building websites in Cursor, using Codex for initial buildouts and Composer to iterate (FAST) on the details.

And I’m building websites that look better, and run faster, than I have in years.

Here’s what I show in the video:

✅ Planning With Mockups & Instructions: I start with a mockup on a whiteboard and a long prompt and Codex delivers 90% of what I need out of the gate.

✅  Fast Iteration With Cursor Composer: Cursor’s Composer model is lightning fast and smart enough to handle anything I would have previously taken to Claude Sonnet.

✅ Converting Designs Into Wordpress: How I convert HTML/CSS live mockups to working Wordpress themes in a few prompts.

Nathan Binford
AI & Marketing Strategist

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. Please, tell me what you like and what you don’t, and how to make this newsletter more valuable to you.

And if you need help with AI, marketing, or automation, grab time on my calendar for a quick chat and I’ll do my best to help!

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