The Status of the Web in 2025: Building for AI, Privacy, Speed, and Structured DataThe Status of the Web in 2025: Building for AI, Privacy, Speed, and Structured Data

The Status of the Web in 2025: Building for AI, Privacy, Speed, and Structured Data Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today, and only joining me today, is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir? You are muted. 

Carman Pirie: I’m excited for today’s guest. A delight. A delight, in fact. 

Jeff White: Yes. Oh, he is. He’s amazing. He’s amazing. 

Carman Pirie: No, it’s… Look, I’m happy to be here. It’s good to be joining you for one of the rare occasions when we don’t bring somebody else onto the show, frankly. And just kick around what’s going on these days in one area or another of the wonderful world of manufacturing.

Marketing. 

Jeff White: Yeah. And not often that we get to explore the more, maybe a bit more of the technical side of manufacturing marketing. Plays into some of the things I’m interested in for sure. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. And folks, just I guess to bring it into the loop, what we’re thinking is that, there’s a lot of.

Changes happening right now, not just driven by ai. Certainly partially or at least in large, in somewhat in large part driven by ai, but not exclusively. And and these changes impact frankly, just if you’re building a website in 20 25, 20 26 you need to be thinking about it differently.

You do. And there’s just been some changes in the last year or two or of e evolutions. One might say it’s not just not complete like 180 degree shifts, but more just things that kind of were somewhat important before and that were very important. And I think it would be good for.

Listeners to understand some of those dynamics and just be thinking about them should they be heading into a website redesign initiative or thinking about how they evolve their digital platform more broadly. 

Jeff White: Yeah, and I mean it, to say that the game has changed is almost to undersell it a little bit.

Even if you were talking about three years ago. There’s no question that most of your traffic came probably in some way or another from Google. You probably weren’t really thinking about how you might show up in AI generated results. Yeah. You probably were still deploying a content strategy that was largely search optimization focused.

And you were also probably able to track people in ways that maybe you can’t now and won’t be able to in the future. So 

Carman Pirie: anyway, and that tracking part is an important one because of course it, so much of the the go to market motion to use industry lingo is fueled by that.

So yeah, let’s let’s dive into it. And again I do wanna stress it’s not. It’s not exclusively a AI in its impact. And I think, the one the way I’d like to kick it off, Jeff, if we could is not AI driven really at all. I, because I think one of the things that seems to have changed is the importance of speed.

And to me, like speed online has always been a lot like. Leads if you ask somebody how many leads should they, do they want the answer is more and a lot more. And there’s no way that’s a bad thing. Unless they’re just unqualified, and similar with speed.

Like it was like, oh, we got speed’s. Good. But it was like, and of course. I think people treated it as though it’s a nice to have. Sure. It would be nice if the web was faster. Sure. If it would be. It would be nice if our site was faster and sure, maybe it is impacting our rank a bit, but boy do we like these WordPress plugins.

Yeah. Yeah. Or there’s, or they’re certainly willing to make a lot of other trade-offs it seems, both in terms of not optimizing content for speed, site structure for speed, WordPress plugins for speed. My goodness. One of the biggest things we’ve ever seen. But, so I guess what have you, what are you seeing there that, like how has the conversation around speed evolved?

I 

Jeff White: think it’s changing quite a lot and I think if you put yourself. If you’re thinking of your web property, if you’re a marketer and a manufacturer and you’re thinking of what you know you’re weighing those trade offs between the functionality of another WordPress plugin or another jQuery add in to track things, or you’re weighing that against what it might be able to give you in terms of knowledge about your prospects and the people coming to your website, then maybe you’re probably willing to.

Give up a bit of performance in order for some additional data about those prospects. But if you’re thinking about how you use the web, even, in a B2B context, when you’re researching a purchase, you are annoyed by a lack of speed and a lack of performance. If a site takes a while to load and you don’t see anything for a bit, or it’s jumping around as it loads, ’cause you’re looking at it on mobile and it wasn’t necessarily coded properly for that, or, you click on something and then it, everything has to start anew and all that. Those are things that Google. Actually tracks. And there, if you’ve been in the marketing game for the last number of years, you would’ve heard of core web vitals.

And tho those are the three and there are more. But the three core items that Google is tracking that influence rank from a speed perspective. I know we’re gonna get into a little bit how maybe search performance isn’t as important as it once was later in this episode, but it’s still, I think 

Carman Pirie: it’s still important.

It does. It can’t throw the baby out with a bath water here. But what, so what are the three web vitals, just so people are clear on what we’re talking about? 

Jeff White: Yeah. The three that we’re talking about are largest Contentful paint. And of course, web engineers have to use terms that really sound grandiose, but aren’t necessarily.

And what they mean by that is that, is the largest area of the screen that you can see. Getting filled with content quickly, and there are guidelines around how quickly that needs to appear. So if you have a really, if your main kind of banner image is a giant video that’s six megabytes, and somebody is unfortunately looking at this on a 3G connection on their phone in New York City if they have to wait 10 seconds for the area, that is the biggest space that you’re looking at to fill with content.

You’re gonna be degraded on that metric. So the idea is to ensure that those large areas load quickly to optimize your images to, use fewer bits of JavaScript that load before the page overall completes loading. Like those things are all really important. The next one is cumulative layout shift, and this is one of those ones that, as a designer, it just makes me twitch exactly what it’s describing.

So basically as a page loads, especially on a mobile device, if you’re talking about a responsive website, that has different, different layout parameters at different screen widths, so laptops versus tablets versus phones versus mid-size phones and all of these different things. You can have what are called break points that determine that if, as those pieces of content are loading into the site, they cause other elements to shift down the page or move around and confuse the viewer about.

What they’re looking at or where it went. If a lot of that is going on, you’re gonna be graded poorly on the cumulative layout shift. So you’ll want the site to render quickly and in place and be intuitive right outta the gate, no matter what device you’re browsing on. 

Carman Pirie: So it’s what, when that’s not.

Operating properly leads to that fault where you think you clicked on one button or one thing because it’s loaded in, but something, yeah. 

Jeff White: Yeah. Got it. Yeah. And the other one is a combination of the two and it’s interaction to next paint. So when you go to do something.

Like how quickly does the next thing load? Does the next screen load quickly? Are you able to interact with it quickly? Does the nav appear last 

Carman Pirie: as opposed to leaving you wondering, did I click that or not? Did it get yeah, 

Jeff White: yeah, exactly. And ensuring that the next thing that you see, whether it’s on the current page, so if you scroll and all the images are being lazy loaded, which means they get loaded early, that can be good, but obviously you have to.

Kind of play with those parameters somewhat. If those images as you scroll down the page are available to you, you have a higher quality interaction to next paint. Yeah. And this is a difficult balance to play with because we have, especially as marketers, typically that means you’re in a place that has good.

Bandwidth. You’re probably working with high quality equipment and newish phones and newish laptops, and you have a, fiber to the office kind of thing, and you really don’t think about slower speeds. But if you are selling into areas that don’t necessarily have the same quality of network, it’s still a concern.

It’s crazy to me because we were talking about this in 2005, and 20 years later we’re still talking about how there are regions of the world that are without high speed internet. 

Carman Pirie: But even with high speed, it’s still a concern. Like you’re still getting, you’re studying ranked, it’s still getting.

Factored in to how how your search performance will 

Jeff White: well, and a big part of that is the fact that there is so much bloat in every content management system unless you’ve explicitly tried to engineer it out. If you’re coming at this with enterprise grade systems. Like Adobe Content Manager.

If you’re coming at this with WordPress, all of these platforms, if you are using pre-made templates that load a whole bunch of JavaScript up front, five megabytes, it’s not uncommon for there to be five megabytes of JavaScript that loads before anything else is even rendered on the page.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. 

Jeff White: Or you’re because those thing, those commands need to be available to the rest of the page. There’s different ways to compact that and make it work. But, if you’re, if you have a two second expectation of how quickly that page should load, but you also want to show three, 3D models on the page.

You have to balance it out, figure out what’s most important. 

Carman Pirie: It’s interesting that you’ve said this a few times. This notion of you have to balance it out. You have to figure it out. It’s not just about applying a, the obvious single fix. It sounds almost a little bit more like CRO or something where you’re having to invest in it and work through some experiments to optimize for what is best for.

For you for both your users as well as your rank 

Jeff White: For sure. And I think that, the idea here is that you want to invest in speed where it makes sense, similar to how you would invest in pay-per-click advertising, where it makes sense, you’re looking for, you’re looking to buy keywords that have some intent to buy.

Maybe you’re optimizing the most important pages that have a role in the buyer’s journey in your site 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. That are most important to get them to rank it somewhere. Exactly. Yeah. 

Jeff White: You’re investing in the speed there and then you can spread some of those some of that extra speediness throughout the site.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. But think so many speed investments kind of impact the site overall anyway. For sure. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Actually belong to some of those evolutions in privacy that you spoke about. Yeah. The. It, I’m just gonna say I think for the average non marketer out there, or even maybe for a lot of marketers, it can be pretty annoying to hear all this conversation about how privacy is getting more strict.

But you, it seems like if you mention a product when you’re speaking to your significant other, it starts being marketed to you on Instagram the next day. Like it, sometimes it can feel like it’s hard to square these two experiences, but what do we need to know about. Privacy in 20 25, 20 26 as we’re building for the web.

Jeff White: It’s been talked about for years. Google themselves have waffled on what they’re going to do from a cookie protection standpoint. We already know that apple and other browser makers have taken more of a privacy first stance and automatically disallow. Tracking cookies and tracking pixels and other things like that.

But Chrome still has the vast majority of, if you’re still using Chrome and Google to search for things, then that is the one place where you are still able to track certain things. For now, Google has committed to basically eliminating. Tracking cookies and their ilk by the end of this year.

We’ll see if that actually comes to pass or if they waffle on it again. But it, it does seem like the writing is in the sand somewhat. For this, you have, different. That’s how 

Carman Pirie: you know you’re on the coast, ladies and gentlemen. The writing’s not on the wall anymore, but rather in the sand, it’s 

Jeff White: not on the wall.

Yeah, it’s moved to the sand. I was at the beach, on the weekend which is rare for me. But yeah, so you need to start thinking about how you’re going to track the users on your site using what’s called first party data. So these are things that you can stand up within Google Tag Manager that allow you to.

Basically own your own data about the people that visit your web properties and track things internally. You’re not getting all the benefit of all the different AdWorks, TE or ad networks telling you, where this person has been and what their interests are and maybe what company they work for and all of those things.

If you can. You can work within the confines of your own owned platforms, as long as that data isn’t being shared with anybody else or being brought in from anywhere else and build your own database of customers and prospects and leads from the site. Getting that information and beginning to compile that as soon as possible is gonna become essential to being able to understand who’s coming to your site, what are they doing when they get there, and you’re not going to necessarily be as easily able to see that information or create targeting with the kinds of things that you maybe were before.

So that’s coming. 

Carman Pirie: It feels to me that’s man, especially if

I’ll, I don’t know, but it feels if you’re a larger manufacturer, I many. There’s big manufacturers out there that are like number one or two in their category. They have a, almost a defacto level of market share without much marketing at all. Simply be, because of being a household name and in the space and or a fa factory hold name in the space when they say.

But and it seems to me, because those are the people that maybe have. 30, 40% of the total addressable market coming to their website at some point over a year, it seems to me to be a real opportunity for them to harness the, their lead. And again and this makes me think that for the David’s versus the Goliath of the world, it’s gonna be another, the privacy rules are gonna make it even that much harder to.

To climb up the ladder. 

Jeff White: Does that make 

Carman Pirie: sense? 

Jeff White: It does, but we still haven’t gotten to the part where we talk about how people are getting found more in AI engines than they are in search engines. So I think it’s important, yes. But maybe going forward with the way people are actually trying to find things, it becomes less important in terms from a targeting perspective and from it getting found.

Carman Pirie: If you’re gonna bring that up, let’s just jump right into it. What are we doing? Because everybody knows, look I’ll I’ll say this, here at a cool partners, we onboarded our first client earlier in 2025 from our sources report, we know found us via chat, GPT that’s a great thing. So many of our clients have, experienced that too in the last year or so. They’re seeing their first bits of lead flow coming from from generative engine search. So I guess how do we need to be thinking about web builds to accommodate that shift?

Jeff White: I think the web builds themselves maybe are probably fairly consistent with what they were before. At least in terms of, your content management system and stuff like that. How you structure the content on individual pages needs to change. We need to tell these engines what things are, and I honestly, I.

I wonder for how long we’re going to need to do that before they are able to begin to deduce what types of content they’re indexing. And what it means and how it relates to other things contextually. But for now, we need to use what’s called structured data on the content within our sites, especially as we’re thinking about the products that we sell.

So these are. Called Schemas and there are a number of them for all kinds of different in industries. It’s not dissimilar to N-A-I-C-S codes and that sort of thing. Like most industries have a way of marking up the products that they sell. There are construction frameworks for building and construction.

There are industrial frameworks for products within that. And then there are additional, more basic, schema components around things like addresses and dates and other types of content, even podcasts, as an example. You have to tell, tell the internet that your piece of content is a podcast, and this is the podcast it’s part of, and this is the episode number and all those different.

Thanks. So that extra level of markup is going to become essential to getting found within these platforms, especially for things like skew searches and product searches within niche categories and all of that. That’s gonna be really important. 

Carman Pirie: And I think it’s important to point out that this isn’t new.

You could have Mark, you could have done all this. Four years ago, it just, it wasn’t as important. There’s an, there’s a lift associated with how far down this path you go. And people, rightly made certain, balanced judgments about how far down the road they ought to be going.

Is a juice worth the squeeze. And I guess what you’re saying is that what’s changed is. It’s so much more worth it now because we have for generative engine optimization. It’s absolutely critical, 

Jeff White: absolutely. For these things to begin showing up in there. We need to tell them what kinds of content that they’re looking at so that the engine understands it.

But you also have to about how people interact. With gpt, it’s not the same. When you go to Google, you search, four person tent or something just that, and then maybe refine your search from there. In GPTs, it’s more conversational. May, maybe you’re leaving out the pleases and thank yous in order to not burn up the the extra energy that those terms apparently use.

But you are asking questions in a lot of ways, so structuring the other content around your products and around what you sell. Around this notion still, this is how we used to write for SEO even 20 years ago, but now it’s even more important is understanding the kinds of questions that people are asking, how they’re asking them, and how they’re refining those questions within the AI platforms.

And what’s interesting about this is that, we think of. Domination in the search field belongs to Google. Domination in the AI field still belongs to chat GPT, and that means Microsoft. So Bing is a more important platform in terms of being able to research how people are using. Tools like chat, GPT than maybe Google is and Gemini and the other platforms.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. It’s a thing that I think people miss and and especially when you look at something like O three where, it’s a reasoning engine, so you can actually watch it. Reason what are the queries that it’s it’s searching. And then you can reverse engineer that.

There are some more kind of technical ways to do that, or you can do it the hard way, but nevertheless, it is it is bing that’s being queried at that point. Yeah. I think people need to be mindful of that that they are operating in a somewhat of a different ecosystem. And it does pull you out of, i, I think it was easy to fall into the trap of saying, you know what, generative advantage and optimization is just an awful lot good quality. SEO yeah, what was good before is even better now. And that’s true, but that’s not all the truth, is it? It’s just that’s not the total story.

Jeff White: For sure. And yeah it’s a really interesting time and I don’t wanna, that, that kind of using Bing to reverse engineer chat GPT queries that may be a hack for now. It may not last. It’s one of those things, but at least it can help you understand how people are using those tools.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. I think that is important to note too, because there’s so much it’s changing so fast that it is important to know if you’re looking at a hack versus what does this tell me about how that helps me better understand how this functions at a core level. Yeah. What then, I know that you mentioned importance of structured data and it somewhat connected to it.

There’s been some enhancements. I think we see most of ’em out of Europe, but a around just how they’re thinking about product data, product, data governance, bringing a level of consistency to it that I think is even beyond web structured data. 

Jeff White: For sure, and a lot of manufacturers, especially those of you that work with distribution networks, are most likely aware of and use a product information management platform or pim, and that is still important, but how you think about this and how you use this.

Information that you’re feeding out to those that are representing your brand or your products to to a broader market. It’s a bit different now. Like you’re able to actually structure the types of content that go into that, and think of your data sheets as code that are actually, pulled from a Git repository by the by the distributor or, changes that are made there get immediately permeated out to your entire network.

These are the kinds of things that. You can begin to do to make, to make it easier for distributors to work with you to make it easier to customize content for your individual distributors, or provide them with the tools to customize that content on their own site. The, there’s some really interesting things going around about content being completely ignored by Google that was previously indexed.

That. Nobody really knows where it’s going or why it’s no longer being indexed, but it’s been deprioritized because it’s too sim, too similar and consistent with other people that sell the same product. So your page adds no value, and those are gonna be some interesting holes for organizations to work their way out of.

And part of doing that from a, a, a more structured perspective is just really controlling the data sheet content and really controlling the descriptions of the products and ensuring that you’re distributing it in a way that your resellers can action that and use it and have it amplify your business instead of take away from it.

Carman Pirie: Very cool. I think we could probably go on for another half hour here. But I, I just think it’s been a bit of a rapid, deep dive in terms of how to, some different considerations for building for the web and in 2025, 2026.

Jeff White: Yeah, so the four things that we’ve talked about here.

I think that every manufacturer can focus on in order to improve their web presence in 2025 and beyond, make sure that they’re, targeting AI search, structuring their content in a way that is going to make a difference. Is. First of all, you gotta invest in speed. If you want to continue to be found on typical search engines and probably generative search engines I’m sure they prioritize speed as well.

Think about those core web vitals. Use them as a lever that you can pull to improve revenue in certain areas and invest in the quality and rapid delivery of your content. The second one is really getting a handle on your first party data acquisition, because we’ve got a cookie deprecation situation coming up where you’re not gonna be able to track people the way you traditionally were.

So you need to begin to own the leads and prospects and website visitors that you have and begin to build a database of those folks so that you can better understand the people who are coming to your site currently. I really wanna look into and understand how to structure the data for your industry.

That’s from a pure content perspective, whether we’re talking about podcasts and location information and all of that, or, if we’re looking at the structure of your data sheets and all of that, and using a platform in a form for displaying that information like J-S-O-N-D these are the kinds of things that you wanna be using in order to ensure that you.

Your data can be found and used by your distributors, and part of that is product data governance and syndication, and really thinking about your data in a way that it goes beyond just your site. So those are the four things that we talked about today, and I really hope that they can help. 

Carman Pirie: I really hope our listeners got something outta this. I know I did. I think it’s been a really really interesting conversation. Thank you, sir. 

Jeff White: No, happy to share. Thanks a lot.