Your website is dead. So now what?

About this keynote

Your website is dead. So now what? is a sharp, funny, and forensic keynote by Abi Hough, UX researcher, optimisation strategist, and founder of We Are Corpus.

In an AI-shaped, zero-click, reputation-led web, customers no longer start neatly at your homepage. They arrive with expectations already formed by search results, AI summaries, reviews, marketplace listings, social chatter, and the wider corpus of what the world says about you.

Using a chaotic anniversary gift story involving AI, Swedish salty liquorice, hidden delivery costs, and checkout betrayal, Abi shows how trust often breaks upstream, long before the website gets blamed.

The keynote introduces a five-layer model of modern trust — Reality, Corpus, Model, Human, Interface — and C.O.R.P.S.E., a practical triage method for diagnosing almost-dead websites by examining Claims, Offer, Reality, Proof, Signals, and Entity.

The message is simple: your website still matters, but its role has changed. It is no longer the whole journey. It is where promises stand trial.

Key Themes

• The Website Is No Longer the Starting Point
  Customers often arrive after search results, reviews, AI summaries, marketplace listings, forums, and social content have already shaped their expectations.

• Trust Is Built Upstream
  Trust is not created only through page design or checkout flow. It is formed through the wider decision environment before the customer lands.

• The Funnel Has Moved
  The traditional funnel assumes brands control the entry point and sequence of information. Increasingly, they do not.

• The Corpus Matters
  Your brand is shaped by what the world repeats about you: reviews, forums, social posts, marketplace listings, AI summaries, and off-site narratives.yalty.

• AI Funnels Decisions Before the Website
  AI systems do not just answer questions. They compress available evidence into shortcuts, recommendations, summaries, and shortlists.

• Your Site Is the Sanity Check
  When someone reaches the website, they are often validating a belief, checking a risk, or looking for the contradiction that tells them to leave.

• Conversion Is a Symptom of Belief
  A conversion does not begin at the button. It begins with the expectations, confidence, doubt, and risk assessment formed before arrival.

• Zero-Click Is Not the Murderer
  Zero-click behaviour existed before AI. AI has intensified the issue, but it has mainly exposed a journey brands were already failing to see.

• Late Truth Feels Like Deception
  If delivery fees, delays, exclusions, or caveats appear too late, customers experience them as betrayal, not information.
• Contradiction Kills Trust
  When claims, policies, pricing, reviews, snippets, listings, and checkout details do not align, both humans and machines lose confidence.
  
• Machine Understanding Is Commercially Relevant
  If AI systems cannot clearly interpret what you offer, prove, and deliver, you risk being misrepresented, flattened, or excluded.
• Semantics Are Not Technical Decoration
  Clear structure, code, content, naming, accessibility, and entity consistency help machines and humans understand what your site actually means.
  
• Proof Must Match the Promise
  Strong claims without visible evidence create doubt. Weak or missing proof leaves humans and AI to fill the gap with competitors.
  
• Signals Must Match Reality
  Search snippets, marketplace listings, review summaries, social chatter, and AI answers should not promise something the site or business cannot deliver.
  
• Entity Drift Creates Distrust
  Inconsistent names, specs, prices, policies, product details, or brand facts make an organisation harder to trust and harder for machines to understand.
  
• The Interface Still Matters
  The website is not irrelevant. It is where upstream expectations are confirmed, weakened, or destroyed.
• Stop Optimising the Crime Scene
  If the problem was created upstream, polishing the final page will not fix the underlying trust failure.
  
• Reputational Hygiene Is the New Optimisation
  Brands need to clean up contradictions, stabilise proof, clarify offers, and align signals before chasing surface-level conversion gains.
• C.O.R.P.S.E. Triage
  The talk introduces a practical diagnostic method for examining Claims, Offer, Reality, Proof, Signals, and Entity.
• Not Dead. Just Different.
  The website still matters, but its role has changed. It is no longer the whole journey. It is where the story stands trial.