What Is A Web Page?

TL;DR: A web landing page is a digital "front door" for brands looking to stand out in traditional search and win visibility in AI platforms. The big aha? Brands that treat AI like a customer and serve up detailed, trustworthy local landing pages built with structured, schema-rich data are more likely to show up everywhere people (and AI models) are searching.

What is a web landing page?

A web page, or web landing page, is a digital document written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and styled in codes like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and others. Then, web browsers like Safari, Firefox, Edge, and Chrome translate web pages into a format filled with content that humans (and machines like AI) can understand. Every single web page on the internet has a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL, which serves as the web page's address and access point.

Every web page a brand creates is like a page within the virtual book that is its website. They can also publish a wide variety of files, such as images, videos, text, and hyperlinks to other web pages.

Practically speaking, web pages aren't just digital documents, though.

With the shift to browserless search and direct answers, web pages are the structured building blocks of brand visibility.

What is the most valuable type of web page for brand visibility?

Generative AI is transforming the way customers discover brands. Compared to a year ago, 75% more people use AI tools, and 43% use them every day.

So, in this era where both traditional and AI search are prevalent, local landing pages are the most important type of web page for brands.

Why? As multi-location brands manage hundreds, even thousands of locations, local landing pages offer brands the power to give AI platforms what they want. And what do AI tools want? A collection of well-managed, interrelated, authoritative web pages filled with structured data that describes each location, product, service, provider, and more.

AI will prioritize brands with local page content it can read and trust. Both web page readability and trust are driven by a page's data quality and the quality of a brand's overall digital presence. Quality is, in part, recognized when brand web pages are published broadly and consistently across hundreds of data sources. Again, structured data in schema markup is also key to communicating web page quality and search relevance.

What are local landing pages?

Local landing pages, or local SEO landing pages, are purpose-built web pages and content centers. They help brands rank in traditional search — and win visibility across AI search, maps, directories, and voice assistants. In today's discovery landscape — where customers bounce between Google, Perplexity, Gemini, Apple Maps, Instagram, and Yelp — the web pages that win are:

• Schema-rich with structured data that machines can read

• Multimodal, AEO, EEAT framed, and mobile-optimized for usability

• Locally relevant and tied to real-world locations, people, and services

• Written in conversational, everyday, even regionally-specific language

• Context-rich, but tightly topical, people-first content

• Paired with a scalable listings management strategy

• Easy to spin up with optimized UX, SEO, and AEO templates

From Ecosia to Alexa and Grok to Google AI Mode, search platforms now scan across your digital footprint. They're evaluating your brand credibility and relevance based on a range of factors, including the consistency of your data and the details you share about your products and services. So when a customer searches for "best pet supply stores with raw food for big dogs in N. Chicago" or "Spanish-speaking pediatric oncologists in Bethesda", your location is more likely to appear everywhere customers search when your web pages treat AI like a customer.

That also means a robust website with long-tail URLs and web page directories featuring local landing pages is also more important than ever.

What are all the parts of a web page URL, and what do they mean?

There are several parts within a URL address that direct your browser to a web page. Let's look at one of Yext's web page URLs to explain the parts of a URL.

We'll use https://www.yext.com/platform/pages as an example:

• Protocol: https:// – The protocol makes it possible to securely transfer information (in the form of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other file codes) between web servers (where brands like Yext store information) and web browsers (like Google Chrome, where customers request, view, and interact with that information).

• Subdomain: www. – This is the general location where all websites are collected and hosted on the World Wide Web. This would, of course, be the "www" that you see on every webpage.

• Domain name: yext. – The domain name is the digital "front door" of a website, often the name of a brand. If a web page is like a book, think of the domain name as the book title.

• Domain suffix: .com – The domain suffix tells people what kind of website the web page is on. Generally, ".com" suggests the page belongs to a brand for commercial use. Other familiar suffixes like ".org" typically represent not-for-profit brands, and ".gov" represents a government agency.

• Directories: /platform/pages – If the domain name is the title of the book, the directories are like chapters and sections of chapters in it. Whether it's a specific product page or the FAQ page, the directory identifier takes the browser to pages internal to the site.

Who invented web pages, anyway?

The history of the first web page and the World Wide Web

Several iterations of the internet were developed beginning in the 1960s. The modern internet, the internet we know it, was created in 1983. But the first web page wasn't designed and launched until 1990.

Tim Berners-Lee, the son of computer scientists Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods, designed the first web page while working at the European Council for Nuclear Research, or CERN.* Berners-Lee** was working on a project that solved some of the inconveniences that computers struggled with at the time. Berners-Lee developed and submitted a project to his supervisors to create a data management protocol that would link documents to particular virtual locations, accessible by any computer connected to the internet.

Initially, Berners-Lee's project was rejected by his supervisor. But he continued to design and refine his idea, joining forces with Robert Cailliau, another engineer who helped secure funding and buy-in for the project at CERN.

• By 1991, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailiau released the first version of the HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP (which evolved into the secure HTTPS in 1994).

• In 1993, they released HyperText Markup Language, or HTML 1.0.

• They considered calling their innovation "The Mine of Information", but landed on the "World Wide Web" (www) — as in www(dot)yourwebsitename(dot)com.

• CERN pushed Berners-Lee to patent his designs and make them proprietary, but Berners-Lee said no.

• By leaving HTML, HTTP, and URL technology open source, he gave others the chance to build upon it, leading to search engines like Yahoo and markets like Amazon created upon the framework Berners-Lee invented.

These inventions are the technological core of web pages and the internet as we know it. Currently, there are nearly 200 million active websites, with 252,000 new websites launched every day. …That's a lot of web pages.

*CERN is an acronym that reflects the French translation, "Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire".

**Tim Berners-Lee was born in 1955 — the same year as Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft), and Eric Schmidt (Google).**

To make your web pages stand out in traditional and AI search, pair Yext Pages with listings, reviews, and social for a complete, AI-optimized local presence.

Keep reading to learn how to create and deliver your brand content more effectively and efficiently with Yext Pages.