Do All Your Landing Pages Need to Match Your Brand Exactly? Not Anymore.

Every decade or so, we get to experience a transformative internet event, and right now, we're experiencing a wide new palette of search and discovery tools, powered by conversational and generative AI. These new interactions have catapulted us into the "browserless" era. As the cost of computing and localization of AI processing becomes more affordable, we will increasingly explore information and discover brands outside of traditional websites.

For years, we've believed that every page on your website must adhere to the same strict design, voice, and structure. If you deviated from this, your users would quickly lose trust in you. However, in today's fragmented digital landscape, this mindset is becoming outdated.

With half of web traffic coming from bots and human engagement shifting to AI-driven search and third-party platforms, brand rigidity could be costing you valuable opportunities. The truth is: consumers are engaging with your brand on various platforms, all of them with various levels of brand continuity. What makes your brand stand out is the core parts of your DNA, not the design of your website.

More and more user interactions are happening away from your website and occurring on third-party platforms and tools such as Google Search & Maps, Apple Maps, Social, and emerging AI assistants. This is our first significant indication that we're gaining some new freedoms with how we think about website branding and congruity. It also proves why it's very important to manage your information and reputation accurately across multiple platforms.

AI, Search-Generative Experience (SGE), and now Google's AI Modeare altering how users find and interact with your brand and its story. Users are now presented with summarized information directly on search results pages, impacting the type of website traffic you're receiving. Businesses that want visibility in these new search mediums should start adapting their SEO and content strategies sooner rather than later. One way to prepare is to consider a long-tail publisher network strategy toincrease the trust factor, which we've found can produce a significant search lift.

Not all bots are bad; they are how many search and social tools learn about what's on the internet and discover your brand. Therefore, it's important to optimize for them as part of a comprehensive SEO strategy. We're finding that successful digital footprints have been investing in optimizing their websites for bot traffic.

Thinking about how we can create a great user experience and a great "machine experience," it's helpful to think about what purpose each digital asset serves and what our intended users and outcomes are. Some web pages exist for users to find information, some exist to convince them to buy something, and some have our brand story on them. All of these are important, but as our tools and technology change, the way we search and consume information changes. I think this is a good thing since it lets us create tailored experiences and play with the channels a bit.

Have you ever been to a website where everything on every page was the same, and it felt like content was forced into a mold, even if it didn't fit? Sometimes, the design is wonderful, but after a while, it loses its luster since it never changes. It's like a song that gets overplayed on the radio. This is why many brands change the experience based on the channel and intent. For example, many career sites and blogs have a different design than the rest of the corporate site. You know it's the same brand because there's commonality in the logo, color, typography, etc., but it's something new and specific to your experience, which can be exciting.

The same applies to getting ready for AI search. We want to tailor the bot's experience to give it everything it needs to comprehend and accurately represent our brands. We often do this via structured data, but an often overlooked tool are location pages. Giving a web-crawling bot a stand-alone page that describes each location or product you might have, allows it to generate its own knowledge graph and information map about you, and as an added benefit, it has an exact reference to point back to. This is super helpful as more and more AI searches are returning URLs of the source back to users.

When designing location (or intent) pages, we have the luxury of breaking them out of our website mold and creating a new and simpler context for them. This allows us to create a tailored user conversion flow and package it for search crawlers to consume. For example, if someone is searching "notary near me," your bank branch location page not only tells the search engines that you provide that service at that location, but when the user visits the page, they see just what they are looking for without having to look elsewhere on your website.

But how do we decide what parts of our main website we should carry over to these pages? It is akin to a well-designed house. Each room has a purpose and its own motif, but you know it's all the same house because it has unifying characteristics or common DNA, but the bathroom doesn't need to be the most beautiful room in the house; it just needs to be functional.

Design and aesthetics can vary depending on the page's purpose, as long as it includes your brand DNA. And the benefit? You get to market faster when you're not tied to a single template.

Your logo, primary colors, and core messaging tone should remain consistent. These are the trust markers, but what can you flex?

• Navigation → Use contextual menus instead of a universal site-wide navigation. Make the navigation work for the page's purpose. This is a great area to reduce clutter and trim to the bare minimum of what's essential. You just need a few links to return to the global navigation.

• Visual layouts → Lighter, search-friendly designs for machine UX pages. These designs also facilitate easier navigation for users who arrive on your landing page from a mobile device, such as Apple or Google Maps.

• Content style → More structured and direct for AI readability. AI-driven search results, such as Google's SGE and ChatGPT citations, look for structured data rather than your design aesthetic. Schema markup and structured content are more significant than branding for these pages. Clarity and entity-based optimization enable AI to recognize your authority more quickly. Performance-first design (fast, lightweight, and indexable) takes precedence over pixel-perfect branding as less of your customer experience occurs on your platform.

If your goal is human traffic, you can track traditional metrics:

• Page views

• Engagement

• Conversion rate

If your goal is SEO and AI-driven traffic, success looks different:

• Increased organic search visibility (Google, Bing, SGE results)

• Increased in AI citations

• More engagement from Google Maps, Apple Listings, AI assistants

• Crawl logs showing activity from AI models (ChatGPT, Gemini, Anthropic) visiting your site

Brand impact isn't just about your website anymore. It's about how your brand is experienced across platforms.

Beyond visual design, brand consistency extends to the entire experience and the commitments delivered. A brand-focused strategy enables the creation of customized experiences for various situations. There are countless major brands whose home and product pages feature layouts different from their store locator, yet they maintain consistent branding through font, color, and logo use. Moreover, with the advancement of AI search, optimizing web pages for both AI bots and human visitors becomes strategically valuable. This perspective allows us to move beyond repetitive designs and explore the development of exceptional digital products.

Your mileage may vary, but as we rely more on agentic tools and social media for search, more of our on-domain traffic will likely shift to bots rather than humans. The businesses that remain visible are the ones that invest in making their websites and their content accessible and understandable by bots and AI.