Wix Report: AI Is Making Websites More Valuable, Not Less

Cloudflare says bot traffic has officially surpassed human traffic, coming in at 57.5% of HTTP requests on its network. Its co-founder predicted this wouldn’t happen until the end of 2027, and ultimately shared a somewhat defeated tweet:

In the new world of bots and agentic AI, there has been a looming doom hovering over the hosting industry’s head: Do people even need a website anymore if ChatGPT or Google Overviews can just tell people what they’re looking for?

Wix’s Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search and SEO Communications, says this isn’t the obituary that some may think it is. Wix’s State of Websites Report, which was just released on June 25, found that websites are still extremely important to the web and its users — perhaps even more than ever before.

“Websites convey trust, and they are the only place where you have full reign to articulate your brand online,” said Carter. “Our data suggests that people may be learning about brands through conversations with LLMs, but they still go to websites for more information.”

People Still Visit Websites

In diving deeper into the report to see what the future may look like for web hosts, one statistic may surprise the masses: Apparently, more people these days are typing website addresses directly into their browsers instead of finding them elsewhere.

Wix says direct traffic to its customers' sites climbed 71% since 2020, reaching 1.74 billion unique U.S. visitors.

But search still brings in the most traffic overall, accounting for 42% of visits, while direct traffic makes up 40% and social media contributes 13%.

Despite all the AI buzz, Wix found LLMs still account for less than 1% of website traffic today. Traffic from AI platforms has quadrupled YoY, but traditional search and direct visits are still dominant.

And it turns out, the people who intentionally visit a website are ready to spend: Nearly 8% of direct eCommerce visitors make a purchase.

"Brands need to shift from thinking of a website less as a destination and more as a resource that people need to use," Carter explained. "So it won’t just be about having the right keywords on a page for discovery, it will be about having genuinely new ideas and tools that connect with your audience."

Trust Is the New SEO

In a sea of AI-everything, this is a sigh of a relief. A website is one of the few places left where a business can actually prove it's real.

"It’s almost a way of proving that your business is real, not a scam or a hallucination," Carter added.

Domains are a part of that, with Wix finding domain rates climbing 2.5x in three years — up from 26% in 2022 to 66% in 2025 — and 69% of those domains are connected before or on launch day, up from 47% in 2022. In other words, the domain is one of the very first decisions.

"We see that people are using custom domains to signal that they are more serious about their businesses in the age of AI," said Carter. "Websites and custom domains show that your business is worthy of trust."

Reviews work the same way: Sites with 50 or more reviews earn 40x the median revenue of sites fewer than 50 and pull in 24x more traffic. eCommerce conversions jump from 1.7% to 54.1% for sites with one to five reviews.

Blogs, interestingly, are pulling their weight too. Sites with blog content are 5x more likely to generate sales and 5x to get bookings. Once a site has 50+ posts, it gets 7x more monthly sessions than one without a blog at all.

I'm calling it now: Blogs are making their comeback.

Additionally, Wix found that 91% of Wix Harmony users (its in-house, AI-assisted website builder) still edit the text on their site themselves, which Carter suggests means that copy is still personal. Another 69% swap out images, often to use their own assets.

"Yes, people are creating websites faster than ever," Carter said, "but they still want distinctive designs and personality."

Needing to Differentiate Between Friend and Foe

A growing share of what's driving that nearly 60% of bot traffic is an AI agent that's only intent on training crawlers: bots scraping content to build on the next model, with no intention of sending any visitors back to the website.

Yeah, not cool. It's why many hosting providers have added llms.txt, robots.txt rules, and bot blockers to their stacks.

For example:

• Squarespace has a one-click toggle to block 20+ bots
• Cloudflare defaults new domains to blocking AI crawlers automatically
• IONOS rate-limits training bots at the infrastructure level without requiring owner action
• Wix provides a robots.txt editor in its SEO settings, where owners can manually list which AI crawlers to block

"The bots are coming and sooner than you think. With the rise of the agentic web, hosting teams will need to understand which bots are coming to websites and why," Carter said.

Legible to Machines, Built for People

Hosts play a foundational role in helping their client sites get found. We know the website isn't dying, but individual websites will certainly begin collecting dust if hosts aren't doing right by their clients.

There's a thin line here: helpful agents that actually refer visitors back, crawlers that just take and never return any visitors at all, and legitimately bad actors that are a cybersecurity risk.

"Many brands are underestimating the impact of AI agents in the buying journey," Carter explained. "Agents can make decisions on behalf of human users and this changes what it means to 'appeal' to your customers."

At this point, hosts should already be implementing — and pushing their clients to adopt — things like:

• Structured data markup
• An llms.txt file
• Clean metadata and headers and subs

It's the kind of foundation that hosts can provide that Carter says will only matter more from here. "Managing these bots is critical because the challenge will only increase as the agentic web grows," she said. "Make sure your framework is secure and built to help your clients thrive in the agentic age."