In his retrospective of 2023 for his company Acquia, a SaaS platform built on top of the open source (and browser-based) Drupal software, Buytaert noted both the dangers and opportunities for the web going forward. “On one side, the rise of AI in information gathering will decrease the need for traditional websites,” he wrote. “On the other side, the decline of commercial social media and the shift to a cookie-less future suggest that websites will continue to be important, perhaps even more so.”

“I think it’s net positive,” Buytaert said, regarding the fate of websites. He then somewhat surprisingly cited the fact that Google is phasing out third-party cookies by the end of 2024 as an opportunity for the web.

“What that means is that marketing teams don’t have the same amount of information about users,” he said. “So that means they need to learn more about users themselves . They can’t track people around the web, so they need to get people to their websites — their own digital properties — and really engage with them to learn about what their behaviors, intents, desires are. So that’s good for the open web. I think it’s good for privacy, obviously, that third-party cookies go away, but also I think marketers and organizations will invest more in their own websites.”

He had a similar take on the impact of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. He acknowledged that AI will likely result in a decline in organic website traffic since the likes of ChatGPT are designed to answer search queries directly. But that just forces website developers and owners to make their properties more compelling, he argued.

“You have to deliver value beyond what a ChatGPT can provide, so that people are still incentivized to come to your website.

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