Why Websites Matter More in the AI Era

In this episode of ThriveCast, we speak with Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search and SEO Communications at Wix and author of the book The New Rules of AI Search, about why a website still matters when buyers are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity instead of typing into Google. Crystal explains why LLMs still treat your domain as the primary source on your own business, how legacy brands end up haunted by old campaigns, and why "indexed" and "cited" are two very different things. If you've been wondering whether your site is still worth the investment now that AI answers questions directly, this one's for you.

Key Insights

* Your website is still the source LLMs trust most. Crystal’s take is straightforward: language models need language to pull from, and the cleanest, most controlled version of that language lives on a domain you own. Not a product feed. Not Reddit.

* Legacy brands carry information debt. Older or fast-moving companies rack up campaigns, sunset projects, and one-off press hits that keep resurfacing in AI answers long after anyone stopped caring about them.

* LLMs will merge everything on your domain into one picture of your brand. Crystal described a business that sold spices but got described by an LLM as also running custom denim and event planning, because a past community campaign lived on the same site and got folded into the AI’s read of the company.

* The fix is to separate what doesn’t belong. Move old, unrelated projects to a different domain or subdomain, or mark the pages no-index, so they stop bleeding into how AI describes your core business.

* Run your brand through multiple LLMs and compare notes. Ask the same basic questions (what does this brand do, who are its competitors) across different models. If the answers diverge, you’ve found a problem worth fixing.

* New businesses have to win retrieval before they win training data. If an LLM doesn’t already “know” you, it falls back on RAG (retrieval augmented generation), and that only works if your site is discoverable in the first place.

* “Fresh and spicy” content gets cited. Commodity explainers don’t. Timely news and genuine opinions force a model to go look something up. A basic “what is gelato” post usually doesn’t, because the model already knows the answer and has no reason to send anyone to your page for it.

* Citations, mentions, and indexing are three separate things. Being indexed on Google says nothing about whether AI tools cite you. Crystal has seen brands wi