It seems fairly likely to me that by the end of 2027 the majority of internet traffic will be Agents using the web. AI bots, basically.

I spent some time 'researching' website traffic trends over time, with Claude and ChatGPT and got fairly similar results.

The green line is human traffic. The yellow line is "bot" traffic (Google SEO). The red line is malicious bot traffic. The orange line is AI traffic.

To be clear, this graph isn't saying people will be using the internet less, although that might likely be true, it's saying as a share of website requests, AI is going to dominate them.

To me, this tells me the primary visitor of your website at the beginning of 2028 will be an AI Agent. I'm not predicting this uniformly across all industries and niches, maybe not your website, but on aggregate this is my prediction.

So what does that mean for web designers? What does that mean for Squarespace?

Plugin sales have been trending down. Not dramatically, but consistently enough that I'd be lying to myself if I pretended otherwise.

Here's what the last four years look like:

It's important not to misattribute casualty here. This graph is saying "people are buying less plugins", but it doesn't say why.

The "why" is the puzzle.

Are people using AI to build their own plugins?

Is search engine traffic also down, resulting in less top-of-funnel traffic?

Is it because I haven't released any new plugins recently?

Is there even a need for websites anymore?

Probably some mix of all of the above. Or something else entirely I'm not considering.

As we experiment and figure out what the next phase of the plugin business looks like, I'm continuing to iterate and build on Robo-Will and The Toolkit.

And as weird this might sound, I'm enjoying the puzzle.

From SFGate:

Allbirds, the millennial beige shoe brand that was once a mainstay among affluent tech workers in San Francisco, just made the stunning announcement that it will become an AI cloud computing service. 

wut?

According to a Wednesday news release, American Exchange Group, which entered a purchase agreement with Allbirds earlier this year, intends to “build on Allbirds’ legacy and deliver compelling products to Allbirds’ customers” by changing its name to NewBird AI.

“NewBird AI’s long-term vision is to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider.” GPUaaS is a cloud-based service that provides access to computational power without the cost of expensive infrastructure. 

So they changed their name, changed their industry, and have new owners. That's just called a new business.

Squarespace has recently released their contacts API with a some damn fine documentation to boot.

Use the Contacts API to manage the people associated with a Squarespace merchant site — customers, mailing list subscribers, donors, and anyone else who has interacted with the site.

Access is OAuth only, which basically means you have to be an approved extension provider, but they're saying API access "coming soon", so hopefully we won't have to wait too long!

To be honest, I've been starting to lose hope that Squarespace was going to invest in their infrastructure like this. Their closed garden approach hasn't been helpful for them in the age of AI.

But this is shows they've got a lot of work on behind-the-scenes and I hope it continues.

The developer website received a fresh coat of paint as well. Excited for what's happening over there.

This websites has a list of 30 design prompts to make your projects not look like that bland vibe coded style.

Even if you're not about to build anything it's fun to sift through all of these and see the different styles. I'm a sucker for simple names and I love the names for each of them.