Why the website is dying | James Ward, Head of Digital Experience @ Personio

The website used to be the shop window. Now buyers do half their research inside an LLM before they ever land on it, and the role of the site itself is starting to shift. My guest today is James Ward, Head of Digital Experience at Personio, one of Europe's fastest-growing HR tech companies, where he leads web strategy, SEO, content and CRO across multiple international markets. Before Personio he spent years at Salesforce and ADP, so he's seen this shift play out from inside both enterprise giants and a fast-moving scale-up. We dug into what happens when your buyers already know everything about you before they hit your site, why your own Wikipedia page might be quietly undermining your positioning, and whether websites are heading toward becoming databases for LLM front ends. ## What we covered in this episode - Why Personio's Wikipedia page was quietly miscommunicating their ICP to LLMs, and how a single line of off-site content can undo your entire positioning strategy - The reverse-prompting exercise every marketing leader should block out half a day for before buying any AEO tooling - Why "dark AI traffic" is forcing a rethink of the website itself, from curated navigation paths toward prompt-based, deeply personalized experiences - The shift from technical SEO hacks to brand narrative and reputation management as the real AEO lever - Why Reddit hype has already peaked, and where first-party content and third-party listicles now sit in the AI visibility stack - How AI is turning specialists back into T-shaped marketers, and why James thinks everyone (yes, even content writers) should be building with Claude Code or Lovable - Why traffic is becoming a vanity metric at Personio, and what they measure instead in an era where LLM citations, branded organic and direct all blur together - Whether the future of B2B SaaS buying happens natively inside ChatGPT, and what that means for the role of your website ▶ Let's connect! 🔗 Niklas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niklas-buschner/ Radyant on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/radyant/ James on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswarddigital/ Personio on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/personio/