A science-tech SaaS company recently re-engaged me, in part to apply what I’ve learned building sites across a ton of industries and stacks to ask what comes next: how the next wave will look, feel, and function, and how to stay a step ahead.

SaaS sites are notoriously trend-chasing. There’s a SaaS-y flavour, no doubt: it’s not vanilla. It’s French vanilla, with your choice of topping. You can try the last batch, or you can sample the new.

The internet—and the role of websites specifically—is shifting under our feet, but it’s still early; the cracks and tremors hard to distinguish, the end result still far from certain. A few trend lines are appearing though:

Learning conversationally is becoming the new norm. Traditional hierarchical navigations aren’t dead, but they’ll begin to lose prominence to the almighty chatbox. Expect a search + chat input, with recommendations, suggested prompts, and a Cmd+K shortcut to grab the key real estate in the nav and on the homepage. To feed this functionality, the best SaaS sites must be built from the right framework.

Platform / page-agnostic, highly relational structured data. One thing is becoming increasingly clear as more and more companies learn to integrate AI in ways that are actually useful: structured data is king. Quality over quantity, all of it in one place, all of it in one format; a marketing source-of-truth to feed all mediums. Imagine some niche question a user might have as they approach your site: “How can your ELN differentiate between a working note and a signed, 21 CFR Part 11 result?” With well-structured, relational data, you can surface the ELN product page, highlight a specific paragraph in a relevant whitepaper, have your on-site LLM ask a follow-up question, or redirect to a sales associate primed to answer in detail.

Two versions of every site: one for humans and one for LLMs. The agent sees your /llms.txt, an action directory to request relevant resources or book a demo, an MCP server to query products, pricing, and docs, and a markdown version of every page for easy skimming and citation. Humans—for as long as we continue to exist—see a more traditional website, with all the sparkly design, product Lotties, and hierarchical nav that brings them comfort and a sense of stability.

Distilled, laser-focused content trumps 500+ page websites, 90% of which see seven visitors a year. Marketing teams are likely to become leaner in the coming years; the overhead required to keep that many pages honest and up-to-date isn’t feasible, and the SEO benefits of 1,500 words on every imaginable topic are becoming less clear. Instead, we’ll see the long-tail leave the sitemap. Teams will use their structured data—entities, features, claims, differentiators—and let Cmd+K, chat, sales decks, and a handful of pages all query it. Articles will stop being the defining unit of marketing content.

Design, well… I’m not going to comment here. Half the examples from the beginning of this post have changed their homepage since you started reading. As of this moment, there are some very clear trends: big, simple sans-serif headlines, full-width animated or interactive product shots, dark-mode by default, pathological monochromatism. I imagine this will start to expand somewhat. French vanilla, but remember, a choice of topping.

A few bonus callouts that couldn’t justify paragraphs:

  • More IDE features (like hot-keyed “find anything” inputs) will creep into SaaS sites as more of the public gains familiarity with that kind of software
  • Documentation is driving traffic, sometimes more than blog entries. This needs to be public; even better if it’s on the primary domain
  • Useful tools or self-serve product trials to drive human traffic; things an LLM can’t reproduce in a chat window
  • Trust and legitimacy become huge in the age of slop. Testimonials, partner logos, credentialed contributors, source citation, and press coverage become even more important
  • Interactive, simplified product shots that show a real example solved with the software—Linear does a great job of this on their homepage