The state of deep tech websites
Most of the decision now happens before anyone contacts you, the first reader is increasingly a machine, and deep tech sites are still built as brochures.
- B2B buyers review around 11.4 pieces of content and complete 60 to 70 percent of their decision before they contact a vendor. For most deep tech companies the website is not supporting the sale, it is conducting it.
- The first reader is often not a person. 94 percent of buyers now use LLMs during research and 51 percent start in an AI chatbot more often than in Google, up from 29 percent a year earlier.
- Only about 56 percent of tracked origins pass all three Core Web Vitals. A one second site converts roughly three times better than a five second one, and deep tech sites are heavy by default because of the 3D.
- The specific failure is a site written to impress rather than to be checked. Technical buyers are looking for conditions, constraints and numbers, and they leave when they cannot find them.
The state of deep tech websites in 2026 is that they have quietly become the whole first half of the sales process, and most of them are still built as brochures for a conversation that now happens without them.
How much of the decision happens before anyone contacts you?
Most of it. B2B buyers review an average of 11.4 pieces of content before contacting a vendor, and are typically 60 to 70 percent through their decision by the time they make first contact. Around 75 percent say they would prefer to complete the purchase without speaking to a sales rep at all if a self-serve path exists.
Roughly 95 percent of deals come from a shortlist formed before that first contact. So the practical question for a deep tech site is not whether it generates enquiries. It is whether the company survives to the shortlist at all, in a process it never sees.
That is a different brief from the one most of these sites were built to. A brochure supports a conversation. This has to conduct one.
Who reads a deep tech site first now?
Increasingly, a machine. 94 percent of B2B buyers use large language models during research, and 51 percent now say they start in an AI chatbot more often than in Google, up from 29 percent a year earlier.
That has two consequences that matter more for deep tech than for most categories.
The first is that the site has to be readable without a browser rendering it. AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript. A site whose technical substance only appears after a scroll-triggered animation resolves is, to that reader, a page with a headline on it.
The second is that a paragraph is now the unit of retrieval, not a page. A model answering "who makes retimers for CXL" lifts the passage that answers it. Deep tech content tends to be structured as a long argument that pays off at the end, which is the worst possible shape for a reader that stops at the first sufficient answer.
Does page speed still matter for a considered purchase?
More than the size of the purchase suggests. As of the May 2026 CrUX data, only about 55.9 percent of tracked origins pass all three Core Web Vitals. The thresholds are LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds and CLS under 0.1.
A one second delay is associated with roughly a 7 percent reduction in conversions, and a one second site converts around three times better than a five second one. Sites meeting the good threshold on all three vitals are about 24 percent less likely to be abandoned.
Deep tech has a specific exposure here that SaaS does not. The 3D that makes an invisible mechanism visible is also the heaviest thing on the page, and the conference floor, the trade stand and the airport lounge are exactly where a specialist opens your site on a bad connection. A scroll sequence that is beautiful on a workstation and unusable on a mid-range laptop has failed at the moment it mattered.
What does a technical buyer need that a SaaS buyer does not?
Conditions. A SaaS buyer wants to see the thing work. A technical buyer wants to know what it was measured under, what the constraints are, and where it stops.
That changes what belongs on the page. Test conditions. The operating envelope. Integration requirements. What a typical deployment involves and what it needs from their team. The number that matters, framed so a non-specialist understands its significance and a specialist recognises it as honest.
Sites that omit this are not being concise, they are being evasive, and a qualified buyer reads it that way. Evaluation is now the longest stage of the buying journey for 40 percent of buyers, ahead of research and decision. Evaluation is the stage your site is failing when the specifics are missing.
Where do deep tech websites break most often?
Four places, in rough order of frequency.
- The hero claims a category rather than a company. If the first line could be true of four competitors, the page has spent its most valuable position saying nothing.
- The mechanism is never shown. A hero video of the product moving is not an explanation of why it works, and screen recordings cannot show a sealed chamber or a molecule.
- The evidence is one layer too deep. Specs behind a gated PDF, or a datasheet that opens in a new tab and never comes back.
- It is too heavy where it is read. See above about the conference floor.
What does a good one do differently?
It front-loads the answer. The definition sentence goes first and the framing second, which is the opposite of how good copy is usually written and the right order for a page read by someone deciding whether to keep reading.
It makes each section independently retrievable, with question-shaped headings answered in the first sentence, because that is the unit an AI reader lifts and the unit a skimming engineer scans for.
It puts the numbers on the page rather than behind a form. And it stays fast enough to survive the environment it is actually opened in, which is rarely a desk.
What should you fix first?
Open your own site on a phone, on a bad connection, and read only the first screen of each section. If you cannot tell what the company does and why it is hard, no amount of scroll animation is going to rescue it.
Then paste your homepage into an AI chatbot and ask what the company does. The answer you get is close to the answer your next buyer is going to get, and it is the cheapest audit available.
Written by Mejo Kuriachan. More in the blog, the glossary and the FAQ.