I read something by an old friend of mine the other day. He is an internationally renowned photographer, and he was writing about his own website. He’s not touched it in seven years. What had prompted him to write was not the website itself, but a growing unease about how much of what he sees on social media we can actually trust.

For a decade a website was the thing you put up and forgot. The energy went where the people were, and the people were on the platforms. The website kind of became brochureware, it might have looked impressive when first built, but it was mainly to be reassuring and keep Google happy.

I’ve spent much of the last couple of decades in and around agencies, and a great deal of the work came down to ranking. Shaping a site so Google would serve it. Google would regularly change its algorithm, and we all rallied round and reworked our strategy to suit. That was the rhythm of the job. What happened around this time last year was different in kind. It was a paradigm shift in how Google approached its own algorithm, and it was a direct answer to the rise of AI search.

We all recognise that increasingly people now ask an assistant what they once typed into a search box, and an assistant does not hand back ten links. It goes looking for a source.

So that changes where the focus should be. We’ve already moved how we talk to customers onto the social platforms, where it’s become increasingly performative, and where the (fair) criticism now is that so much of it is AI-generated noise and nonsense. More of the same will not fix that. What will is bespoke content in a brand’s own voice, with integrity and authority, interesting enough to hold its own against a scrolling feed.

Which takes us back to the website. Not somewhere new, somewhere that was always there. All we are really acknowledging is that the website has to work harder again, as a business tool rather than a brochure, and that doing that well could now be a job for AI - or not.

Having spent twenty-five years walking into organisations of every size, from international NGOs to global drinks companies to some of the biggest names in fashion. The lesson holds at every scale…

When people want to know what you do, or what a thing costs, they look for the authoritative source. We always used to assume that was a search result. Today it’s an assistant, and the assistant goes to your site. If your site is stale, it answers for you, badly, and worse, if you’re not talking their language - you’re like a black cat, sitting in a dark room without a door.

A while back I wrote a piece here about peacocks. The gist was that the things worth trusting are the ones that are hard to fake. A feed is cheap now. A flood of confident posts can be generated before breakfast, and anything that effortless, I think slowly stops meaning anything at all. What still takes time, thought and a human hand behind it holds its value for exactly that reason.

Biologists have a name for the idea. They call it costly signalling, the display that means something because it is expensive to produce. A business’s own account of itself, at its own address, where it can be checked and held to account, is one of those. It actually requires effort, and so it earns real trust. A bit like a good photography... ahem.

A lot of us are worrying about the same thing from one side, the AI slop generated to feed a scroll. I believe the more interesting half of the story is the other side. As search moves towards the assistant, the question changes. Not how big is your following, or how many likes that post got, but what your website is actually doing and saying for and about you. For years that was the dullest question in marketing.

I think it’s just become a bit more interesting. Qu'est-ce que c'est?

I read something by an old friend of mine the other day. He is an internationally renowned photographer, and he was writing about his own website. He’s not touched it in seven years. What had prompted him to write was not the website itself, but a growing unease about how much of what he sees on social media we can actually trust.

For a decade a website was the thing you put up and forgot. The energy went where the people were, and the people were on the platforms. The website kind of became brochureware, it might have looked impressive when first built, but it was mainly to be reassuring and keep Google happy.

I’ve spent much of the last couple of decades in and around agencies, and a great deal of the work came down to ranking. Shaping a site so Google would serve it. Google would regularly change its algorithm, and we all rallied round and reworked our strategy to suit. That was the rhythm of the job. What happened around this time last year was different in kind. It was a paradigm shift in how Google approached its own algorithm, and it was a direct answer to the rise of AI search.

We all recognise that increasingly people now ask an assistant what they once typed into a search box, and an assistant does not hand back ten links. It goes looking for a source.

So that changes where the focus should be. We’ve already moved how we talk to customers onto the social platforms, where it’s become increasingly performative, and where the (fair) criticism now is that so much of it is AI-generated noise and nonsense. More of the same will not fix that. What will is bespoke content in a brand’s own voice, with integrity and authority, interesting enough to hold its own against a scrolling feed.

Which takes us back to the website. Not somewhere new, somewhere that was always there. All we are really acknowledging is that the website has to work harder again, as a business tool rather than a brochure, and that doing that well could now be a job for AI - or not.

Having spent twenty-five years walking into organisations of every size, from international NGOs to global drinks companies to some of the biggest names in fashion. The lesson holds at every scale…

When people want to know what you do, or what a thing costs, they look for the authoritative source. We always used to assume that was a search result. Today it’s an assistant, and the assistant goes to your site. If your site is stale, it answers for you, badly, and worse, if you’re not talking their language - you’re like a black cat, sitting in a dark room without a door.

A while back I wrote a piece here about peacocks. The gist was that the things worth trusting are the ones that are hard to fake. A feed is cheap now. A flood of confident posts can be generated before breakfast, and anything that effortless, I think slowly stops meaning anything at all. What still takes time, thought and a human hand behind it holds its value for exactly that reason.

Biologists have a name for the idea. They call it costly signalling, the display that means something because it is expensive to produce. A business’s own account of itself, at its own address, where it can be checked and held to account, is one of those. It actually requires effort, and so it earns real trust. A bit like a good photography... ahem.

A lot of us are worrying about the same thing from one side, the AI slop generated to feed a scroll. I believe the more interesting half of the story is the other side. As search moves towards the assistant, the question changes. Not how big is your following, or how many likes that post got, but what your website is actually doing and saying for and about you. For years that was the dullest question in marketing.

I think it’s just become a bit more interesting. Qu'est-ce que c'est?