04/09/2026
Nobody Wants to Explore Your Website Anymore 👀
💡 AJ Coutts, our Co-Founder and Managing Director at ThoughtShift, shares her latest insights on the changing landscape of website user experience:
“Fourteen years ago, I wrote an article comparing bad ecommerce websites to junk shops. I'd spent years working in HMV, so retail analogies came naturally. Walk into a badly run shop and you feel it immediately, products piled everywhere, signs competing for attention, no clear sense of where to go. Finding what you came for becomes actual work.
🤖 AI has since made the real problem visible. Websites were never overstocked, we'd just built them with the stockroom and the back office sitting out on the shop floor.
🗄️How Websites Became Digital Filing Cabinets
For years, marketers were encouraged to keep adding: more service pages, more blog articles, more FAQs, more landing pages. There were good reasons, search engines rewarded comprehensive sites, and customers researched heavily before buying. That content is often genuinely valuable. The problem is we started expecting every visitor to wade through all of it.
🔍 Your Customers Already Know What They Want
Increasingly, prospects do their research in AI tools before they ever land on your site — comparing suppliers, gathering recommendations, learning about the market. It's part of why conversion rates run 3x higher from LLM traffic than search traffic. By the time they arrive, they may already know what you do, how you compare, and whether you're a good fit. The website's job has shifted from informing to confirming.
🏢 The Shop Floor Isn't the Stockroom
A good stockroom holds thousands of products and resources, but not something customers should have to walk through. The shop floor should be organised, build confidence, and remove friction.
🛒 Take IKEA for example, a shop I personally can't stand. It's built for exploration: wander the showroom, discover things you weren't looking for. Fine, if exploration is the point. But I once went in knowing exactly which product I wanted, I got stuck in the maze, couldn’t find the product and walked out empty-handed. AI means more visitors now arrive already knowing what they want, yet we still march them through the showroom.
✍️ Content Isn't the Problem. Access Is.
This isn't a reason to cut content. Rich, authoritative content still helps search engines, AI platforms, and prospects understand who you are. The real question is whether your site makes decision-making easy once they arrive or whether it is making people work too hard for the next step.
✨ Deep Stockrooms, Clear Shop Floors
Screwfix is a good model: a huge stockroom of specs and technical detail behind the scenes, but products can go straight in the basket from the category page. The detail is there for those who want it, but it doesn't get in the way.
🎯 AI doesn't mean your website needs less content. It means your customers may need to see less of it. The winners won't have the smallest websites, they'll have the deepest stockrooms and the clearest shop floors. The fix being significantly better UX for these more informed customers.”
🚀 Is your website built for today's AI-driven user journeys? Get in touch if you need our help optimising yours: https://www.thoughtshift.co.uk/contact/ 🔗
