All my clients wanted a carousel, now it's an AI chatbot!

2026-03-14 12:55

It always starts the same way. The client pulls out their phone mid-meeting, navigates to a competitor's website, and holds the screen up like evidence. "You see? They have one of those." A little bubble. Bottom right corner. Blinking...

For years, that gesture was about carousels. Every homepage had to have one, big, slow, full of stock photos that nobody asked for. I built dozens of them. They spun. They faded. They slid. Visitors ignored them completely, scrolled past in half a second, and went looking for the phone number.

Then the trend quietly died, as trends do. Not because anyone decided carousels were bad. Just because something newer came along to copy.

Cookie consent banners came next. Every site needed one, even the ones with no cookies whatsoever. Then Google Tag Manager, even for clients who never once opened an analytics report. I asked one of them, eighteen months after launch, if he'd ever looked at the traffic stats. He hadn't. He didn't even remember the login.

Now it's the chatbot.

I've started asking clients a simple question when they bring it up. Not to be difficult, just to understand.

"Do you actually use chatbots when you visit other websites?"

There's usually a pause. Then a laugh.

No, not really. They close them immediately. They find them annoying. Half the time they answer something completely unrelated to the question. Once, a client told me about a competitor's chatbot that confidently gave out wrong opening hours for months. He thought it was hilarious. And yet: "but we should have one, right?"

That's the moment I find both fascinating and exhausting.

It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind. A website without a chatbot in 2026 risks feeling unfinished, like something's missing. Even if what's missing is a half-broken widget that most visitors dismiss in three seconds. The chatbot has become a social signal, not a tool. A way of saying: we're keeping up.

I've tried the opposite approach. When a client mentions the chatbot, I'll sometimes open a few smolweb sites, fast, minimal, readable, calm. No pop-ups. No blinking corners. Just content, clear and immediate.

Their eyes change. "Oh, that loads fast." "That's easy to read." "I like that."

And they mean it. Genuinely.

Then I ask if they'd want something like that.

"Well... but it looks a bit simple, doesn't it?"

Simple is the word that keeps coming up. And I've learned that when a client says simple, they don't mean easy to use. They mean not impressive enough. They mean what will people think. A lean, fast website doesn't look like it cost anything. It doesn't signal effort. It doesn't say: we take this seriously.

The real irony is that building something genuinely simple, something that loads instantly and says exactly what it needs to say and nothing more, is often harder than bolting on a chatbot. But that's invisible work. Nobody sees the restraint.

I don't have a solution to offer here. I'm not going to end this with a tidy list of tips for convincing clients to embrace the smolweb. That's not how it works, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

The pressure isn't really coming from clients anyway. It's coming from the web itself, from a decade of bloated pages, dark patterns, and feature arms races that quietly redefined what a "real" website looks like. Clients are just reading the room. The room is wrong, but they're not imagining it.

The shift might come from users, not decision-makers. It might come when enough people notice that the fast, calm site was easier to use. That they actually found what they came for. That they didn't have to close three things before reading a single line.

Maybe we plant the seed and wait.

In the meantime, the chatbot is live. It sits in the corner of my client's homepage, blinking patiently. It doesn't know the opening hours. It doesn't know the prices. It doesn't really know anything.

But it's there. Just like everyone else's.

You encounter the same behaviour? Share it with me on the Fediverse