Close Encounters

For years, using the internet meant reducing our questions to fragments: walking shoes plantar fasciitis, speech delay two year old, vegetarian restaurant in Wales. We learned to remove context and specificity because the system was not built to understand them. 

Now people are starting to search more the way they speak. 

Last year, I asked ChatGPT to help me find a realtor. What I typed was fairly close to how I might ask a thoughtful friend for advice: I’m looking for someone communicative, grounded, and not too sales-y.

Someone grieving and looking for support might ask for “a Jungian analyst who is insightful without feeling clinical.” A homeowner needing a contractor might search for “someone experienced with older homes who won’t immediately suggest tearing everything out.” 

Whatever people feel about AI — and I suspect many of us remain conflicted — it is already changing how people move through information online, and that shift has implications for anyone with a website.

Over time, businesses wrote websites in one of two ways: either packed with keywords for Google, or wrapped in language so abstract that it became difficult to understand what was actually being said. 

Somewhere along the way, many websites have stopped sounding like people.

If you have a website, it’s worth spending a little time inside Google Search Console, a free tool that shows some of the phrases people use before arriving at your site through Google. Inside the “Performance” section, the “Queries” tab offers a revealing glimpse into the language people are already using to find someone like you. What those searches often reveal is a mismatch between how businesses describe their work and how people describe their problems.

A designer may talk about “visual identity systems” while a client sits at their laptop thinking, “I just want my business to feel more professional.” A consultant may speak about “organizational transformation” while someone else types, “everything feels chaotic.”

I suspect many thoughtful businesses still under-describe themselves. They downplay their expertise. They bury clear offerings beneath abstraction because they worry that directness will flatten their intelligence or cheapen their work.

Often, the opposite is true.

As people begin asking the internet questions more the way they ask one another, businesses may need to spend less time trying to sound impressive and more time trying to be understood. ✦

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