The algorithm will see you now

A lad beside me in a café tapped “Add to basket” and stared at a spinning wheel. Four seconds, maybe five, then he stood up, left the coffee, and walked out like the website had slagged him off. The barista had written “DAVE?” on his cup in thick marker, all caps.

Then you read it and realise it’s not impatience, it’s training. We’ve all been trained by feeds and apps and one-click everything to treat friction like a fault, and we punish it instantly.

Offline, you used to fight for eye-level shelf space. Get into Tesco, pay for the end cap, make sure the packaging holds up under fluorescent lights, job done. Online, your customer types “best” and two other words, and a system decides what they see, in what order, and whether you even deserve to be there.

The brutal part is how quiet it is. There’s no manager telling you you’re underperforming. There’s a small drop in click-through, a few extra bounces, a handful of people who don’t wait for the page to load, and you’re out of the running before your brand story has even turned up.

My dad used to say a rushed diagnosis is just a polite misdiagnosis. Algorithms don’t do polite. They do fast. They make a call in microseconds off scraps of behaviour, and they never ring you afterwards to explain themselves.

And your logo, your long heritage, the year you were founded, the awards you won last year, none of it buys you much when the page takes a beat too long to appear. If the site feels like it’s running on dial-up, you’re not “losing attention.” You’re failing an entry test. A neighbour of mine is convinced marketing is still mostly a sharp logo and the right golf handicap. Lovely man. He’s arguing with a machine that doesn’t play golf and doesn’t care who you know.

So what do you do with that, other than have a small cry into your tea. Start with the boring stuff you’ve been ignoring because it didn’t feel like “marketing.” Speed. Clarity. The obvious answers in plain language. The bits that let a tired person get what they came for without working hard. If you want to see how your brand really performs, don’t do the grand brand workshop.

Open your own site on bad Wi-Fi, on an old phone, with your thumb. Try to buy. Try to find the one thing customers always ask you in support tickets. Count how many times you swear.

Next, assume you are being scored all the time. Every delay, every confusing label, every dead-end page is a little vote against you. People don’t leave you a review saying “your checkout was fiddly.” They just vanish. This is where AI is useful in a very unsexy way. Let it help you spot the leaks. Summarise the complaints. Cluster the “I couldn’t find” messages. Rewrite the help article so a human can skim it, and so a machine can lift the one sentence answer without guessing. Use it to clear the debris.

But don’t fall into the trap of thinking the algorithm is your customer. It’s not. It’s the bouncer on the door. Passing the bouncer gets you into the room. Once you’re in, you still have to be worth staying with. The machine can decide what shows up. It can’t decide what gets remembered.

That’s still the human job. Not “make content.” Make meaning. Give people a reason to recognise you again when the options blur together, and the shortlist looks the same.