Designing for surfaces you don't own

Someone weighing up mortgage options this morning put the question to a chatbot rather than a search engine, and what came back was a short summary and a recommendation. They never saw a lender’s homepage. The brand overview they were sizing up had been assembled for them by a machine, without the lender ever knowing the conversation was happening.

For twenty years the surface belonged to the brand owner. They chose what the customer saw, and the website was where brand and customer actually met. We're watching that come apart now, unevenly, and faster than most of the boards we sit with expected.

Your customer might meet your brand first through an AI assistant's summary, a shopping agent weighing you against three rivals, or your product rendered into a pair of smart glasses as they stand in the aisle. You designed none of those surfaces, but they speak for you anyway.

Automated traffic has recently overtaken human traffic across much of the web, so for a growing share of visits the first thing to "read" a brand is no longer a person. Smart glasses from Meta, Samsung and Google are already arriving.

The platform vendors have landed in the same place: an agent is only ever as good as the structured content beneath it. If what's underneath is a mess, that's what it renders, just as fluently.

The obvious response is to defend the surface: fight for the homepage, optimise for the model, chase each new channel as it appears.

Structured content is a brand building block

Whether a machine renders you well is less about the surface and more to do with what sits behind it. A machine can only build from what it finds.

If the value proposition is vague, the experience it assembles is vague. If the content is ten years of campaign leftovers with no structure, the machine surfaces something stale and presents it with confidence.

If the journey was built around the org chart rather than the person moving through it, that is what gets rendered onto a surface you have no way to correct.

We've sat with a brand whose own website couldn't answer a question their own call centre handles fifty times a day. The omission wasn’t spotted until the gap showed up somewhere the brand didn’t own and couldn't edit. Assembled into an experience elsewhere, that gap becomes more painful and obvious to the user.

None of this is new work invented for the age of agents, which is the part we find genuinely hopeful. It requires:

• A value proposition sharp enough to survive being compressed into three sentences, or expanded into an experience nobody at the company got to check first;
• Content structured and governed well enough to be assembled by something that isn't human;
• Journeys built around the customer;
• A design system coherent enough that the brand stays recognisably itself when something else is doing the building.

This is the work of a good digital presence, and in our experience it turns out to be the same work as showing up whole on a surface you'll never see.

So it reassures anyone who has spent years getting the fundamentals right, and it should give some pause to anyone who has put them off. Do the work for your own website and you are not only fixing your website. You are building the thing that lets you show up as yourself on surfaces that don't exist yet.

The surfaces will keep multiplying. The one investment that doesn't have to be rebuilt each time is the groundwork underneath, the proposition, the structure and the system.

When the groundwork is there, each new surface is a rendering problem rather than a rebuild. When it isn't, the experience just gets assembled from whatever happens to be lying around, everywhere at once, while you're not looking.

The machines are already in the room. What they build when they get there still depends, for now, on what you've left for them to find.