Stop. Put the Website Contract Down and Back Away Slowly.
Stop. Talk to me first.
By Mark Andrew Palmer · · 8 min read
The other day I made a post that ruffled some feathers. Good. Feathers exist to be ruffled. The post said this: if you are thinking about hiring a professional agency to build your website right now, or you already signed the paperwork, stop and talk to me first.
The other day I made a post that ruffled some feathers. Good. Feathers exist to be ruffled.
The post said this: if you are thinking about hiring a professional agency to build your website right now, or you already signed the paperwork, stop and talk to me first. Not eventually. First.
People had questions. Mostly the question was “why,” followed closely by “who do you think you are,” which I appreciated for its honesty.
So here is why.
The Ritual
Let me describe how most websites get built in 2026, and you tell me if any of this sounds familiar.
First, there is a discovery phase. This is six weeks of meetings in which the agency discovers exactly how much budget you have. Remarkable how often the scope lands right at that number. Practically supernatural.
Then comes strategy. Stakeholder interviews. Mood boards. A workshop with sticky notes on a glass wall, because nothing says innovation like $4 of office supplies billed at $275 an hour.
Then wireframes. Then design comps. Then revisions. Then revisions of the revisions. Then a development phase that mysteriously doubles, like bread dough, except bread dough eventually becomes something you can use. Then QA. Then launch, roughly nine months after kickoff, at which point half of what you actually wanted has been “moved to phase two.” Phase two is a magical land where features go to die. No one has ever returned from phase two. Send a postcard if you do.
Total cost: somewhere between a used car and a small house. Total elapsed time: long enough to grow an entire human being, who would arrive knowing more about your customers than the deliverables do.
I can mock this ritual because I ran it. For years. I built an agency to 68 people on this exact ritual. We were genuinely good at it. We won awards for it. Then I sold that agency, which means I can now say the quiet part with a straight face.
Why the Ritual Survives
Agencies sell time. Time is the inventory. So the process expands to fill the invoice with the enthusiasm of gas filling a room.
The nine month website is not nine months because websites require nine months. It is nine months because the business model requires nine months. Nobody in that conference room is lying to you, exactly. They believe in the ritual. The ritual pays their mortgages. And it is very hard to get someone to see a thing when their salary depends on not seeing it. Upton Sinclair said that, more or less, and the man never even sat through a sprint retrospective.
Search Died in Its Sleep and Nobody Sent Flowers
Here is the part your proposal does not mention, probably because acknowledging it would require rewriting the proposal.
Search, the thing your entire website strategy is quietly built on, is not what it was. Not slightly different. Structurally different. Roughly 68 percent of Google searches in the U.S. now end without a single click to any website. Read that again. Two out of three searches, and nobody visits anybody. The answer gets served right there on the page and the searcher walks away fed.
It gets better, and by better I mean worse. Google’s AI Overviews now show up on roughly 48 percent of tracked queries, and every independent study measuring their effect on clicks has found a decline. Twelve studies. Unanimous. When was the last time twelve studies agreed on anything? They cannot agree on coffee.
Meanwhile, the machines became the new front door. Bain found that 80 percent of consumers now lean on AI generated results for at least 40 percent of their searches. And traffic flowing from AI assistants to websites grew sixteenfold between 2024 and 2026. Small river today. Watch which direction it is flowing.
Here is the twist that should reorganize your whole plan: the clicks that survive are worth more. When someone reads an AI summary and still clicks through, they arrive already informed and convert measurably better. Fewer visitors, better visitors. Which means the game is no longer “rank and pray.” The game is being the source the machines trust enough to cite, and being worth the visit when the serious ones show up.
Your agency’s proposal was written for the old game. Check the date on the playbook.
Your CMS Is Having an Identity Crisis
Now let’s talk about the thing under the hood, because it matters more than the paint.
WordPress still runs an enormous slice of the internet, and no, it is not dead, despite the eulogies delivered annually by people selling the alternative. WordPress is fine. WordPress is viable. But WordPress in 2026 has to be treated like a different animal than WordPress in 2016, and most shops are still dressing it up the 2016 way: pile on a theme, pile on 34 plugins, pray they don’t fight, ship it, bill it. That is not a website. That is a Jenga tower with a contact form.
The modern move is to stop thinking of your CMS as the whole show and start thinking of it as the kitchen. Here is the non geeky version of the thing the geeks call headless, and I promise this is the whole concept: in the old model, the kitchen and the dining room were welded together. Your content and the way it displayed were one inseparable lump. In the new model, the kitchen stands alone. It just makes the food. And that one kitchen can serve any dining room you want: your website, an app, a screen, a voice assistant, and yes, the AI engines that are out there answering questions about your business right now whether you are in the room or not.
One kitchen. Many dining rooms. That is the entire lecture. You now know more about modern web architecture than several account executives currently billing for it.
Why should you care? Because the number of dining rooms is multiplying, and the businesses whose content is locked inside a welded together lump are going to be serving exactly one room while the party moves elsewhere.
AI Giveth, AI Absolutely Taketh Away
Let me be fair about AI, because I am many things but rarely dishonest.
The good: in the right hands, AI is the greatest force multiplier the creative and technical world has ever seen. Things that took teams now take an afternoon. Depth that was unaffordable is now on the table. It is the reason I can even write an article like this without winking.
The bad: AI made average free. And when average became free, average became worthless. The internet is currently filling with AI generated websites and AI generated content stacked to the horizon, all of it wearing the same face, all of it saying nothing in the same soothing voice. You have seen these sites. They feel like elevator music looks. And here is the punchline: the machines doing the new search are getting very good at recognizing that sludge and skipping right past it. AI generated mediocrity is being ignored by AI. There is a poem in there somewhere.
The tool is not the talent. Which brings me to a delicate subject.
A Word to the Do-It-Yourselfers
You have ChatGPT. You watched a video. You are feeling dangerous. I respect it. I genuinely do. I am a man who taught himself most of what pays for this Scotch.
But hear me on this: AI hands you power tools, not judgment. A chainsaw is a marvel of engineering, and I still do not want my neighbor performing his own tree surgery over my fence line. The tools got faster. The knowing did not come in the box.
What you can now do is build the wrong thing at incredible speed. It will look right. It will feel finished. And underneath, the parts you cannot see, the structure, the signals, the machine readable layer that decides whether the engines cite you or ignore you, will be missing or broken, and you will have no idea, because failure at that layer is silent. No error message. Just quiet, permanent invisibility while your competitor gets recommended by name.
I Stopped Thinking About Websites Years Ago
Here is my actual confession, and it is the closest I will come to showing my cards.
I do not think about websites. Haven’t for a long time. I think about a complete web presence, of which the website is one organ. Important organ. Not the whole body.
Your presence is the site, yes. It is also the content ecosystem around it. The structured layer machines read while humans sleep. The profiles, the citations, the consistency of your story everywhere it appears. It is what an AI assistant says about you at 2 AM when somebody asks it, in plain language, who they should hire, and you are not there to defend yourself. That answer is being generated right now, today, from whatever the machines can find. The only question is whether you had a hand in it.
A website is a building. A presence is a reputation. Agencies sell buildings because buildings fit neatly on invoices. Reputations are harder to scope, which is exactly why they are worth more.
The Ground Moved
So yes, something changed, and here is where I get deliberately vague, because I am not handing out the recipe while I am still eating the meal.
The physics of building for the web changed. What used to take a team of eight people most of a year can now be done at a speed and a depth that would sound like fiction if I attached numbers to it. So I will not attach numbers to it. You would not believe me anyway. Skepticism is healthy. It just gets expensive if you hold it too long.
The 90 Percent
So why is nearly everyone still doing it the old way?
Not because they are dumb. These are smart, talented, caffeinated people. They are doing it the old way because they are invested in the old way. Retooling means admitting the sacred process was scaffolding, not cathedral. It means the org chart stops making sense. It means the partners have an uncomfortable meeting.
Change this size does not get adopted. It gets survived. Most will not survive it, and deep down, the smart ones already know.
Mark Palmer
Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for pocket change and passed, because late fees were the business. Kodak invented the digital camera and then buried it in the backyard like a dog with a secret. The incumbents are never blind. They are handcuffed. To their own revenue.
That is where web design is right now. The cusp. The hinge. The part of the movie where half the room laughs at the new thing and the other half quietly updates the resume.
So Here Is the Offer
I am not telling you to fire your agency. Some of them will figure this out. A few already smell the smoke.
I am telling you this: before you sign, or before you write the next check on the thing you already signed, have one conversation with me. Thirty minutes. Bring your proposal. Bring your timeline. Bring your skepticism, I like it seasoned.
Worst case, I confirm you are in good hands and you leave with a free second opinion and a story about a tattooed guy in Louisville who talks too fast.
Best case, I save you a pile of money, most of a year, and the special heartbreak of launching a brand new antique.
Stop. Talk to me first.
whatif@omythic.com
Tags: Branding, Business, Web Design, Agencies, Agency Model, Web Presence, CMS, WordPress, Headless, AI Search, Zero Click, AEO, Digital Strategy, Mark Palmer