January 12, 2026
As AI strips away the clicks and surfaces of the web, brands face a new challenge: how to stay visible in a world that no longer looks. This piece explores why the future of marketing isn’t frictionless; it’s human. And how intrigue, not efficiency, will define what endures.
In a recent essay, Optimising for the Surfaceless Web, Jono Alderson recently described something quietly radical.
He argues the web as we know it - made up of pages, links and clicks - is dissolving.
Instead, AI systems are beginning to read, compress and reconstruct the web internally. They don’t browse or scroll. They don’t click. They ingest, model, and predict.
In Alderson’s view, our digital world is shifting from a web of surfaces to one of substance. A layer beneath what users see, where AI models store and synthesise information to serve it back in their own language.
“The game isn’t about visibility anymore. It’s about viability.”
For marketers, that line lands like a thunderclap. We’ve built decades of practice around the visible: clicks, conversions, landing pages, thumb-stopping ads.
If users no longer click, how do we measure success?
If AI curates the path before a person even acts, what does it mean to “earn attention”?
Yet as tempting as it is to see this as dystopian, the death of creativity beneath an algorithmic grey fog - it’s also an invitation to evolve beyond our coveted efficiency complex.
The AI revolution promises less friction everywhere.
Search results summarised before you search. Products suggested before you shop. Music that knows your mood before you do.
In theory, it’s a marketer’s dream: fewer barriers with greater relevance through perfectly personalised delivery.
But frictionless can also mean soulless.
A tension perfectly articulated in Michele Smith’s piece: When Algorithms Curate Culture, What Do We Lose?
She notes that our entertainment, news and even humour are increasingly shaped by AI recommendations.
On the surface, it’s efficient. Underneath, it’s narrowing.
“Infinite choice has collapsed into predictable familiarity”
The machine learns your taste so well that it stops surprising you, though this should scare us.
Discovery - those moments of accidental delight - gets optimised out of existence. And when that happens, culture itself flattens.
The same risk faces brands. The more we optimise for prediction, the more predictable we become.
A brand reduced to an algorithmic pattern might remain visible in the data, yet invisible in the imagination.
For years, marketing success has been tied to reducing friction: fewer clicks, faster load times, smoother funnels.
AI supercharges that mindset.
With every new tool promising hyper-personalisation or one-click conversion, we’re training ourselves to treat efficiency as the ultimate metric.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: people don’t fall in love with efficiency.
They fall in love with experience.
Moments that resonate and campaigns that become culture rarely emerge from seamlessness.
They come from surprise, emotion, tension, storytelling. They come from friction designed with purpose that only a human can truly curate.
Alderson’s concept of the “surfaceless web” might remove the need for physical clicks, but it doesn’t remove the need for human intrigue.
In fact, as surfaces disappear, intrigue becomes the only thing left to differentiate us.
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This doesn’t mean rejecting automation. Far from it.
The most exciting work happening right now exists at the intersection of human imagination and machine intelligence.
AI is brilliant at pattern recognition, data analysis and scale.
It can tell you which messages resonate, who to reach, and when they’re most receptive.
But it can’t invent meaning. It can’t feel the rhythm of culture. It can’t intuit the subtext that makes an idea land in a specific time and place.
That’s the human domain.
Our role as marketers and creators isn’t to out-compute the machines; it’s to feed them material worth computing.
To give them stories, values and emotional nuance to amplify.
When we talk about brands needing to be useful, true and integral to earn a place in the AI’s internal model of the world, we’re essentially describing brands that matter on a human level first.
Machines don’t decide what’s meaningful; they reflect the meaning we make.
So perhaps the next era of marketing isn’t about removing friction but reframing it.
Instead of smoothing every surface, we should design the right kind of resistance. The kind that invites curiosity or conversation.
That unexpected turn of phrase.
That moment of imperfection.
That campaign that challenges rather than panders.
Despite being viewed as inefficiencies, they’re anchors of humanity in a world optimised for automation.
Because when we let algorithms curate culture entirely, we lose the accidents and contradictions that make culture rich.
The same is true for brands. If every interaction is a predicted outcome, we become forgettable.
Great brands will engineer moments of intrigue deliberately.
They’ll use AI to deliver context and timing, but humans to shape the experience.
Blending automation with artistry, prediction with provocation.
The future isn’t a battle between humans and algorithms; it should be a partnership.
The brands that thrive will be those that understand both sides of the equation: machine logic and human wonder.
Imagine a world where AI handles the mechanical layer, delivering knowledge instantly, predicting needs precisely. While we humans craft the cultural layer: the stories, moments and shared meanings that make all that information matter.
In this hybrid space, friction becomes intentional, efficiency becomes invisible, and creativity becomes the competitive edge once again.
The web may be losing its surfaces, but the depth of experience we can create has never been greater.
So, can we all agree that as the machines take care of the clicks, let’s take care of the curiosity?
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