All my clients wanted a carousel, now it's an AI chatbot!

The carousel that never mattered

When a client pulls out their phone in a meeting and points at a competitor’s homepage, the first thing they show is usually a rotating banner in the bottom‑right corner. For years that was the litmus test of a "modern" site: a big, slow carousel full of generic stock images that no visitor reads. I built dozens of them, watching users scroll past in a split second to find a phone number.

The trend faded not because anyone declared carousels bad, but because something newer arrived to copy. Cookie‑consent banners took the place of the carousel, then Google Tag Manager snippets, then a slew of analytics tools that nobody ever opened. I once asked a client 18 months after launch if he’d ever looked at the traffic dashboard – he hadn’t, and he didn’t even remember the login.

The chatbot as a social signal

Now the conversation has moved to AI chatbots. The moment a client mentions a competitor’s bot, I ask a simple question: "Do you actually use chatbots when you visit other sites?" The answer is almost always a laugh and a “no”. Users close them within seconds, or get irrelevant answers. One client even told me about a bot that gave the wrong opening hours for months and still thought it was funny.

Yet the pressure remains: "We should have one, right?" The chatbot has become a visual cue that a site is keeping up, not a functional tool. A website without a chatbot in 2026 feels unfinished, as if a piece of the UI puzzle is missing, even if that missing piece is a half‑broken widget that most visitors ignore.

When simplicity scares clients

When a client brings up a chatbot, I sometimes flip the script and open a few smolweb sites – tiny, fast, readable pages with no pop‑ups or blinking corners. Their reaction is immediate: "Oh, that loads fast. I like that." The word that recurs is simple. But for many clients, simple means not impressive enough, not easy to use. They equate visual heft with effort, and worry that a minimal site looks cheap.

Building a genuinely simple experience – instant load, clear copy, no unnecessary widgets – is often harder than slapping a chatbot on the page. The restraint required to keep a site lean is invisible work, and no one sees the discipline behind it.

Where the pressure really comes from

The push for chatbots isn’t really client‑driven; it’s a symptom of a decade of bloated pages, dark‑pattern tactics, and a feature arms race that redefined what a "real" website looks like. Clients are simply echoing the room they read, a room that has been conditioned to expect a floating widget in the corner.

A shift may come from users rather than decision‑makers. If enough visitors notice that a calm, fast site lets them find what they need without dismissing three overlays, the market signal could change. Planting the seed, however, is a slow process.

Bottom line (without a tidy list)

The chatbot sits on my client’s homepage, blinking patiently. It doesn’t know the opening hours, the prices, or the correct answer to most questions. It’s there because everyone else has one, not because it adds value.

If you’re seeing the same pattern in your projects, let’s talk about it on the Fediverse. Your experiences help map where the next real improvement might emerge.