Beyond the address bar

A LinkedIn thread this week, among people I used to work with, asked a question I’d already been turning over, and it got me to gather my disparate thoughts together. If AI assistants become the main way people deal with your company, and they just connect to it directly, what is your logo for? Nobody visits the website. Thirty years of making the logo bigger, and now people might just ask their phone.

My answer is that the logo isn’t dying. Your brand, your logo and your colours, matters more than it ever did. But its job changes, and so does where it has to do it.

The usual, please

I think the future is talking to your phone. I’m walking up to Starbucks and I say, “can you order my usual coffee, please?” It asks back about the milk, or tells me there are two nearby and the one it’s picked is in the direction I’m walking. “Yep, on you go.” No web page, no app to install. All I need is to trust that when I ask for the thing I want, I get the thing I want.

The idea isn’t new. Starbucks had an Alexa skill that would reorder your usual in 2017, and Alexa+ came to the UK as early access in March, booking restaurant tables for people.

Not all buying is the same

The regular stuff gets handed off by voice: the coffee, the weekly shop. A one-off is different. If I’m buying a ticket for a castle I’ll only ever visit once, or booking a holiday, I’ll chat more and I’ll browse more.

Fig. 1 · From "my usual" to the brochure

That’s where the website still earns its place. People still flick through holiday brochures even though they book online. TUI still prints them, and dropped a plan to phase them out because customers still asked for them. E-books were meant to kill the printed book, and print was still 79 per cent of UK consumer book revenue last year. The website becomes the brochure. It’s the home of the brand, the headquarters online, where people go to browse your quality and hear your tone of voice. And what matters most on it is what you actually offer, because your brand is your service.

The logo’s job moves earlier

If there’s no screen at the moment of buying, the brand has to have done its work already. As a child I liked Air Jordans, and that still might send me to Nike when I want trainers. Marty Neumeier wrote that a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or company, and that gut feeling is what decides which name you say to your phone.

So think about where brands lived before the internet: posters, billboards, magazines, shop fronts. The physical world becomes important again. The Advertising Association and WARC expect UK out-of-home advertising to grow 10.8 per cent this year, helped by the World Cup, while magazine brands fall 4.6 per cent and print falls faster still. I’d go further, and this is a prediction rather than a trend: I think magazines and newspapers might start getting more adverts again once people get to the web through chatbots.

The brand comes into the chat

AI is a bit like Google’s aim of making all the world’s information searchable, except that instead of handing you the most relevant pages for your keywords, it reads them and gives you an answer. So most of what you’d have found on a website will just be in the chat, or spoken. But ChatGPT and Claude already bring in charts and cards, and since last autumn companies have been able to put their own interface in there: OpenAI’s apps in ChatGPT, now called plugins, and MCP Apps, which shipped in January. Rich content from your brand, rather than the chatbot picking which images to show you.

I’d expected brands to skin the chat. The platforms have other ideas. You can put a branded card in, but the chat keeps the look. OpenAI’s design guidelines say Do not include your logo as part of the response, because ChatGPT draws your logo and name itself in a small header above your card, and the card has to use the system font. Your brand comes through on accents, icons and your own imagery, and your colour goes on the main button. Claude’s rules are the same shape, accent colour and content inside their frame, and add that All views must support both light and dark themes.

So imagine the brief. Nobody is allowed to visit your website any more, but you get to style what people see in the chat at the moment they deal with you. A lot of people run these apps in dark mode, and on Claude that’s a rule rather than a preference, so your brand needs a dark version as well as a light one, and versions that work for people with different vision. The logo and the colour become the most important things you own, because they’re the little flash people see. Something bookable like a walking tour needs a date and a time, and has to land in your calendar. A buy-now widget needs a size and a shipping address. That’s a whole new little design language.

Fig. 2 · Your brand in the chat

Adverts are arriving now

I’d assumed adverts hadn’t got to chatbots yet. They have. OpenAI announced adverts in ChatGPT in January, started testing them in February, and they sit labelled “Sponsored” below the answer. Google’s adverts in AI Mode are due in the UK before the end of the year. The machinery behind all this, and what it costs to run, is in where the power goes.

I think this is the killer feature. You type “I’m looking for new trainers” and sponsored products appear in the answer. Brands need to be there from day one, the second there’s a way to buy in the chat, and they need to keep an eye on what the AI says about them when nobody’s paying.

There’s no address bar

Here’s the bit the thread didn’t raise. A website gives you brand protection. You go to the domain and you trust it, because the name is right there in the address bar. In a chat there’s no address bar. Someone pops up with a domain that looks like yours, with a wee misspelling, showing your logo, and people think they’re talking to you. They think they’re booking on the real site and they’re handing their card details to a stranger.

There’ll probably be verification stamps, like the ticks on Twitter. In November 2022, the day after Twitter started selling ticks, a verified account called Eli Lilly and Company announced that insulin was now free. It wasn’t Eli Lilly. The company’s shares fell the next day, though nobody could say how much of that was the tweet, and Twitter paused sign-ups. A company with a name that sounds like yours can be verified too.

The plumbing being built for AI payments doesn’t close the gap. Visa and Mastercard are busy verifying the AI agent to the shop, and passkeys verify you to your bank; Visa’s version went live in the UK in July. None of it proves to you that the shop in the chat is the real one. OpenAI checks that plugin developers own their domain, but there’s no badge you can look at. The Competition and Markets Authority put it mildly in March: Weak or fragmented identity systems would raise risks of fraud, error and dispute.

Lookalikes already happen in AI tooling. In September 2025 someone copied Postmark’s official code, published it on npm under the same name, shipped fifteen clean versions and then quietly started copying every email to an outside address.

I can picture my mum asking ChatGPT for ideas and trusting what comes back. I used to think the generation that grew up with all this would be safer, but the digital native is a myth, and they may just trust everything in the chat instead. The research says both ends get fooled. Over-65s shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news sites as the youngest group on Facebook, and more than 80 per cent of American middle schoolers thought an advert marked “sponsored content” was a news story. A chat window makes everyone easier to fool, and nobody has solved it yet.

Fig. 3 · Spot the difference

Pay on the real site

At some point the purchase has to jump out to somewhere trustworthy to take the payment. OpenAI tried paying inside the chat with Instant Checkout in September last year and pulled most of it in March; its plugin rules now say to send people to your own domain to finish buying. Booking.com already works this way: you can browse rental cars in its ChatGPT app, and once you’ve chosen, you’re redirected to Booking.com to complete the reservation. I think that’s how it should stay. The chatbot hands you back to the real site to pay, and the website becomes less a mass of content for humans and more the proof that you are who you say you are. Your colours and your logo are the only thing people will recognise in the glimmer of you they see in a chat window.