Your website gets 50 milliseconds

People decide what they think of your website in about a twentieth of a second.

That figure comes from a 2006 study at Carleton University in Ottawa. Gitte Lindgaard's team flashed web pages at people for 50 milliseconds and asked them to rate how appealing each one looked. When people got ten times longer to look, the ratings barely moved.

So the impression is made before anyone reads a word you wrote.

That matters more now that AI builds so many sites. Left to itself, AI gives everyone the same safe look. You've seen it: the same fonts and the same gradient buttons, site after site, until you can't tell one business from the next.

AI has no taste of its own, so it needs yours written down on one page.

Start with your colours, with their exact hex codes, and the fonts you use for headings and body text.

Add three websites you rate, with one line on what you like about each one. A line like "the spacing on this one" gives AI something real to aim at, where "make it clean" leaves it guessing.

Then add a short list of what you never want to see, like stock photos of handshakes or a gradient on every button.

Give that page to your AI before you start, whether you're building a web page, a slide deck or a PDF.

Then ask it to check its own draft against the page before it shows you anything. You'll catch the generic look before it ever reaches your website.