From a relatively small experiment, we learned a lot about the effectiveness of different formats of student communications and student preferences. The main findings were as follows: 

1. When it came to assessing content in student communications, students did not seem to be primarily concerned with the digital sustainability of the format. While digital sustainability considerations did not drive student format preferences, it’s worth noting that the most preferred format (structured text) had the lowest environmental impact of those tested. 
2. Audio did not appear effective for this type of student communication. Audio formats lack the scannability that students rely on, making them a less suitable choice for this type of communication. 
3. Complying with accessibility requirements does not guarantee usability or a good user experience. A transcript can meet accessibility requirements, yet still fail to provide adequate scannability, highlighting the importance of considering both accessibility and usability. 
4. Students prioritise their time and seek relevant information, emphasising the need for formats that can be easily updated and kept current. 
5. More research is needed on video and text complementarity. Further study is required to determine the most effective ways to combine video and text to support communicating with students in the most effective ways possible.  
6. When researching the effectiveness of student communications, hearing direct feedback from students is essential. A useful next step would be to ask students directly about their experiences with structured text content versus timestamped video and compare the accuracy as well as the completeness of their recall. 

We’re planning to continue our research into effectiveness of video content

Our findings have implications for the development of educational content. We shared our results with the Careers Service, who were interested in using our research to inform their content development. This collaboration has the potential to impact how they work with media in the future. Looking ahead, we would like to investigate how students interact with videos on social media platforms like LinkedIn, as their attitudes towards video seem to differ depending on whether it’s for entertainment or educational purposes. This could provide valuable insights into the role of video in student learning and engagement.

Today’s post is a collaboration between myself, Tom Greenwood, and Michael Andersen, a fellow digital sustainability advocate and author of the book Sustainable Web Design in 20 Lessons.

Michael got in touch with me recently with a rather interesting question — if people are increasingly getting their information directly from AI services like ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, should we still be designing websites for humans? Put another way, is the primary audience for a website in the future going to be non-human intelligence?

This is a rather provocative question, and as Michael and I both care deeply about the environmental and social impact of the web, it is one that we should not ignore.

Of course, the idea that we might have to consider robots when designing a website is not entirely new. There has long been a tension between the need (and desire) to provide the best experience to human users while also needing to optimise websites for higher search rankings. The robots have been exerting power over us for a long time already. However, until recently the robots were simply the gatekeepers controlling who actually finds their way into our websites. With the rise of AI services, the robots are stealing our content and locking the gates behind them. 

This poses some interesting challenges for any person or organisation that has a website, and in the process forces us to ask some deeper questions about what we actually want the Internet to be moving forward. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that this is an inherently bad thing, and it’s certainly not all good, but Michael and I want to hold space to consider the challenges alongside the possibilities with open minds, to imagine how we might evolve the web positively for this new era.

The AI traffic paradox

In recent times we’ve seen a number of clients at Wholegrain Digital experience significant spikes in their web hosting traffic as a result of AI bots constantly crawling their pages for information. This can come at a real financial cost to the client, not to mention the environmental impact, and it raises the question over whether we should block AI bots from our websites.

At the same time though, Michael highlights that some organisations have seen significant drops in web traffic coinciding with the rising popularity of AI services such as ChatGPT. At Wholegrain we have seen ChatGPT appear as a new traffic source for some websites, but at this stage it’s mostly a small one, as fewer people tend to click back to websites from their AI answers compared to traditional search engine results. Not to mention the fact that Google now provides AI answers at the top of its search results these days, reducing the need for the website “visitor” to um… visit. 

So we have AI companies causing a significant increase in artificial traffic to websites, while also reducing the human traffic to those same websites. And yet the place where these AI tools get their information from are these very same websites. Websites that people have invested a lot of time and money into designing, building, and maintaining, as well as creating content for.

This article isn’t about arguing the injustice of this situation, but to sit with it and acknowledge that we are in something of a paradox. AI services need a thriving Internet full of rich information in order to do what they do, yet they simultaneously erode the incentive for people and organisations to invest in creating a thriving web. The snake is eating its own tail.

Visiting the source

In our discussions, Michael highlighted a key feature of this changing dynamic being that websites are increasingly treated as sources of information, rather than destinations to visit. If AI companies have their way, much like social media, people will spend most of their time on these new platforms and not leave. In this sense they really don’t care about your website other than it being a source of data to mine. 

But it’s likely that if you have a website, then you do care that people visit. You likely have reasons, whether commercial or not, to want real human beings to visit your website. You could, as some are doing, block AI crawlers from your website to discourage them from mining your website and attempt to ensure that the information on your website is really only available by visiting your website. This may work for some, but as people increasingly use AI tools as search engines, blocking AI crawlers entirely is not dissimilar to blocking Google from your website. It’s a bold and admirable ethical stance, but it might not be very practical in many cases. So what can we do instead?

My personal view is that we may need to design hybrid websites, facing the tension head on by separating the needs of humans from the “needs” of robots, but neglecting neither. We can compartmentalise, at least partially, the destination for humans, and the source of data for machines. In doing so, we might actually create a win-win and unleash a new wave of human creativity in web design, reversing the long term trend of websites “all looking the same.” Let me explain.

The human experience

One of the things that this new dynamic highlights is that some people go online in search of answers to questions, and LLMs are increasingly taking this role. However, the user experience of LLMs tends to come in the form of long text based responses, or a digital voice speaking these same answers. What they don’t provide is the rich, immersive experience that has for a long time been a significant part of what people enjoy about going online. It could be argued that in the past decade or so, as User Experience “best practices” have become more firmly established and websites have been optimised for search rankings, the web has become increasingly bland compared to its earlier days when website design was a truly creative practice.

We now have an opportunity to reverse that trend by prioritising the human visitor not just in terms of ease of use, but in terms of the richness of experience that we offer people. Websites that are truly beautiful, immersive, joyful and thought provoking in their design, and which people want to visit because they are places that people actually want to be rather than just sources of dry information.

This also includes the tone of voice of the content, which is generally very bland in LLM tools but can be much more expressive on your own website, especially if there is now less need to awkwardly jam our content full of SEO keywords. This will allow us to enrich people’s experiences and convey the spirit of our brands in ways that an LLM likely won’t, making our own websites a more authentic expression of what we really have to say.

We could compare this to the shift we are seeing in high streets, whereby generic, uninspiring shops have struggled to compete with online retailers, but it has left an unmet need for unique, enjoyable experiences that people cannot get from shopping on Amazon. When high street retailers shift their perspective to see themselves as destinations to be experienced rather than just places to buy things, people do make the effort to leave their homes and go into town. Similarly, when we view websites this way and design experiences that people genuinely enjoy visiting and even want to share with their friends, we create something that the LLMs cannot replicate, even if they steal some of our content.

Of course, my comparison with high streets runs out here as some of the organisations that have the greatest opportunity to do this are likely those with some element of e-commerce. There is an inherent opportunity to inspire potential customers with rich visual information about the products, and interactive tools to help them understand products better and choose what is right for them. Of course we want to do this in a way that is accessible and environmentally efficient, but there are huge opportunities here for creativity. To quote my colleague Chânelle Sharp, a designer at Wholegrain, “the design of websites will shift to work even harder for the user now”. I think that is a good thing, with web design in the near future becoming much more about digital storytelling.

People are time poor and so instead of wasting their time with large reams of text intended mostly for Google, user experiences could actually cut back significantly on written text in many cases and just give people exactly the information they need, in a beautiful and engaging format. And despite the downsides of these AI tools, it may just be that AI coding tools in the long term will make it easier for organisations to create rich functionality and design features such as visualisations, personalisations, dashboard, calculators, and interactive journeys, that were previously beyond their budgets. It may well be therefore that AI coding will gradually reduce one of the key limiting factors in doing really exciting things online.

Then come the robots

If we design websites primarily for humans once more and relegate the AI and search crawlers to second class citizens of the web, then you may be wondering, how do you get your website featured in search results and AI responses? I think the answer might be to have a secondary layer of a website that is purely informational, with large repositories of high quality written information and raw data relating to your organisation and area of expertise. These repositories can include high quality original data, white papers, academic research and the like, making them a rich source of quotable information for the LLMs. These pages can be crawled by crawlers without getting in the way of human visitors, and to quote Chânelle again, “if the information is purely informational, then maybe it doesn’t even need to be designed”. This second layer of a website could be super efficient by virtue of not being mixed in with the presentation elements such as imagery and custom fonts that are there only to improve the experience of humans.

But what if your visitors do want to access some of this information from your data repository while they are on your website? This is where a more efficient LLM tool tailored just to your website may provide the answer. Tools such as HOLP, which we used for the UK Green Building Council, can provide answers to the questions of the people who have arrived at your website, without them having to leave your website and unlike mass market AI tools, they can provide trusted answers as they are trained to provide information from your own websites information repository (as well as its user facing web content). This is a win for the human visitor who is seeking specific information that may not be easy to find in the standard user facing content, and for the organisation who is able to meet the unique needs of such visitors without complicating the user experience for other people.

I’ll hand over to Michael now to discuss how some of this might be achieved on a practical level.

Down at street level

I want to begin by saying how excited I have been to write this alongside Tom. Ever since I first read his book Sustainable Web Design, he has been a constant source of inspiration to me. The hybrid idea he lands on, a light and human surface sitting on top of a denser layer meant for machines, is the thread I want to follow, though I would not want to give either of us too much credit for it, since the web has been built in roughly this shape for a long time and most of us have simply taken it for granted. What feels worth examining now is not the layers themselves, but the question of who that hidden layer is increasingly being built for, and that is where my own corner of the work comes in.

That corner is the code itself, where I tend to sit rather than up above it looking at the strategy. Tom has been describing the shape of all this from above, the way you might look down at a city and see how the roads connect to one another, and I want to stay down at street level for the rest of this, because it is down there that the same question we kept circling stops being philosophical and turns into something you can put your hands on. It becomes a question about which file you create, and what you put in it, and who you imagine reading it. So where Tom has been holding the why of all this, I want to spend my half on the how, on what the hybrid he describes actually looks like when you are the one who has to build it.

The plumbing underneath the page

If you have ever sat and built a website properly, not just made it look nice but actually built it so that it holds together, then you already know that a page is never only the thing the visitor sees. Underneath the colours and the images and the words arranged on the screen, there is a second version of the same page that almost no human ever really looks at. There is structured data, little labelled notes in the markup that say this is the price, this is the author, this is the date, this is the review, and here is how many stars it got. There is JSON sitting in the background, describing the page in a way that is clean and predictable and easy for software to read. And none of this is particularly new to anyone who builds for the web, because we have been doing it for years, mostly so that search engines could understand our pages well enough to rank them, and most visitors have never had any idea it was there.

To make that a little less abstract, it helps to picture what one of those hidden notes actually looks like in practice. If I have written an article, I might tuck a small block of structured data into the page, written in a format called JSON-LD, which is really just a tidy way of listing plain facts so that a machine can read them without having to guess. In ordinary words, the block says something like, this thing is an article, its headline is this, the person who wrote it is this, it was published on this date, and it belongs to this larger publication. None of that changes a single pixel of what you see on the screen, and you could read the article perfectly well without ever knowing the block was there. But a machine that lands on the page no longer has to work out who the author is by hunting around the layout and hoping it has guessed correctly, because you have simply told it, in a vocabulary that thousands of other sites use in exactly the same way. That shared vocabulary is what people mean when they talk about schema, and the whole point of it is that meaning stops being something a machine has to reconstruct and becomes something you have stated plainly.

What is changing now is the kind of reader that layer is starting to serve. There is a proposed convention that appeared back in 2024, suggested by Jeremy Howard, who is one of the people behind Answer.AI, and it is called llms.txt. The idea is almost touchingly simple. You place a plain markdown file at the root of your website, the same way we have placed a robots.txt file there for decades, and in it you lay out, in clean and readable text, the parts of your site you actually want a language model to read. No clutter, no menus, no scripts, no advertising, just the meaning, served plainly.

And because it is only markdown, building one is genuinely something you could finish in an afternoon, which is part of why it interests me so much. You open a plain text file, you name it llms.txt, and you place it at the very root of your site so that it sits at a predictable address the way robots.txt always has. At the top you write the name of the site and a sentence or two describing what it is and who it is for. Then you write a short list of links to the pages that actually matter, your best writing, your core explanations, your reference material, and after each link you add a handful of words saying what a reader will find there. That is more or less the whole thing. If you want to go a step further there is a fuller version, often kept as a second file, where instead of only pointing at your important pages you include the full cleaned up text of them, so that a model has the real content in front of it rather than just a map showing where the content lives. Either way, what you are really doing is curating. You are deciding, on purpose and in advance, what you would want a machine to understand about your work if it only ever saw the tidy version and never visited the site at all.

I want to be honest about what it is and what it is not, because it would be easy to oversell it. It is not an official standard, and Howard himself has said as much. The big AI systems do not reliably read it yet, and by now more than one fairly large study has looked at the question and found that adding the file does not measurably change how often a model mentions you, with one analysis of around three hundred thousand sites finding essentially no difference at all. Google has even said, fairly plainly, that it has no plans to support it. And yet hundreds of thousands of sites have already added one, including a few names you would recognise, and people who have watched the web for a long time keep comparing it to the early days of schema markup, back when that too looked like a niche curiosity that later turned out to matter a great deal.

And this is where I want to put the practical heart of it, because it would be easy to read everything above and imagine that building Tom’s hybrid means building two entire websites, one warm and human and one stripped bare for the machines, two of everything and twice the work. You can do that, and for certain things you genuinely should, but for most of a site the truth turned out to be stranger and a good deal kinder than that. If you have already built the human layer properly, with markup that is clean and honest about what each thing is, with real headings and real buttons and images that are actually described, then you have already built most of the machine layer without ever thinking of it that way. What you add on top of that is thin. A little structured data to state plainly what the important things on the page are, and an llms.txt file at the root to hand a model the tidy version of what you most want it to read. That is the bulk of the work, and almost none of it is a second website. It is mostly just the first website.

Where the two layers do genuinely come apart is in the place Tom pointed to, the large stores of pure information, the white papers and the raw data and the long reference material that exist mainly to be read rather than to be experienced. For that kind of thing it really does make sense to build a separate and lighter layer, plain pages or plain markdown with almost no presentation wrapped around them, so that a crawler can read them cheaply and a person who actually wants the underlying detail can still reach it without having to wade through it on the main site. So when I try to picture the hybrid in concrete terms, it is not two parallel websites standing side by side at all. It is one human site built well enough that it serves the machines almost for free, sitting next to a small and efficient archive for the heavy reference material that nobody really wanted dressed up in the first place.

And this is the moment I really wanted to reach, because when you sit with all of this at once, you start to notice something a little strange, and a little hard to name. The future Tom was describing, the website that is one thing for people and another thing for machines, is in some sense already half built. We just never called it that. We built the human layer because we cared about people, and we built the machine layer because we wanted to be found, and now that machine layer is slowly turning into the thing that reads our work on the reader’s behalf. It is a bit like discovering that a path you have been clearing and maintaining for years leads somewhere you never expected it to go.

When accessibility starts serving the machine

There is one corner of all this that I have not been able to stop thinking about since my call with Tom, and it has to do with accessibility. For most of my career, the work of making a website accessible has been understood as work we do for people. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which most of us just call WCAG and which are looked after by the people at the W3C, exist so that someone who cannot see the screen, or cannot use a mouse, or who processes information differently, can still move through a website and understand it. In practice, when we talk about meeting those guidelines, we usually mean building to a level they call AA, which most teams treat as the realistic target, and the work of getting there is made up of a hundred small and very ordinary decisions. You write alternative text that genuinely describes what an image shows rather than leaving it empty. You use headings in a real order instead of choosing them for how big they happen to look on the screen.

You label the fields in a form so that it is clear what each one is asking for. You make sure every part of the page can be reached and operated with a keyboard alone, and that the text has enough contrast against its background to be read by someone whose eyes are tired or beginning to fail. None of it is glamorous, and almost none of it ever shows up in a screenshot, but it is the difference between a site a person can actually use and one that closes its door to them. Here in Europe that work has recently stopped being optional in a lot of cases, because the European Accessibility Act came into force in the summer of 2025 and now expects a great many digital products and services to meet exactly these guidelines. So accessibility has been on a lot of minds lately, and rightly so.

But here is the part that feels strange to me. The whole craft of accessibility has always been, underneath everything else, the craft of making meaning explicit. You write your markup so that a screen reader, which is itself a machine, can correctly understand what is a heading and what is a button and what an image is actually showing. You describe things in plain words so that software can relay them faithfully to a person who needs them in some other form. In other words, we have spent years and years learning to make our websites legible to a machine, because a machine was the thing standing between our content and the human who needed it. We just thought of that machine as an assistant working on behalf of a person, which it was.

And once you see it laid out like that, the overlap with everything I was describing earlier stops feeling like a coincidence and starts to look almost like the same task wearing two different faces. The alternative text you wrote for a blind visitor is meaning made explicit, and a language model wants that exact thing. The heading you marked up honestly so that a screen reader could announce it is structure made explicit, and a model trying to make sense of your page wants that too. The form field you labelled, the button you named properly, the landmark you added so that someone could skip straight to the main content, every one of those is intent stated plainly rather than left to be guessed, and plainly stated intent is precisely what this new reader is hungry for. Which means that in very practical terms, if you build a site to that AA level for the people who actually need it, you have quietly built a large part of your machine layer at the very same time, and the two reasons for doing the work, the human one and the technical one, turn out to be pointing in the same direction.

Now another kind of machine is arriving, the language model, and it turns out that much of the work we did to make the web kinder to people has also, almost by accident, made it more readable to this new reader. The structure, the explicit labels, the meaning made plain, all of the things we built for the person using assistive technology turn out to be more or less exactly the things a language model also wants. I find that both hopeful and slightly unsettling, and I do not think I am supposed to resolve which one it is. It is hopeful because it might mean that good, accessible, carefully made websites are simply ready for this new era without anyone having to compromise anything. And it is unsettling because there is something odd about realising that work you did for the most human of reasons also serves something that is not human at all.

And then it opens a question I genuinely do not know the answer to. If a language model can read the raw, structured meaning of a page and then reshape it into whatever form a particular person needs, spoken aloud, simplified, translated, slowed down, made calmer, then it is at least possible that AI becomes a better companion for people with accessibility needs than many of the tools we have today. The same shift could even help companies that have never been able to afford a genuinely good, accessible experience, because the model sitting in front of their content could, in principle, give their visitors a kinder journey than their own budget ever allowed. I want to hold that possibility gently rather than promise it, because we have all heard a great many promises about what AI is supposedly going to fix. But I would be lying if I said the thought did not move me a little, that the very thing reshaping the web might also, if we are careful and a bit lucky, make it gentler toward the people it has so often left behind.

AI as a search tool

I want to slow down here, because there is a worry underneath all of this that I have been turning over for a long while, and I am wary of how I say it, because it would be very easy to make it sound like I am complaining about the way people read now, and that is not what I mean at all.

At my job we have spent time talking with young people about how they find things out, and one of those conversations has stayed with me. A teenager said, more or less, that AI made the person lazy, that when something can simply be handed to the person, the person loses the urge to go and chase the answer. I want to be careful and call this what it honestly is, which is one young person being candid in one conversation, not a study and not a verdict. But it landed on something I had been feeling for a while without quite having the words for it. Because if the answer can be had instantly, without arriving anywhere at all, then a certain kind of journey simply stops happening. Not the journey through a checkout or a menu, but the one where you go looking for something, and you end up somewhere you did not plan to be, and you leave a little changed by having been there.

For a long time I think we treated that journey as part of the value of the web, even though we never wrote it down anywhere or put it in a proposal to a client. You arrived at a site, you read more than you came for, you understood the people behind it, you caught their tone of voice, you felt that there was a person or a team or a belief on the other side of the screen. That was never really about the information. The information was almost the excuse for the visit. And my worry is not that people have become lazy, but that we are building a version of the web where that kind of arrival is no longer necessary, at least for everything that can be reduced to a quick answer. I do not think that is the whole web, and I do not think it has to be a tragedy. But I think it is worth noticing what we might be letting go of while we are busy admiring everything we are gaining.

And I notice, sitting here at the practical end of all this, that my worry is really the shadow of Tom’s hope. He is hopeful that we will build places worth coming to, websites so rich and so genuinely worth the visit that people choose to arrive even when a machine could have spared them the trip. I share that hope, more than I probably let on. But the thing I keep turning over, down here where the pages actually get made, is whether the arriving itself is quietly being designed out of the web, and whether all the craft in the world can pull someone back to a place they no longer have any reason to go.

The questions I cannot put down

So I find myself ending more or less where Tom began, holding a handful of questions rather than answers, which I have come to think is the honest place to stand.

Are we still designing for people, or are we slowly becoming translators, standing in between humans and machines, trying to serve both at once without fully belonging to either? When a language model has already read everything on the page before the person ever arrives, what is the visit itself actually for, and what is left inside it that still matters? And if the model becomes the thing that shapes how our work is understood, I find myself wondering whether it might end up building better journeys through that work than we do, and whether, a little further down the same road, we will still need the style guides and the UX designers and the graphic content, or whether those become a luxury rather than a default.

I wonder too about the places that exist almost entirely to be read; the Wikipedias and the reference sites and the great open stores of knowledge, and whether they will one day be built in a wholly different way, written first as plain markdown for the machines rather than dressed up in markup for us.

I am not sure either, when it really comes to it, whether companies will simply hand the whole customer journey over to the AI sitting in front of their content, having decided that a more accessible and more helpful experience, delivered by a machine, is worth more to them than the elaborate one they once paid so much to design. And if plain text is becoming the shared layer that the machines hand out for free to anyone who asks, then what becomes the thing worth keeping precious, the thing we still make slowly and by hand precisely because it cannot simply be read out by something else and passed along? I do not have clean answers to any of these, and I am not sure I trust anyone who says they do.

What I do know is that the question Tom opened with, whether we are still designing for humans, is not really a question with a yes or a no waiting at the end of it. It is more like a question we are going to be living inside of for the next several years, whether we choose to or not.

Planning the learning outcomes for the module on a Miro board.

This week I had the pleasure of giving a talk at Smashing’s “Meets Sustainability” event, alongside fellow speakers Chris Adams and Ines Akrap. Videos of all talks and the Q&A are available to watch online, but in this article, I want to provide a written version of my talk, One Small Step for Web Kind.

My hope for this article is to communicate the key message of my talk, which is this:

The title of my talk echoes Neil Armstrong’s famous words when stepping onto the surface of the moon, and it felt fitting for a talk given at a time when the scale of the digital sustainability problem has apparently transcended Earth. With Elon Musk talking about putting data centers in space, and even on the moon itself.

It would be easy to throw our hands in the air and say “I give up,” but I hope to inspire you to believe that our hope and actions matter now more than ever. To explain why, let me travel back in time to the beginning of my own journey in web sustainability.

From small beginnings

When I started Wholegrain with my wife Vineeta in 2007, we had a mission to use our business for good and we put sustainability at the heart of everything that we did, from the way that we worked, to the supplies that we purchased, to how we traveled, and to the types of clients that we worked with, but despite our best intentions, that wasn’t actually everything.

It was only in 2016 when we were preparing to certify as a B Corp that I realised that we had a huge blind spot. The B Corp assessment asked us how we measure the environmental impact of the products that we make, and furthermore, how we reduce that impact. Having previously specialised in the eco-design of physical products, I knew exactly what this question meant, as I had done exactly this type of assessment and design in the past, but I had always assumed that digital products didn’t have an environmental impact. They were “virtual” and living in a “cloud.” Weren’t they?

When I read these questions in the B Corp assessment, it quickly dawned on me how ignorant I had been, and to be honest, I was really embarrassed. Of all people, I had the experience to know better.

This realisation kick-started a mission that has since been at the center of Wholegrain, to understand the impact of the web, and to figure out what we can do about it. At that early time, searching online, the number of people who I found talking about this topic could be counted on one hand, such as Tim Frick, Mike Gifford, and James Christie. True pioneers out there in the wilderness.

I also found a lone academic paper on the subject, reporting the total emissions of the internet to be 2% of all global emissions, equivalent to the aviation industry. This was a startling statistic. There was very little information, and very few people talking about it, but it was a start, and it inspired me to go further.

That starting point led me to develop the first methodology for calculating the emissions of a single website, so that we could benchmark our work and find ways to improve. It led our team to then look at their own work in a new light and begin to evolve their approaches to design, development, content, and hosting, and we began to share what we were learning through talks, tools like WebsiteCarbon.com, collaborations like the Sustainable Web Manifesto, and content such as blog posts, our Curiously Green newsletter, and in 2021 my first book, Sustainable Web Design.

At first, most people were skeptical, believing that the digital world doesn’t impact the physical world. But slowly, slowly, people began to engage with the topic. And those people who engaged with the topic went on to make changes in their own work, speak to their colleagues, write their own articles, give talks, develop new tools, and even write books.

Skip forward to today and while the AI race may have made some people feel that the digital sustainability challenge is now too big to solve, we should stop and look at how far we have come. In an industry that claims to be forward thinking, digital sustainability was not on the agenda 10 years ago, apart from those few pioneers speaking into the seemingly endless void. Now, in 2026 there is a significant level of awareness of the impacts of digital technology, not just in the industry, but even in the general public. There are a growing number of events, podcasts, blogs, and tools, not to mention that a global standard for web sustainability is well on its way to fruition thanks to this ever-growing community of passionate people. On top of that, every day that I log into LinkedIn, I see someone with “digital sustainability” or “sustainable web design” in their profile or their company description. The culture has changed radically in 10 years, and this is thanks to every single person who stopped to take notice and cared enough to do something, however small.

It all matters, and every small action does matter, however imperfect it might be. If you optimise your email newsletter or switch to EcoSend, that one action scales to thousands of emails every time you send a message. If you optimise your website, that impact scales over thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of visitors, and if you slow down your use of AI, you slow down the AI race just a little bit. Furthermore, when we talk about the things that matter, sharing knowledge and ideas, we multiply our impact further, having a ripple effect that extends out to horizons that we will never see, but will likely be greater than the direct impact that we can see.

Seth Godin says that culture is simply the phenomenon that “people like us do things like this,” and I believe that in this spirit we can change the culture simply by daring to do things differently in line with our own values. We may face resistance at first, but gradually we disrupt the flow of the status quo to the point that the culture in our teams, in our organisations, in our industries, and society at large, begins to change.

My friend Nick Whitnell often likes to quote Buckminster Fuller, who loved to illustrate this with the analogy of a ship. Huge ships have immense momentum and are almost impossible to turn. The forces resisting them from turning are so great that it’s almost impossible to even turn the rudder, let alone the ship itself. To overcome this problem, ships have a tiny extra rudder attached to their main rudder, called a trim tab. This trim tab is small enough that it can be moved in the water, and when it does so, it creates a small pocket of low pressure that slowly moves the big rudder. And as the big rudder then moves, gradually the whole ship changes direction.

We may feel small and insignificant, but we are all the trim tabs of our society, quietly creating pressure to turn the seemingly unstoppable ship that we are all on, if we choose to. We just need to dare to stick our little oar out into the oncoming flow of water and trust that in time we are helping to steer the ship.

So with that, I hope that I’ve inspired you to believe that we all do matter, that the future hasn’t been written yet, and that we should get up each day and do our best to represent a version of the world that we want to live in, knowing that how we show up today shapes the world that we step into tomorrow.

A slide from our training session on evaluating the effectiveness of different images from the University web estate.

We are obviously a WordPress agency but that decision wasn’t made lightly or without considering all of the options. If you’re reading this it probably means that you’re interested in WordPress, worried about its security levels (don’t believe the press, its secure!) or we’ve linked you here.

Either way, welcome! Lets get started…

01. Trusted & Secure

It’s incredibly easy to make WordPress secure, mainly because the core is so well maintained and patched so the addition of hosting and domain encryption or SSL certification adds to the security. You may have heard the not so pleasant hype that WordPress isn’t secure but powering over 43% of the web, there is a reason WordPress is so well established and such a trusted platform. Based on its share of the internet, WordPress hacks are actually a lower proportionality. As with most CMS platforms, the security does also depend on maintenance and the actions of the developers / owners and so with Wholegrain’s Maintenance, that security is optimised for you.

02. Simplicity

It’s easy to build user friendly interface, making it easy for you and your team to on-board, update and edit your site. This level of control means your site won’t need a developer or expert to update it – saving time and budget! WordPress enables consistent, iterative and long-term growth, not a new site every few years – its that simple.

03. Scaleable growth

The WordPress framework makes it easy to create multiple websites under one umbrella, maintaining consistency of your brand whilst also enabling some great opportunities to grown your wider digital estate in a easy, logical way. Not only that, it can also handle everything from simple forms to e-commerce thanks to the use of a combination of out of the box and custom functionality. For Wholegrain, we have our own WrodPress theme that pushes this adaptability even further!

04. SEO friendly

WordPress not only comes with its own core SEO functions, but it’s also enables easy SEO best practice. At its foundation, WordPress is built using clean, structured code – which SEO loves! You can easily add custom permalinks and manage meta data to further feed your WordPress site to the search engines, which also help with your accessibility too. WordPress also enables fast loading and image compression with ease, making the site more sustainable and as we always say at Wholegrain – a sustainable site, is an SEO friendly site.

05. Open source

Meaning you own your own site, and have a community of expert knowledge to lean on and collaborate with. For us, this is a huge benefit and our team learn and grow form the community all of the time (and vice versa). There is a side effect of this too, which we don’t like to talk about, but should you ever decide to move away from Wholegrain, finding a developer to work on your site is also easy because of this open source nature.

06. Cost effective

This may be last on the list, but it has a big impact. Firstly, lets start with the lack of licensing fee for the core software and because it’s open source, its free to install – none of those nasty Drupal updates that cost a fortune every year. You will have read further up that WordPress has a large community behind it and this manifests plugins, themes and a professional network of developers meaning not everything needs to be from scratch and support is easy to find.

So WordPress is safe, cost effect, great for sustainability and SEO whilst also enabling some strong growth of your site. It’s easy to see why WordPress is Wholegrain’s platform of choice.

We recently launched version 4 of the Website Carbon Calculator, our free tool to help accelerate the shift toward a more sustainable Internet. We make this available because we can’t build or maintain every website in the world, that in itself isn’t sustainable! Tools like this help to contextualise website emissions to take steps on your own digital estates.

But the ones we do build? We make sure they’re sustainable as they grow.

We work with many people post launch, and after retesting our current client’s homepages and service pages, the average score was a ‘B’. 

A ‘B’ is a good score that indicates sustainable progress, but we’re never satisfied with ‘good enough’. We know it’s possible to reach an ‘A’, and that’s what we strive for. Websites should always be evolving toward better performance, in line with their business growth.

Where there’s growth, there can be bloat

Okay, I recognise that is not the sentence we all wanted to read – but it’s the truth! As businesses grow, there’s often an urge to add more to the website. It’s natural, but sometimes it leads to unnecessary bloat. And while adding more can feel like progress, it can hurt the site’s performance and impact the user experience.

We start builds with low-carbon, efficient code, but that’s just the beginning. The real goal is to make sure that every person interacting with the site has a meaningful, enriching experience. This is where education and collaboration come in. Together, we can make sustainable design choices that benefit both the planet and the people interacting – internally and externally.

A true balancing act! But it is possible; Humanitarian Practice Network is a shining example of displaying varied types of content without increasing its impact on the planet and giving a rich experience for a global audience.

Digital sustainability is not a one and done

We always aim for an ‘A’ score at site launch, but we need to think of websites as living things that need care and attention to stay healthy and high-performing. That’s where continuous iteration of the site is key and keeping Experience Principles front of mind.

With us by our client’s side, we design thoughtful solutions to business developments, campaigns and product launches – demonstrating to your audiences you care about all their interactions with you. We’re on a mission, and we want to bring you along with us! If an image upload is too big, don’t worry, we’ll help you fix it and share a tip or two with your team to prevent it in the future.

Long-term vision

We can’t improve what we don’t measure. Regularly benchmarking our websites helps keep sites in flow with new tools, user needs, and the ever-changing digital landscape – like AI. It’s important to us to be transparent about our own work too because digital sustainability is a journey, not a destination.

It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room – the impact of a ‘bad’ brief.

Writing a brief can seem really daunting – especially when you are not a designer or coder yourself. But trust us, it doesn’t need to be a huge document that strikes fear into your marketing team as they try to wrangle the countless wants, needs and opinions from the finance team, senior leadership, sales execs and your best friend who just doesn’t like the site.

Avoid the panic and keep it simple.

Don’t sweat the small stuff! Adding every possible goal, detail, want and desire will confuse and complicate the responses you get. Trust the agencies responding to do the creative thinking bit and instead focus in – why are you building a new site? That should give you the overall goal. Of course it needs to X and Y and Z along the way but don’t get too fixed on those because they are not your overall goal.

Identify your target audience and put them front and centre. It’s ok for one of the audience to be your company, but remember thats just one group and 99% of website are focussed on conversion of some kind and your team are already converted! It’s also worth noting here heirachy is incredibly important – you might have 10 user groups but the site can’t whistle and dance for all of them across all of their needs and neither should it. Some pre-work on who the main site audience is will really give you a great head start on the work.

Here’s where you shouldn’t got top line and the detail will really help. Specify essential features, functionalities and integrations. Provide any open source documentation on API’s too, that always helps in terms of gathering realistic numbers and not inflated ones because the agency just doesn’t know enough. This will also narrow the field of agencies really quickly for you and make sure you get a better steer on solutions because not all team can or want to work on all platforms and integrations.

Spoiler alert – agencies know you bend the truth when it comes to budgets. It’s a lot easier if both sides are open and honest so both teams are on one page straight away. This will save time and also build trust right out of the gate whilst also making sure that the agencies responding to your brief are being as realistic as possible about the ability to deliver within your budget and time.

We don’t need more carbon heavy, clunky and chunky websites on the internet. Adding “please detail how you will make our site low carbon and accessible please” into your brief will sort those who can from those who can’t and will result in you being delivered a new, sustainable, low carbon site that will look after you well into the future. You shouldn’t have to compromise on performance or impact so this one should be your default.

It’s as easy as that! Happy brief writing!

Wholegrain has a three part mission statement.

We aim to create the best websites in the world.

We use our business as a force for good.

We work to accelerate the shift to an Internet that’s good for people and planet.

This mission runs through our organisation like a stick of rock. Sometimes it’s a balancing act. At times we are focussed more on one element than another. 

Website Carbon as an Internet for Good accelerant

Website Carbon is one of the ways we aim to shift towards a better internet. Since its launch in August 2018 the tool has been used to test over 1 million individual webpages, for free. For many, using the tool has been a stepping stone into larger actions within digital sustainability. It certainly was for me and many of my colleagues at Wholegrain.

We take the stewardship of Website Carbon very seriously as a result. It means that making any changes to the site takes time and care. The last major update came in November 2023 when we added a rating system to the tool. The ratings give more context to the results and allow for better benchmarking.

Since then the calculator has remained stable but relatively untouched, until today.

A major update to Website Carbon Calculator

On the 14th July 2025 we updated the calculator to the V4 of the Sustainable Web Design Methodology (SWDM). V4 is the latest version of the model. The process of updating the calculator has been delicate and one we were keen to get right the first time. Any issues that erode trust in the estimates the tool provides need to be avoided.

After extensive testing Website Carbon is now updated. If you have a keen eye you might see some changes to the results it provides.

How are things different now?

V4 is a major update to the SWDM and things are quite different under it. 

For one thing you might notice that the estimate your website receives in V4 is lower than in V3. Sites tested using the V4 model tend to have lower carbon estimates per page view than V3. Estimates for your webpages may be up to two thirds lower than in V4.

Why are the estimates lower?

SWDM uses data transfer as the main proxy for estimating webpage energy use. The core calculation is the total energy used by the internet divided by the total data transfer on the internet. The updated sources used for V4 of the model saw that data transfer has increased two fold. However, total energy use has fallen.

Essentially the internet appears to be operating more efficiently than previously thought. 

If the internet is more efficient do my webpage results matter less?

Not at all!

Efficiencies in the network will only go so far. The total data transfer on the internet is increasing hugely. Growth in AI and data collection continues at an increasing pace. Efficient, lightweight websites are more important than ever.

Your website’s footprint might represent a tiny fraction of the internet’s overall emissions. But a more efficient website has huge benefits outside of carbon reduction. Lower carbon sites tend to be quicker to load and have better structure. Humans like this, search engines like this, they can lead to higher conversion rates and it’s better for the planet.

API access and API endpoint

When Website Carbon launched 7 years ago it was a pioneering tool. As part of our “improve the internet” remit we offered access to the Website Carbon API endpoint to a handful of users. From today that is no longer the case.

The main tool isn’t affected in any way, but it’s important to be transparent when we make changes like this. Any people or organisations materially affected by the change have already been contacted.

The digital sustainability landscape has changed significantly since 2018. Building a similar tool to Website Carbon is accessible. For instance The Green Web Foundation has an open-source JavaScript library CO2.js. with extensive documentation and support.

The change to API endpoint access isn’t one we have made lightly. Changing the way it can be accessed allows us to put our time and energy into other areas.

Watch this space for more details about where our energy is being redirected.

Wrapping up

We’re pioneers in the digital sustainability space and have a duty to the community to continually refine our offerings as knowledge and technology evolves. We’re on a mission, and we make our tools and resources publicly available so others can learn and help mobilise this mission.

If you have questions relating to Website Carbon you can reach out to our eat@wholegraindigital.com.

If you want to dig deeper into your website’s carbon footprint speak to bailey@wholegraindigital.com about our Digital Sustainability Consulting.

If you want further reading or to take more action you can subscribe to our Curiously Green Newsletter, visit the Sustainable Wed Design site or download the Digital Declutter toolkit.

Here’s to many more years of website testing.

“Googling” something is now common language in the same way that “Hoovering” has been since in the mid 20th century. While Hoovering still means to use a vacuum cleaner, the meaning of Googling is starting to change.

The market dominant search engine is currently morphing into an “answer engine“. Before, you would search for something on Google and then click a link to find information. Now Google and many other companies are encouraging users to find information without ever clicking a link. New services like AI Overviews are causing a growing number of Zero Click Searches causing organic traffic to fall in recent months.

But organic traffic isn’t just falling because of changes to Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Services like ChatGPT and Perplexity also appear to be partly responsible. They allow people to “search” for information without ever reaching the website source the information came from.

There are legitimate doubts of the accuracy of AI Overviews. There are also concerns over increased LLM hallucinations. Whether the information is accurate or not, how users find your site and how often people visit is changing. What we can do about it isn’t immediately obvious so we called on some experts to help. In this article Dave Peiris, head of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) at Propellernet helps shed some light on what’s happening in SEO at the moment and how to navigate it.

Summary

• Robust, reliable, fast and performant sites remain the goal. All search engines currently prioritise such sites.
• Well structured, human focussed and authoritative content is still what people and search engines want.
• Where your site features on a results page is just as important as it ever was.
• Adapting content and pages towards more specific search terms could pay dividends.
• A diverse marketing and “discoverability” strategy is key in 2025
• Economic realities and backlashes against AI may yet have a role to play in search.
• Independent and non-commercial players could be disruptors in the near future.

Discoverability fundamentals

Let’s start with the basics.

While SERPs have changed, the fundamentals for technical SEO haven’t, particularly in the case of Google. Sites with strong technical foundations and good performance metrics are more likely to rank highly for organic search results and in AI summaries.

The view from Propellernet:

Position and rank on results pages remains important. Given that AI summaries appear at the top of the page, organisations are increasingly targeting these sections to maintain authority. High search rankings coupled with strong technical SEO helps here in two ways. Dave explains that Google’s AI overviews are partly based on the Gemini model but also grounded in organic search results. They use a process called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) which passes new, relevant information into the AI model before a response is generated.

Other platforms work slightly differently. Dave says that: 

There are many reasons for an organisation to try and opt out of Search Engines crawling their sites for AI summaries. Those trying to protect IP and content on ethical grounds aren’t penalised as such. Blocking Google’s AI crawlers but allowing Googlebot to facilitate page indexing, means you’ll still appear in organic search results. At present, this doesn’t appear to result in any punitive action or downgrading of search ranking across the major search engines.

Away from search, ChatGPT and other LLMs are slightly different propositions. Blocking access to them means they can’t use your information. You won’t appear in an answer and won’t therefore be cited. Whether this presents authoritative or traffic issues is not yet clear.

In essence, the game has changed but how you play it hasn’t. A site still needs to be written using clear markup and hierarchy, load quickly and contain useful pertinent information. 

Has discoverability strategy changed?

Yes and no.

As you’ll note from the advice above, many of the best practices on technical SEO remain. The difference is that it appears to be driving less traffic to sites. 

So what can we do to mitigate these changes?

One thing is to adapt to the new ways people are searching for information. Search is becoming more personalised and queries are becoming longer and more detailed. The example Dave gave me was about running shoes. He says:

This type of query might come from people using voice to speech features on devices. It might be from an AI deciding that’s the right query based on user data. Either way the specificity is the key.

For purpose driven organisations and businesses this might mean being more specific about your products and services. For Wholegrain it might mean we break down and describe the digital sustainability services we offer in a different way. Dave suggests that a “Best for” type section could help in the new model.

As an example our Website Carbon Audit might be described as “Best for large organisations looking to assess and reduce their website emissions“.

Our Digital Sustainability Workshops could be “Best for organisations asking “How can we reduce the environmental impact of our digital estate?” “.

This small change could prove useful for human users looking for solutions as well as “agentic” AI or LLMs.

“I think the days of pumping out huge amounts of content in order to appear in search results are on the decline”

There might be an interesting side effect from a digital degrowth point of view. This focus on specificity might mean a decline in pumping out huge levels of generic content. Dave advocates for diverse methods of brand and awareness building.  

The irony of so called digital solutions like LLMs is that it might see more efforts put towards human connectivity such as:

• In person events
• Newsletters
• Digital round tables and webinars
• Branded Discord servers or Sub-Reddits
• Digital PR

Synthetic content or dare I say it, slop, proliferates the modern internet. Building authentic connections with your audience has never been more important.

Speculation on the future of search and AI summaries

While AI and LLMs are everywhere, it’s worth considering what the future might look like. Many AI products feel like they are fishing around for a solid use case. There’s also a question of whether these businesses will ever reach viable profitability. I think we might see a limiting of free tier access and a ramping up of costs as VC firms seek returns on investment.

Under those circumstances there are some more philosophical questions to consider when it comes to strategy. I asked Dave how he felt about organisations blocking AI crawlers and opting out of the game (as far as is possible). He saw this as an ethical consideration. News Organisations and publishers in particular have issues with their content being used without explicit consent. The New York Times, for example, blocks GPTBot and Google-Extended from crawling their content.

There are budget implications to being open to AI crawling too. At Wholegrain we’ve seen charity sites experiencing huge amounts of bandwidth being used by AI crawlers. Going over band width quotas increases website hosting costs at a time when charities and not for profits are seeing funding squeezed. 

Ultimately you need to understand the implications of blocking AI crawlers from your site. Your competitors might not be as ethically minded (if you see this as an ethical question) and could steal a march on you. Alternatively an ethical stance of AI combined with a human approach to brand building could be highly effective.

The small matter of truth

The question of human truth and AI summaries also came up. Users often see search results that appear higher up the page as a source of truth or authority. We don’t know enough about how truthful users view AI overviews even when they contain inaccuracies. Users who are used to ignoring the sponsored ads at the top of the page might scroll to the organic results out of habit.

A potential backlash against the new search norms

Propellernet are taking pragmatic steps for themselves and their clients in the face of the new normal. But that doesn’t mean they can’t see an alternative future. Dave acknowledges that AI summaries on all search engines are incredibly divisive. On the one hand Google and others tell us that users are engaging with the overviews and use this as evidence of assent. But social media is full of anecdotes about AI slop and inaccurate LLM generated content. Any company going all in on new, AI heavy, user interfaces might be subject to a backlash.

A smaller player like Ecosia, DuckDuckGo might go back to what Dave describes as a “10 blue links approach”.

We might even see more independence in the search industry. Projects like OpenWebSearch.eu open the way for new players to gain traction with “ethical” search platforms. While they might not overtake Google,the possibility of more competition from more transparent sources feels like an important and hopeful one.

Wrapping up

So there we are. The search landscape is changing but in many ways the situation for businesses and organisations hasn’t changed at all that much. For all the billions of dollars invested in AI “winning” the SEO game still requires the same things. Solid fundamentals, authentic useful content and diversified channels for messaging and engaging with your audience.

Plus ça change, rien n’a changé.

Thanks to Propellernet for their invaluable input on this article.

Enormous thanks to Dave for his time and expertise in answering our questions and shedding light on the topic. Thanks too to Propellernet general manager Gill Sheen for facilitating things.

Propellernet is a team of search experts, storytellers and strategists, helping ambitious brands unlock value across performance and brand marketing. They are AI-enabled, human-led and propelled by purpose.

Since 2003, their mission has remained consistent: to hire great people, deliver outstanding work and enjoy the process along the way. A focus on innovation has driven the creation of tools such as AnswerThePublic, Blackbird, CoverageBook and Hidden Keywords.

At Wholegrain we spend a lot of time thinking about the environmental impact of our websites. Our designers create engaging, accessible layouts and craft planet and user friendly experiences. Our developers are continuously working to improve our efficient code bases. They push the envelope on what a low data website can deliver. Our project and account managers are on a mission to ensure that our clients (and their clients) get what they need in a way that is good for people and planet. The whole site from the back end to the front end is carefully considered and iterated on.

All our sites are tested on multiple browsers. They have high levels of backwards compatibility with older versions of Chrome, Safari and Firefox. At an agency level that’s normally where our consideration of browsers stops.

Recently though, I’ve been questioning my choices of tech platforms and software.

Out of all the programmes I use on a daily basis, a browser is what I spend the most time on. I’d never really thought about what browser I use or why. I hadn’t engaged with my choice from a sustainability point of view. This is strange because most of my working and personal life is spent doing just that. Curiosity got the better of me (which shouldn’t be a surprise given my job title) and I started investigating the question.

Pulling on the thread marked Chrome without unravelling my Google sweater

Much of this article is going to focus on Chrome and its alternatives. It is difficult to discuss Chrome without talking about Google as well. Google dominates browser market share in the same way that it dominates other online services:

• Search – First with a 91% market share
• Digital documents – First with a 50% market share
• Analytics – First with a 75%+ market share across different platforms
• Email – Second behind Apple with a 28% market share

Many of these products and services are widely used because they are free and default on devices. They are also used because they are good at what they do.

Google is a tech company but makes the majority of its income from advertising. Their dominance across multiple areas of the internet grants Google a monopolistic reach and influence over it. This access allows them to hoover up vast amounts of user data and intelligence through Chrome and other products. 

Myself and others see it as problematic.

Some of the others that share my opinion include the US Judiciary. Following an Antitrust ruling in August 2024, the US Department of Justice submitted a proposal stating that Google should be forced to sell off Chrome to reduce its monopolistic powers. 

In this article I will try to back up that proposal from a sustainability point of view. The intent is not to persuade you to cut Google out of your personal or professional life. Rather it is to help you make an informed decision about the environmental costs of your online activities.

Browsing the main browsers

With those caveats in place I’ll dig in.

Statistically speaking you are probably reading this article on Chrome or Safari. Google and Apple have huge dominance in the browser market. Worldwide Chrome takes 66% of browser market share, with Safari coming in second at 17.6%. Microsoft’s Edge browser trails way behind in third taking just over 5% of the market.

That means three giant tech firms are responsible for 90% of the browsers used globally. Does it matter that three companies hold the keys to how we interact with and consume content online? On an individual basis possibly not. Collectively though, especially in the case of Chrome, this dominance poses a problem for users and the environment. 

There are some obvious reasons why Chrome dominates the market. For a start, Android phones dominate the mobile market and Chrome comes as standard on them. More importantly, it works well. From a usability point of view it’s pretty solid. It’s got great developer tools and most sites are optimised for Chrome because of its dominance. It’s a rare, free, product that we use on a daily basis that works pretty much flawlessly.

It’s not just working flawlessly for its users. Google is benefitting hugely too. As the saying goes – “if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product”. Chrome plays a vital part in Google making billions in profits from advertising. Essentially the browser is doing two things. Allowing users to access the internet and allowing Google to gather data for advertisers to use.

So what is this free product, used by approximately 3.67 billion people, actually costing us? In my opinion it costs us two interconnected things. As individuals it costs us a measure of privacy and agency in our browsing and consumption habits. 

In the context of digital sustainability, it extracts a cost that is paid by the planet.

The big data hoover

Much of what we do at Wholegrain aims to reduce the data transfer associated with browsing our clients web pages. We try to help others to do the same with tools like Website Carbon and through our writing.

In many ways Chrome is trying to do the opposite.

By some estimates, Google stores an additional 15 petabytes of data every day. If 15 petabyte doesn’t sound like much, understand that 1 petabyte is equivalent to:

• 500 billion pages of standard printed text
• or 200 million 5mb photos
• or 13.3 years worth of HD video content

They won’t run out of storage any time soon though. Google has an estimated 30 zettabytes (30 trillion gigabytes) of capacity in their (power, water and resource hungry) data centres. 

The data they collect from Chrome takes the form of a “digital fingerprint”. This is user data that can identify and target the individual habits of a Chrome user. They use seemingly benign data points like IP addresses, screen resolution, device settings etc to build up a picture of your habits and interests. This, along with data from a wealth of other sources is used to help make their advertising solutions so effective.

In effect we and our data is the product that Google extracts from Chrome.

Why is this bad?

Using the internet is an essential part of daily life. Even an aspiring neo-luddite like myself can’t deny that. Nor can I ignore the positive benefits that digital solutions bring to us all. But browsing doesn’t have to mean vast amounts of data being collected. It doesn’t have to be stored and analysed. The additional, hidden energy and environmental costs of this data collection are not essential to our daily lives.

This data gathering by Chrome plays a part in the data centre growth that has exploded in recent years. These huge data centres need power, water, space, minerals and resources. A browser which helps create a digital doppelganger has impacts in the real world.

The 2024 UN Digital Economy report states, “low-carbon and digital technologies largely compete for the same critical minerals”. Additional and extractive data collection plays a part in this. At a time when we need to decarbonise our grid as quickly as possible, big data centres are increasing energy demands from companies like Google, Microsoft and others. Renewable energy growth is struggling to keep up and we can’t afford the competition for resources.

Less tangibly these digital fingerprints are helping the global economy maintain a level of consumption that our planet cannot sustain. Humanity consumes vastly more resources than the earth has the bio-capacity to regenerate. To combat the climate crisis, the developed world needs to consume less. Being exposed to fewer and less targeted adverts would likely help reduce consumption.

It would be healthier on our bank balances, our psyches and the earth’s eco-systems. 

If Chrome isn’t so shiny, what are the alternatives?

If you would prefer a browsing experience without this hidden environmental cost, there are simple steps you can take. Making Chrome more privacy focussed is possible but is less effective than using an alternative privacy focussed browser. There are a number of options to do this including Brave and Vivaldi. Personally I’ve made the switch to Firefox as my main browser for a number of reasons.

1. Firstly it’s owned and maintained by a not for profit who are committed to building a fairer, safer internet. They want an internet “where our privacy is protected, AI is trustworthy and irresponsible tech companies are held accountable.” That sounds quite nice doesn’t it? Here’s their full Manifesto.
2. It’s a privacy first browser. It blocks trackers from the first time you install it by default. It also allows you to further enhance your online privacy if you wish. By contrast, Chrome tracks your browsing even in incognito windows.
3. Using Firefox means less data is collected and stored as I browse. This means less demand for data centres and less energy is required for my online actions.
4. Not only does using Firefox save energy use at a data centre level, there is evidence it does so at a device level too. Tests show that Firefox uses less electricity than Chrome, meaning lower browsing emissions.
5. Firefox is an open source project. This means that its source code can be scrutinised and improved by its users. A transparent and collaborative web is better and fairer for all its users.

Making the change

If you are persuaded by the arguments above, Mozilla has a handy guide for making the switch to Firefox. While I’ve been happy with the experience of using the new browser it isn’t perfect. There are some additional privacy tweaks you might want to make. More pertinently I have occasionally found that some website features, such as payment portals, haven’t worked when using Firefox. This can be temporarily frustrating, but firing up the page on Safari or Chrome fixes the issue.

This serves as a good reminder that you don’t have to jump to an alternative browser full time. You could keep using Chrome for work and switch to another browser, such as Firefox, for personal browsing. Any time spent browsing on something other than Chrome means less data collected and stored.

For the sake of the planet, we should all be striving for that.

Article update

If this article peaked your interest you can find out more on the topic in the interview I gave to Reset – Digital for Good. We discussed about the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google, browser choices, digital consumerism and much more.

Chris: Context is key

One of the primary reasons that the people behind Wholegrain work here is a want to do better – that means build more sustainable websites, consider the needs of people more centrally to our decisions and play a leading role in moving forward our understanding of what sustainable web design really means.

I can imagine this to be true for anyone working in any sector where they consider and challenge how to do it more sustainably. It can be frustrating, constantly looking for the definitive end line that says ‘this is how we do it perfectly’, but we all know that we are not there yet and to be truthful, may never be there. Not that this should stop us trying.

At Wholegrain (and in all other businesses and communities we stand beside in this space) we are continuously reading, writing, listening and sharing the latest ideas and frameworks that can push us all collectively closer to that golden state of understanding. Learning from each other and communicating new ideas is what has built the understanding we have today and it often leads to the need to pivot or unlearn what was thought to be true but now is proven incorrect. Again, not that this should stop us trying.

This past week the overall approach to Digital Sustainability was challenged, sadly not through conversation.

The following is the thoughts of Andy, who manages our Curiously Green newsletter and spends his time in and around the wider thinking on Digital Sustainability with input from Bailey, our new business Manager and Dan, our Technical Team lead – who both speak internally and externally about what Digital Sustainability looks like on a tangible level, as people on the front line of actually designing and building sites to be more sustainable. 

Andy: The latest lightning rod

The ever evolving nature of digital sustainability means that we’re constantly reading and consuming articles, reports and ideas on the topic. We keep a careful eye on developments in coding, file formats, data gathering, storage optimisation, changes to calculation models and philosophical ideas about digital usage Our website carbon calculator, Website Carbon often features in these articles in these topics, sometimes acting as a lightning rod for thoughts and findings about low carbon web design.

The most recent example is a report from the BBC called “Does what you scroll burn coal? Mythbusting energy consumption on the web”. The post on the Research and Development subsite has caused some consternation in digital sustainability circles.

The article looks at two areas:

• The effect of dark mode on device electricity usage and user behaviour
• Correlation between performance metrics and data transfer and energy usage

The good bits:

The dark mode research is interesting and goes against some of the sustainable web design advice and methodologies. In their research a small sample size of participants turned up monitor brightness levels up when using dark modes, regardless of overhead lighting conditions.

This rebound effect is potentially a useful finding. If it can be replicated across a larger sample size it would certainly change some conventional wisdom and design methodologies. We would add that any dark modes implementation should be in line with accessibility guidelines and based on user preference rather than prescriptive.

As the researchers note, further research would be required using devices with OLED screens, which is something that is noted in the Web Sustainability Guidelines.

The frustrating bits:

The rest of the report has frustrated us at Wholegrain and others in the community. The sections on performance and data transfer feel to have taken an over simplified view on areas that the digital sustainability community treat as nuanced and complex.

The report states that “performance and energy efficiency aren’t always linked, so optimising for performance may not yield the desired energy results”. This is something that we would agree with. Indeed we wrote about how strong performance metrics don’t always correlate with low site emissions in November 2023. 

Without knowing what sites were tested, it’s hard to comment further. What we can say is that we and other reputable agencies know that “Developers cannot therefore simply optimise for performance and hope that energy savings occur as a happy by-product”. Suggesting otherwise feels harmful to the industry and undermines trust and engagement at a time when digital emissions continue to rise.

This feeling of being unduly undermined continues when the researchers discuss data transfer. The researchers question whether a link can be made between data transfer and device energy use. The report raises issues where “data is used as a direct proxy for energy” going further to state that it presents a “completely fictitious narrative of how emissions are generated on the internet”, citing Website Carbon as one place this narrative is shared.

Them’s fightin’ words.

Our polite but firm response

It’s widely known and acknowledged within the sustainable web industry that data transfer is a flawed proxy for carbon emissions. I think Fershad Irani’s piece on this issue is the most eloquent and persuasive on the topic. Put simply, we know there are issues and that in certain cases it might cause some paradoxes. Where those paradoxes are proved we take note and adjust best practices.

The report discusses testing “top sites” but not what they were, how they are built and what platforms or frameworks they use. Picking holes in the sustainable web design practices without testing sites built using them doesn’t feel fair or representative. Indeed they tested the COP28 site which did an infamously bad job of implementing the “low carbon mode” mentioned in the report. The site (which was not built by a sustainable web specialist) was criticised heavily at the time and revisited when updates were put in place. Citing this website as a good example of best practice is incredibly frustrating.

In the conclusion of the BBC piece the researchers write – 

This is pretty insulting to the careful thought and dedication brought by contributors to the Web Sustainability Guidelines. Agencies like MightyBytes and Wholegrain, organisations like the Green Web Foundation, SustyWeb and individuals like Alexander Dawson, Fershad Irani, Michelle Baker, Hannah Smith and many others work tirelessly to bring nuance and suitability to the interventions prescribed. 

Next Steps from everyone at Wholegrain collectively

We’ll end this response in the same way as the report does, with some suggested next steps. The researchers express a desire to collaborate with the industry to develop “tools that allow them to accurately estimate energy”. A good place to start might be to collaborate with an organisation like GreenSpector who share similar aims. 

They could also ask to collaborate with any of the organisations and individuals mentioned above. We’re an open bunch who desperately want to do the best thing for people and planet in every way. We’re open about what we do and why we do it. We showcase our sites and think they hold up to scrutiny. We’re open to making changes if our methods turn out to be flawed. We want to iterate and improve where we can. We want accurate measures just as much as anyone else. Maybe even more so.

Our mission to “accelerate the shift to an Internet that’s good for people and planet” needs collaborators so we can continue to do the work we do for the companies we work with – one being BBC Good Food, just for reference.

Let’s talk.