I have started noticing something I cannot now stop noticing, and I suspect it is the front edge of a much larger thought.
Open ten software company websites in a row. A gradient headline, a sentence about empowering teams, three feature cards with thin line icons, a screenshot floating at a slight angle under a soft shadow, a row of grey customer logos, and a call to action in a rounded rectangle.
You cannot really tell which company you are looking at. The names feel interchangeable. Cover the logo and there is no way back to the identity, because there is not much of one underneath. Just a very polished, carefully assembled look that everyone seems to have arrived at together.
I want to be fair about how this happened. It is not laziness. It is best practice, working exactly as intended. Someone studied what converts and wrote it down, and everyone read it, and now everyone does the thing that converts, and the thing that converts has become so common that it has quietly stopped working, because it no longer tells anything apart from anything else.
That is the part I keep circling. Optimisation is convergent. If we all measure against the same benchmark, we all end up in the same place, and the place we end up is nowhere in particular.
I do not have the full shape of this yet. But there is something here about the difference between being effective and being memorable, and I have a feeling I will be chewing on it for a while.