AI has made getting answers remarkably easy.
Knowing which ones to trust is a different matter.
We use AI every day at Lolly. It helps us research more quickly, organise our thinking and explore ideas from different angles. It’s become a really useful part of the creative process and, used well, can save an enormous amount of time.
But we don’t take everything it tells us at face value.
Recently, a client shared a list of SEO recommendations generated by AI. On first reading, they all sounded perfectly sensible: create some new pages, target a few more keywords and open up new opportunities for search.
So before changing anything, we did what we always do.
We had a proper look.
It turned out that the website was already performing well for many of the suggested search terms. Adding more pages wouldn’t necessarily have helped and, in some cases, could actually have meant competing with content that was already doing its job rather nicely.
What mattered more were two completely different issues: a broken redirect and duplicate URLs that were splitting valuable ranking signals.
AI hadn’t spotted either. That doesn’t mean that AI was wrong. It simply didn’t have the whole picture. And that’s where experience still matters.
AI can process huge amounts of information, spot patterns and suggest possibilities in seconds. What it doesn’t always know is the history behind a project, the conversations that have already taken place or why certain decisions were made in the first place.
Sometimes a recommendation can be technically correct and still not be the right thing to do.
Sometimes the best answer isn’t to create something new at all. It’s to strengthen what’s already working rather than build something new around it.
We think of AI as a brilliant starting point, rather than the final word.
It helps us spend less time gathering information and more time making sense of it. Less time hunting for answers and more time deciding which ones are actually useful.
The technology will continue to get better, and we’re excited to see where it goes.
But there’s still something rather reassuring about this:
Getting an answer may be easier than ever. Knowing what to do with it still takes judgement.