Labour Illusion

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I have a slightly unhinged theory that most websites lie to me.

I know you're reaching for the unsubscribe button, wondering how many tin foil hats I can fit on my massive hat, but wait. I have some evidence.

In 2025, most of the major LLM models made an almost identical update.

Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and many others started to show what they were thinking.

According to Claude, Anthropic does this for three reasons.

1. It helps people check and trust answers.
2. It reveals mismatches between thinking and answers.
3. It’s simply interesting to watch.

But I think there’s a fourth reason that AI providers have purposefully hidden from us.

The Labour Illusion

In 2011, two Harvard professors asked 266 participants to use a travel search site¹.

Similar to Skyscanner or Kayak, the user could enter a destination, and the site would pull back several flights to potentially book.

However, there was a twist.

One group saw just a plain loading wheel on a white background as the search engine filtered through results.

The second saw the plain loading wheel, plus a live scrolling list of which airlines were being searched, with fares visibly stacking up as they were found.

Once participants had seen the results, they were asked to rate the website out of seven.

Turns out, the results from the loading wheel that shows its working were perceived as 8.1% higher value than the same results from a blank loading wheel.

Incredibly, people rated the results higher even if the transparent loading wheel took longer.

When the search engine showed it was working, people preferred it. Even if it took 50 seconds longer to gather the same results.

Later a new group of 118 participants were asked to pick between using a faster site with no transparent loading screen and a slower site with the transparent loading screen.

The results that both sites generated were exactly the same.

Participants were more likely to pick the slower site with the transparent search over the faster site with the blank search.

My Silly Theory

I've worked with plenty of website marketers who endlessly optimise their sites for conversions.

I've seen teams running dozens of different website tests a day.

These intelligent people will have spotted the results from these studies, and I'm sure they would have tested them out.

Which means they probably learnt that websites convert more if they take slightly longer to load.

My (probably crazy) theory is that many websites purposefully load results slower to make you value the results more.

What do you think?

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Cheers,

​Phill​