AI.com Spent $85 Million on a Super Bowl Ad. Their Website Crashed Before Anyone Could Sign Up.

During Super Bowl LIX, AI.com ran a 60-second ad. The domain alone cost $70 million. The airtime cost $15 million. Total outlay: $85 million to put their brand in front of roughly 127 million people.

The site went down before the ad finished airing.

What actually happened

When the ad ran, the volume of traffic hit infrastructure that wasn't configured to handle it. Auto-scaling cloud infrastructure would have fixed it. The cost: around $4,000 to $5,000. Against an $85 million spend, that's less than 0.005% of their budget. Less than a single second of their airtime.

For the users who did manage to load the page, the problems continued.

The homepage offered a vague mission statement and a single CTA: claim your handle. There was no clear explanation of what the product actually did. Visitors who pushed through were then asked to claim two separate handles, one for themselves and one for their AI, with no explanation of why. And before any trust had been established, card details were requested.

The result: a funnel that failed at every stage. Confusion, friction, abandonment.

The split between marketing and website

Marketing has one job: get the right people to show up. AI.com's marketing did exactly that. They had the budget, the placement, and the reach to move people. Tens of millions of people saw that ad and a meaningful portion of them went to the site.

That's where the handoff happened. And that's where everything broke.

This is a pattern we see regularly, at a much smaller scale. A business invests in social media, paid ads, or a rebrand. The campaigns look good, the engagement is real, and the traffic comes through. But the website doesn't convert. The CTA is buried. The load time is slow. The value proposition isn't clear in the first five seconds. The checkout process has too many steps.

The money spent on getting people there doesn't disappear. It just never produces a return.

Why websites get de-prioritised

The common logic is that marketing feels more immediate. You post a campaign and you can see the reach, the clicks, the engagement. The feedback loop is fast.

Websites feel more permanent. Once they're built, they recede into the background. They become infrastructure rather than an active investment. The result is that businesses often end up with a marketing operation that's significantly more sophisticated than the site it's pointing people toward.

AI.com is an extreme case. But the mechanic is the same whether you're spending $85 million or R85,000.

What a functional conversion funnel actually requires

The basics are not complicated:

Infrastructure that matches your traffic expectations. If you're running a campaign, your site needs to be able to handle the spike. This applies at any scale — a local business running a paid ad push needs the same logic applied, proportionally.

A clear value proposition above the fold. A visitor who doesn't understand what you do within the first few seconds will leave. The homepage's job is not to tell the whole story. It's to answer one question fast: why should I stay?

Progressive trust before progressive commitment. You earn the right to ask for information. Asking for card details before a user understands the product is one of the most reliable ways to lose them.

A simple, single conversion path. Every point of confusion is a point of abandonment. If you're asking a visitor to make two decisions where one would do, you've already reduced your conversion rate.

The website is the fulfilment of the marketing promise

Marketing creates intent. Your website either fulfils it or wastes it.

If your site is slow, unclear, or difficult to use, no campaign budget is going to overcome that. You're funding an audience for a broken experience.

We build websites designed to convert. If you're driving traffic to a site that isn't doing its job, get in touch and we'll tell you what we think is going wrong.