I’ve made a habit of opening around ten or so executive search firm sites in a row, and by the fourth one I can usually predict the rest. Hero banner: diverse professionals, mid-handshake. Stock skyline. Three service tiles reading “Executive Search,” “Leadership Advisory,” and “Talent Strategy.” A logo wall. An “Our Process” graphic with four numbered circles.

None of it’s wrong exactly. It’s just indistinguishable from every competitor you’re pitching against, which means it does none of the work a website is supposed to do for a firm that sells judgment instead of inventory.

That’s a structural problem wearing a design problem’s clothes. Your whole pitch to a board or a founder is that your read on people beats the alternative, whether that’s their internal HR function or the boutique down the street. A site built from stock photography and templated copy says the opposite. It says your marketing got assembled the way everyone else’s did, by the same process, quite possibly even by the same agency pulling from the same stock library. And if the site can’t show distinct thinking, why would anyone assume that the search process behind it is any different?

Who’s actually looking at your site

Before we argue about what belongs on the page, let’s get precise about who arrives at it and what kind of mood they’re in.

Research published in March 2026 by SurveyMonkey and Reddit, drawing on 1,202 US business decision-makers surveyed at the turn of the year, found 83% of them research a vendor privately before they’ll speak to anyone in sales. And they move fast. 65% finish inside a week.

So your site is being read by someone who’s already decided to evaluate you in private, who has days rather than weeks, and who hasn’t given you a chance to explain yourself in person yet.

The same study found those buyers trust peer recommendations (73%) a good deal more than a vendor’s own website (55%). Which sounds like an argument for giving up on web copy entirely, right up until you look at what buyers say gets in their way. Their complaints are all about missing substance. 48% can’t find authentic testimonials from real users. Another 46% struggle to parse the information vendors hand them, and 44% simply can’t get specific details about a provider out of the material on offer.

Read that list again, because the whole problem is sitting inside it. Buyers aren’t saying vendor websites are ugly; they’re saying they’re vague.

Experts and ordinary readers don’t judge a page the same way

The instinct to put your marketing budget into photography and layout isn’t irrational, and there’s well-known research sitting behind it. But the findings are narrower than most people quoting them let on.

The Stanford Web Credibility Project’s 2002 study of how people assess websites is the one that gets cited the most to justify design spend. Alongside it, the researchers ran a comparison almost nobody cites, and that’s the one that should matter to you. In “Experts vs Online Consumers,” also published in 2002, ordinary consumers and domain experts evaluated the same health and finance websites. On finance sites, 54.6% of what consumers said about credibility came back to how the site looked. Among finance experts assessing those same sites, it fell to 16.4%. What the experts assigned weight to instead was substance. 40.3% of their comments went to the breadth and depth of what the site actually taught them.

Two people can walk through the same house and see completely different buildings. One reacts to the kitchen and the light in the front room. The structural engineer goes straight to the foundation and the age of the wiring. Neither one is being unreasonable. They’re each applying the standard their expertise handed them, and the engineer’s standard doesn’t care about a fresh coat of paint.

A board evaluating your firm is the equivalent of that engineer.

Now, that research is old. Twenty-plus years old, and the web has changed a great deal since 2002, so treat those percentages as directional rather than current. The direction has held up since then.

A peer-reviewed study from 2019 by Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew put professional fact checkers, PhD historians, and Stanford undergraduates in front of the same live websites and watched what each group did. The fact checkers were off the landing page in about 32 seconds, gone to check the site against other sources. The students stayed put for roughly 100 seconds, and 60% of them picked a deceptive site as the more trustworthy of the two they were shown. Two reasons came up over and over. The logos looked official and the design looked tidy.

But here’s the part I want you to notice. The historians, expert in their own field but not in this one, landed a lot closer to the students than to the fact checkers. So expertise on its own doesn’t make anybody immune to a well-designed page. But relevant expertise does. My read is that a board that’s sat through a dozen search firm pitches has exactly the relevant kind, and your site gets about half a minute of its attention before somebody goes looking for a second opinion.

Eyetracking work lands in the same place but from a different angle. Nielsen Norman Group’s research on photos as web content first published in 2010 and still maintained today found users completely ignored large decorative images and skipped straight past stock photos of generic people. Attention went to pictures carrying actual information: real people in real places and documents you can read. In one test on a firm’s staff page, users spent 10% more time on portraits of the team itself than on the biographies beside them, even though the biographies took up more than three times the space. Photographs of real, named individuals earned attention. Generic imagery of nobody in particular didn’t.

Consumer research points the same way on authenticity. Getty Images’ “Building Trust in the Age of AI,” published in 2024 and based on responses from more than 30,000 adults across 25 countries, reports that 98% of consumers treat authentic images and video as central to trust, and close to 90% want to be told when imagery was generated by AI. That data was gathered in 2022 and 2023, which is ancient for a topic moving this fast, so I went looking for something current. Clutch surveyed 401 US consumers in September 2025 and found 84% still want brands to disclose AI imagery, with 65% worried about authenticity in what they’re being shown. Much smaller study. Same direction.

I’ll be straight with you about that evidence. It’s consumer research, and your buyer is a board director rather than a shopper. Nobody has run this study on people hiring search firms. My own view, and I’ll own it as a view rather than dress it up as a finding, is that it transfers, because what’s being measured is a general reflex about manufactured-looking material and not something peculiar to retail. Imagery that looks manufactured gets read as manufactured.

Why this bites harder for you than for most businesses

All of this matters more for a search firm than it does for most B2B categories, and the reason is simple enough. What you sell isn’t visual at all.

There’s no factory floor to photograph. No physical good to render in a product shot. Nothing about the actual work, which is conversations and references and market mapping and judgment calls made quietly, resolves into an image.

So the stock photograph on your homepage isn’t standing in for the product. It’s standing in for the absence of anything else to show.

If you’ve ever sat down to write your own site and found yourself reaching for a photograph because the words weren’t coming, that isn’t a failure of effort on your part. How do you photograph 20 years of knowing which VP of Engineering survives a founder transition and which one doesn’t?

Think of a restaurant with no menu in the window, just a big photograph of happy people eating. You learn nothing about the food. You learn only that the owner had a photograph and decided to use it, which raises an obvious question about what they’d have shown you if they’d had something better. With nothing else to go on, a reader draws the inference, and it isn’t a flattering one.

What buyers say actually moves them

If your buyer is an expert, in a hurry, and hunting for specifics they keep failing to find, the useful question is what kind of material closes that gap.

Buyers have answered this pretty directly. The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, which surveyed 1,934 global business executives, found 73% of hidden decision-makers (in Edelman’s framing, people with final sign-off but not always deep expertise in what they’re buying) say an organization’s thought leadership helps them judge the type and caliber of thinking that organization will bring to their work.

Sit with that sentence a second, because it describes the exact thing you’re trying to sell and can’t otherwise put on a page. Judgment stays invisible until somebody demonstrates it. A well-argued piece of writing is a demonstration.

The rest of the report runs the same way. 71% of decision-makers say thought leadership does more than conventional marketing or sales material to show a vendor’s potential value. 55% use it as part of vetting. 79% say they’re more likely to advocate internally for proposals from firms that consistently publish high-quality work, which matters enormously in a category where the person reading your site usually isn’t the person who signs. And roughly two-thirds of them spend more than an hour in an average week reading this kind of material. The appetite is there.

Every one of those signals is text-driven. A named partner’s byline on a specific, well-argued analysis does more for your credibility than a professional headshot of that same partner standing in front of a blurred office background.

The copy-first alternative

None of this argues for a text-only website out of some minimalist preference. It argues for a website where the thing doing the converting is written material only somebody inside your firm could have produced.

Here’s the test I use. Could a competitor paste those words onto their own site without anyone noticing? “We have deep networks in fintech” passes the test for any firm in the market, which is another way of saying it means nothing at all. An analysis of why the last several fintech CTO searches in a particular market stalled at the same stage, and what you now do differently at that stage, can’t be lifted by anyone who didn’t run those searches.

Stock photography can’t be proprietary. Writing tied to a specific person’s judgment is close to the only thing on a services website that can be. That’s my read rather than a research finding, and I’d defend it anywhere: proprietary is the whole game on a page where every competitor buys from the same stock library.

There’s a budget implication in all this, and it’s an uncomfortable one. A stock photo subscription and a template redesign are the default spend because they’re easy to see finished. A written body of work, case studies structured around real client problems and named-author analysis of hiring dynamics inside your niche, is harder to produce and slower to accumulate. Which is why most of your competition don’t have one. The firm willing to make that investment is betting on a credibility signal buyers have already told researchers they respond to, over a design convention the research says they scroll past.

The baseline test

Here’s a diagnostic you can run on your own site today. Strip out every stock photograph and see what’s left standing.

I’ve watched firms do this and go quiet for a minute. If what remains is three sentences of service description per page, the site was never making an argument for why you, specifically, should be trusted with a leadership hire that shapes the company for years. If what remains is a body of specific, attributable, well-reasoned writing, the photography was decoration sitting on top of a real asset.

Most firms, if we’re honest about it, land in the first case. So strip the photography off your own site tonight and read what’s left. Whatever’s still standing is your actual argument for the mandate, and if that takes under a minute to get through, the photography was never the problem you needed to fix.