I get asked this a lot now. Sometimes it’s a joke, and sometimes the person is half hoping I’ll say yes so they can save some money.
And yes, it can. I’m not going to sit here and tell you AI can’t build a website, because you could go prove me wrong in about fifteen minutes. Type in what your business does, pick a color, and you’ll have a homepage and a contact form before your coffee gets cold.
What people really want to know is whether the thing AI builds is the thing their business needs. That one I have a lot more to say about, mostly because of what’s been landing in my inbox.
The Emails I Keep Getting
Lately I’ve gotten quite a few emails that all say more or less the same thing: I made this website with AI, it’s not quite what I need, the formatting is off, can you fix it?
I love these emails, by the way. These are people who tried. They got most of the way to a website in an afternoon and then ran into a wall they couldn’t quite describe. They just know something’s wrong with it.
What AI Is Good At
I’ll give credit first, because it’s earned. AI is fast, ridiculously so. It’s great when you’re staring at a blank page and need something to react to, whether that’s a layout, a headline, or a first pass at your About page. What comes out usually looks clean and works on a phone. And if you’re starting a business with no budget, a cheap AI-built site is better than no site. I’d tell you that to your face.
We use AI tools at Vibrandt too, and I’m not precious about it. If something handles the tedious parts faster, more of my day goes to the parts that need me.
Where It Goes Sideways
The first problem is that AI only knows what you tell it, and most business owners don’t know what to tell it. That’s no knock on you. It isn’t your job to know that the question your customers ask most belongs on your homepage, or that your quote form asks for too much, or that nobody can figure out what you want them to do next. Pulling that out of people is half of what I do on a first call. A text box doesn’t ask follow-up questions (or at least not the right ones).
Then there’s the sameness. These tools learned from millions of websites, so what they hand you is basically the average of all of them. It’s fine. It’s also what the guy down the road got when he used the same tool. If you could swap your logo for a competitor’s and nobody would notice, the site isn’t saying anything about you.
But the big one, the one behind most of those emails, is everything that comes after the homepage. A homepage is easy. What’s hard is the quote form that has to send leads into your CRM, the payment form that can’t fail even once, and the store with a few hundred products and shipping rules that only make sense to you. Pile accessibility, page speed, and showing up in Google and AI search on top of that. This is where an AI-built site stalls out, and unfortunately it’s also the part that makes you money.
A couple of smaller things while I’m at it. AI will write things about your business that aren’t true, very confidently, and somebody has to catch that before a customer does. And once the site is live, there’s nobody to call. Plugins need updating. A form stops sending and nobody notices for three weeks. Something looks weird on the new iPhone. The tool isn’t going to check on you, so that becomes your job, on top of your actual job.
What You’re Paying a Person For
I’ve been building websites for 15 years, and we’ve launched more than 150 of them. What that mostly gets you is somebody who has already made the mistakes, or watched them get made, on someone else’s site instead of yours.
So I ask a lot of questions before anybody designs anything, and I’ll talk you out of things, including things that would have made me more money. The design gets built by actual people around your customers and your brand. It isn’t a template in your colors.
You also get someone to email. We don’t do support tickets. You send a message, and a person who already knows you and your site writes back that day. (Email checking is our cardio.) Some of our clients have been with us since we opened in 2019, and I think that’s a big part of why.
What I’ve noticed lately is that clients don’t much care which tools we use. They care that it’s handled.
When You Should Just Use AI
I don’t sell people things they don’t need, so let me be straight about this. If you’re brand new and still figuring out whether the idea has legs, use an AI builder. If all you need is one page with your hours and a phone number, use an AI builder. If the budget is basically zero and you’ve got some evenings to tinker, same answer. It’ll do the job, and you can put that money somewhere else.
Where I’d tell you to hire someone is when the website has to earn its keep. If it needs to bring in leads or sales, connect to your CRM or payments or inventory, or look like your brand and nobody else’s, you’re past what a prompt can do. Same goes if you just don’t want to be the person maintaining it.
And if you start with AI and outgrow it later, good. That’s how it should work. We take over sites other people built all the time, and these days “other people” includes robots.
So, Can AI Build Your Website?
Yep. It can’t tell you what the website should be, though, and it won’t be around six months from now when you need something changed.
If you’re not sure which camp you’re in, send me a note. I’ll tell you the truth, even if the truth is that you don’t need me yet.
