Do a quick search for AI website makers, and you’ll find hundreds of options that promise to build a full website using just a few business details. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Even the best AI website tools tend to overpromise, often causing you to spend more time on edits than you save by using the tool in the first place.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t use AI to help you build a website. In many cases, AI website builders can help you streamline busywork and spark creativity. But the success of an AI website comes down to how you use these tools and how much of the work you entrust to a bot.
Most people explore AI to build a website because they need support throughout the process. While it can be a helpful tool, it doesn’t understand your unique customer base or fully capture the value your business offers. Looking for a partner who does? Connect with Brandography for website solutions and marketing support tailored to your business.
What Is an AI Website Builder?
An AI website maker can be any tool that uses AI to generate the code, design, images, content blocks, or the content itself for your website. Not all tools handle the same level of complexity. Some are designed to create a ready-to-use website from the ground up, while others are more like assistants.
Types of AI Website Builders
|
Type |
Popular Platforms |
Benefits & Features |
Drawbacks |
|
Instant Web Presence Tools |
Durable, Mixo, and Webnode |
• Set up a digital presence in just a few minutes. • Low complexity and beginner-friendly. • Virtually zero learning curve. • Functions as a digital business card with contact details and basic information. |
• Too basic to support eCommerce or complex services. • Often produce generic, cookie-cutter results. • Typically falls into the category of “commodity content,” severely limiting search visibility. |
|
All-In-One Ecosystems |
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy Airo, and Hostinger AI |
• Entire page frameworks, layouts, and color schemes. • AI-powered business tools like payment processors and appointment bookers. • Drag-and-drop editing for light modifications. |
• While functional, the blocks and content are not developed with a conversion strategy or content tailored to your business. • Backend dashboards are often cluttered with features, creating a learning curve for manual edits. • Typically uses proprietary code, making it difficult to move to a new platform in the future. |
|
Bespoke Design Tools |
Framer AI and Webflow |
• High-level designs with responsive layouts. • Modern elements with custom typography and scrolling animations. • Usually written with non-proprietary code that can be transferred to a different host. |
• Editing tools are extremely technical and create a high learning curve for design and UX. • Their complexity makes it too easy for inexperienced editors to accidentally break a page layout. • Often lacks a customer management infrastructure, requiring the integration of separate tools. |
When Does it Make Sense to Use AI to Build a Website?
AI tools are usually touted as quick fixes that require no advanced skills to create a beautiful and functional website. However, simple platforms often lack the advanced features that eCommerce brands and service-based businesses need. At the same time, the clean designs and easily transferable code of high-end AI websites require a learning curve that is far too steep for most businesses to handle in-house.
That leaves most businesses considering the middle-ground “all-in-one” platforms like Wix and Squarespace for website upgrades. While platforms like these seem to offer the best of both worlds, it’s really only a short-term solution. Many businesses realize too late that they can’t easily migrate their website to another platform because the code is proprietary. Using such a platform might serve your needs now, but it will require a great deal more work in the future if (and when) you outgrow your site.
With all that in mind, there are still scenarios where it makes sense to use AI for your web presence:
- Timing. You need to get a website up instantly to establish a digital presence. For example, you can create a portfolio website using AI, as this can still look professional without advanced capabilities.
- Limited Growth. You don’t anticipate growing your website beyond its original capabilities, such as adding eCommerce or using it as a standalone customer management database.
- Temporary Solution. You need a landing page for an event or other temporary purpose and don’t necessarily care about future rankings.
- Budget Restrictions. You have a very small budget and recognize that your website will be a placeholder until you invest in a more robust solution.
Best Practices for Creating an AI Website
To have good results with an AI-generated website, you need to understand its shortcomings and accept these as part of the package. AI excels at basics like site structure, layouts, spacing, simple designs, and basic content generation. But it isn’t ready to replace the human insight required to understand your branding, personality, and voice.
With that in mind, here are some guidelines to keep in mind when building a site using AI:
- Avoid tools that promise to build an entire website for you with little to no input, giving you a virtually hands-off experience. AI tools that do everything often miss the point and give you cookie-cutter websites that don’t represent your brand identity.
- Treat AI-generated text as a placeholder rather than giving it a permanent home on your website. AI website builders can generate accurate and believable text for many areas of your website, but it rarely reflects the uniqueness of your brand. Generic text is easier for AI to write, but it also makes your business easier to forget.
- If your website relies on obviously AI-generated images and text, it can signal that you don’t have real experience. This can be a major red flag, making you appear less trustworthy to potential clients and customers.
Does Having an AI Website Affect Your Search Visibility?
Not necessarily. According to Google Search Central, Google doesn’t penalize websites coded by AI. However, if your website is filled with generic, AI-generated content, Google is highly unlikely to serve it as a search result because it doesn’t add value to the internet.
As a general rule, if the content could be scraped together from publicly available sources without adding any new perspective or firsthand experience, Google will almost certainly skip crawling your site. In other words, using an AI builder that creates an “instant web presence” still requires you to write new and unique content in order to show up in search results.
Does an AI Website Affect PPC Performance?
How you show up in organic search isn’t the only consideration. Many website owners think they can bypass poor organic performance by simply running paid search campaigns. However, platforms like Google assign a Quality Score to your website, which also affects how you appear in paid search results.
Your site structure plays a big role in your Quality Score. If an AI-generated website creates a poor user experience or a mismatch in brand messaging, it can lower your Quality Score. The lower your score, the more you pay for clicks.
A poor website doesn’t just hurt your organic rankings — it raises the price of every ad you run. Google’s Quality Score rewards relevant, well-built landing pages with lower costs per click. An AI-generated site that misses on user experience or brand messaging pays that penalty twice. – Chris Flaten, Brandography’s Senior Search Marketer
Is it Safe to Use AI to Build a Website?
When considering the pros and cons of building a website using AI, it’s easy to focus on feasibility. Yet this overlooks one of the most important questions: Can you trust it with your information? And will you have support if an unexpected bug develops?
AI websites from mainstream platforms are usually hosted on secure cloud infrastructure and include built-in SSL certificates and distributed denial-of-service mitigation (DDoS) protection. But beyond that, you have to be careful with how you use data to build your website.
- If typing sensitive or proprietary data into an AI prompt, it can be absorbed into the AI model’s training dataset. Theoretically, this means private customer data could be used to answer future prompts.
- AI builders usually lack localized compliance settings, such as CCPA or GDPR, meaning your website may not comply with cookie consent and data-deletion policies out of the box.
- If you experience a security issue, you don’t have a dedicated account manager to prioritize support if your website goes down, leaving you stuck in standard support queues. When you do get through, you typically have to rely on AI-powered support, which often traps you in a troubleshooting loop with no real solutions.
Finding the Balance Between Speed and Long-Term Growth
Many businesses want the end result of a bespoke AI website design tool with the simplicity of a tool that gives them an instant web presence. However, that capability doesn’t really exist yet with AI tools.
If you just need a digital placeholder to claim a domain name by tomorrow afternoon, an AI tool will get you across the finish line. But if you’re ready to build a site that reflects your brand and is tailored to your long-term goals, let’s connect and explore what’s possible for your business.
Brandography offers real-time support for website development with an in-house team that supports every aspect of your digital marketing. We don’t just build websites. Our team includes experts across SEO, branding, PPC, copywriting, email marketing, graphic design, and more. And as a Shopify Plus Partner, we can help you grow an eCommerce business without the limitations of a website built with AI alone.
