Let’s be honest: AI is pretty good at building websites now.
It’s 2026. You can open an AI tool, describe the website you want, and a few minutes later you have something that looks like a real website.
It might have a nice hero section. It’ll probably have some animations. It’ll be responsive. It might even have a contact form that actually works.
A few years ago, that would have been impressive.
Today, it’s becoming normal.
And I think that’s where we’re starting to get confused.
We’re looking at AI’s ability to make websites and assuming that means AI can build the right website.
It can’t.
At least, not on its own.
Making a website isn’t really the hard part anymore
For a long time, one of the hardest parts of building a website was simply getting the thing built.
You needed someone who understood HTML, CSS, JavaScript, a CMS, a framework, hosting,
databases, APIs, and all the other pieces that go into making a website work.
AI has changed that.
A person with very little technical experience can now get surprisingly far.
That’s a good thing.
I’m not interested in pretending AI hasn’t made web development better in a lot of ways. It has.
The problem is that getting a website onto the internet was never the actual goal.
The goal was to build a website that does something.
Get more leads.
Sell something.
Explain a complicated service.
Make a company look credible.
Help existing customers.
Get people to call.
Get people to book.
Get people to trust you enough to hand over their money.
That’s a much harder problem.
AI doesn’t know your customers
This is probably the biggest issue.
You can tell AI:
“Build me a modern website for my plumbing company.”
And it will happily build one.
But AI doesn’t know the guy who runs that plumbing company.
It doesn’t know that most of his customers are homeowners over 40.
It doesn’t know that customers usually call because something has gone wrong and they want
someone who can come out today.
It doesn’t know that the company’s biggest selling point isn’t actually price. It’s that they answer
the phone on weekends.
It doesn’t know that people are nervous about getting ripped off.
It doesn’t know what customers complain about.
It doesn’t know why people choose this company instead of the other five plumbers in town.
Unless someone figures those things out and tells it.
And that’s the point.
Someone still has to do the thinking.
A website can look great and still be terrible
This is another thing I think we’re going to see a lot more of.
AI can make something that looks fantastic.
And that’s dangerous.
Because when something looks good, we’re naturally inclined to assume it works.
But those aren’t the same thing.
I’ve seen plenty of websites that look great but make you work way too hard to figure out what the company actually does.
The headline sounds clever.
The animations are impressive.
The cards have rounded corners.
Everything has a nice gradient.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, you’re still trying to answer the most basic question:
“So… what do these people actually do?”
That’s not a design problem.
That’s a thinking problem.
We’re going to get a lot of websites that look the same
There’s another side effect of AI that I don’t think we’re talking about enough.
Everything is starting to look a little bit the same.
Ask an AI to build a modern software company website and you’ll probably get a familiar formula.
Big headline.
Short paragraph.
Bright button.
Three feature cards.
Logos.
Testimonials.
A pricing section.
Some gradients.
Maybe a dark section toward the bottom.
None of those things are inherently bad.
The problem is that they’re becoming defaults.
AI is really good at recognizing patterns and reproducing them. That’s one of the reasons it’s so
useful.
But if everyone uses the same patterns, eventually nobody stands out.
Your website shouldn’t necessarily look like the best website AI has seen.
It should look like your company.
That’s a harder problem.
The part AI can’t replace is knowing what matters
Here’s where I think experienced web designers and developers still have a huge advantage.
They’ve seen things go wrong.
They’ve watched people use websites in ways nobody expected.
They’ve worked with businesses that didn’t actually understand their own customers.
They’ve launched pages that didn’t convert.
They’ve fixed slow websites.
They’ve dealt with broken integrations.
They’ve looked at analytics and realized that the beautiful page everyone loved was the page
nobody used.
That experience matters.
You don’t get it just because you can generate code.
And honestly, that’s probably going to become even more important as AI gets better.
Because when everyone can build something, building something isn’t much of a
competitive advantage anymore.
Knowing what to build is.
AI is a tool. It isn’t the person responsible for the website.
This is the part I think gets lost in a lot of the AI hype.
People talk about AI as if you can hand it a business and get a finished digital presence back.
Maybe someday.
We’re not there.
And even if we get there technically, there’s still a question of responsibility.
Who decided the navigation should work that way?
Who decided those were the right pages?
Who decided that headline was going to resonate with customers?
Who checked whether the site was accessible?
Who looked at the analytics six months later?
Who noticed that the contact form stopped working?
Who decides what needs to change?
AI can help with all of those things.
But somebody needs to own the decisions.
I don’t think AI is bad for web development
Actually, I think it’s going to make good web developers much more productive.
That’s the exciting part.
A developer can spend less time writing repetitive code and more time thinking about the actual
problem.
A designer can explore more ideas.
A small business can afford to experiment.
A developer can prototype something in an afternoon that might have taken a week before.
That’s all great.
But there’s a big difference between using AI to build a better website and using AI because
you don’t know how to build a website.
The first one is progress.
The second one is where things get messy.
The real question isn’t “Can AI build my website?”
Of course it can.
That’s not an interesting question anymore.
The better question is:
“Can AI understand what my website needs to accomplish?”
And right now, the answer is: only if a human gives it the right context, asks the right questions,
challenges the answers, and knows when the result isn’t good enough.
That’s not a failure of AI.
It’s just the reality of what we’re asking it to do.
AI has made the production of websites dramatically easier.
It hasn’t made the business of building the right website easy.
And maybe that’s a good thing.
Because websites were never really about code.
They were always about people.
AI can write the code.
We’re still responsible for figuring out what the hell it’s supposed to accomplish.
