Should I use AI to build my website?

You describe your business in a sentence, and thirty seconds later there is a website with your name on it. It is a genuinely impressive thing to watch, and for some businesses it is the right answer. The question is whether yours is one of them — and whether the site it makes is the site you need, or just a site.

What AI builders do well

• Getting something live today. If the alternative is no website for another six months, a generated site is better than nothing.
• First-draft copy. The text is generic, but generic beats blank, and it gives you something to correct.
• Layouts that are not broken. The output is competent — it will not embarrass you on a phone.
• Price. Most are a subscription of $15 to $50 a month with no build fee.

Where they fail a real business

The failures are not visible in the demo. They show up at month three.

• It looks like every other AI site. The models are trained on the same templates, so the output converges. Your bakery and a dental clinic in Calgary get the same hero section with different photos.
• It cannot do the thing that makes you money. A menu that takes orders, a catalogue with a quote request, a booking that lands in your calendar — the builder either does not offer it or offers it through a third-party widget with its own fee.
• You do not own it. The site lives on their platform, in their format. Cancel the subscription and it is gone; there is no code to take with you.
• The copy is confidently wrong. Generated text invents opening hours, services you do not offer and awards you did not win. Every line has to be checked, and most people do not.
• Search engines and AI assistants can tell. Pages assembled from the same patterns as a million others have nothing distinctive for Google or ChatGPT to cite. Being findable is the point of a website, and it is where these sites are weakest.

How a studio actually uses AI

We use AI every day, and none of it is 'press a button, get a website'. It drafts the first version of copy that a person then rewrites in your voice. It speeds up code that a developer then reads, tests and owns. It checks a page for accessibility problems faster than a human can. It is a very fast junior colleague who is wrong often enough that everything it produces gets reviewed.

AI makes the building faster. It does not make the decisions about what to build — and the decisions are the job.

The result is that a custom site now costs less and ships faster than it did three years ago, not that custom sites have become unnecessary. The work that matters — understanding what your business needs the site to do, and designing around that — is the part no builder does.

A fair way to decide

Use an AI builder if you need a placeholder this week, your site only has to say who you are and how to reach you, and you are fine replacing it later. Have a site built if the site has a job — taking orders, generating enquiries, being found for what you sell — or if you want to own it. Most businesses that are still trading in three years end up in the second group; the question is only whether they pay for the placeholder first.