We have always been open about the fact that we use AI in our business. We use it to take care of tasks that would typically take weeks and condense them down into hours. AI can crunch data at a rate no human can. It's simply better at it. It is also better at producing code with fewer errors than ever before. JetBrains found that professional developers are using AI agents to write roughly half their code. Stating that AI is bad and can't do a good job of something it was so clearly made for would make us look really silly.
I think it's also safe to say we're all getting a bit burned out on AI content. AI-generated images, video and text seem to pop up everywhere. Whether it's on social media, TV or even movies, chances are good you've touched AI somewhere along the road. I've said all this to say it's no longer hard to imagine all the cool things you can do with AI. I dunno. Maybe write a Viking ballad about how awesome your friend is or something. We've all done some solid thinking about how we can use this new technology to better our lives, save money or enhance our business in some way.
That raises the question:
Should you use AI to build your website?
The answer to that question is nuanced.
You absolutely can build a website with no knowledge or skills. AI does a decent job of it too. You may see a site that was built entirely by AI in one pass and think to yourself, "Man, I really like that. It has all the stuff I've ever liked about websites." And you'd be right. AI builds and designs by referencing millions of data points and aggregating them together. You'll see that most AI-built websites have very similar design features. That's because the machine is built to put out the best average of what already exists.
You get a functional, good-looking website that is usually blue and purple with lots of tech bro gradients. (I'm a sucker for tech bro gradients. I've always loved them.) The more you look around the web, the more you'll start to see websites that look very similar to one another. It's not because they're being built off a standard template and barely modified. It's because they were built by someone who doesn't necessarily know what to look for in a finished website.
An AI Generated website built in approximately 5 minutes by Claude
To make a good-quality, functional website, you need to know the right questions to ask. Anyone can run a quick Google search and figure out what goes into a good website. All the information on how to be a great SEO tech is available to you. But if you don't know the basic questions to ask, AI won't hold your hand and ask them for you. It will do exactly what you tell it to.
If you don't know design basics, you may miss that the sections on your website don't have the right rhythm or grouping. You won't necessarily understand that your primary heading needs to contain the keywords you're targeting, or it won't do anything to help your business gain traction in search. You won't necessarily know how to set up analytics correctly, so you can tell where your traffic is coming from and which changes turn into solid leads.
You may not realize you need a phone number tied to call tracking, so you can see how many calls turned into good leads. Or that your schema markup needs to match the details on your Google Business Profile.
You need to understand that image optimization still matters, how it affects your website's page speed score, and how to optimize your site for mobile. All of this is easy to find with a quick Google search, but if you don't know what you're looking for, you won't find it.
AI can do all of these things. However, you need to tell it what to do. It can build you a site that looks good, but if you don't have the technical knowledge to see what's missing, you'll likely miss the things that take a website from good to great.
That brings me to my next point.
If everyone can make a decent site, decent becomes the bare minimum
Here's a shocking stat: about 68% of Google searches now end without a click (SparkToro). That means fewer clicks are available, so each one is worth more to you. If every painter in Maine looks the same because they all used AI to generate their websites, you get lost in the noise. The real work is making your business the one that Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI tools trust as the source of truth for your industry. The unfortunate truth is that building a website takes more work than a single prompt can do. You have to know what to tell the AI agent to build something that stands out, and you need to know how to preserve the authority you already have.
Rebuilding your website? Don't throw away what's working
An AI rebuild comes with some inherent risk. Your website has spent time being crawled by the bots that handle indexing. If you're not careful with your rebuild, you could damage the authority you've already built, so don't discard content that's ranking well. If you're not explicit when migrating an existing site, old URLs disappear, redirects don't get set up, and a site generating 6,000 visits a month can drop to 900 very quickly.
The brass tacks
Yes, you can build a website using AI. But you need to be careful about how you go about it. We've been building websites for years and know how to preserve a client's existing authority and then improve the site's performance. Chris at CM Electric shared a wonderful video testimonial on YouTube. If you're a very small business just starting out, an AI-built website may be your quickest way to build a web presence. If you'd rather spend your time running the business, why not partner with us at Momentum Marketing? Let us take care of building, maintaining and growing your online presence.
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