An AI builder will give you a working three-page brochure site in about an hour, and it will not look bad. If that is genuinely what you need, build it and spend the money somewhere it matters more. The trouble starts when the site has to do a job.
What these tools are genuinely good at
Producing a first version fast. A landing page to test whether an idea has any pull. A brochure site for a business that currently needs a phone number, some photos and an address. A rough layout for a designer to work over. In all three cases speed matters more than durability, and that is exactly what you get.
We use them ourselves, mostly to put three or four layout directions on screen in the first hour of a project. That used to take half a day.
Worth saying plainly, because an article claiming AI is useless is selling you something.
Where the output falls apart
Sites built this way that later arrive with us for a rebuild tend to break in the same few places.
Weight. The generated code carries layers it does not need: a library pulled in for two animations, unoptimised images, whole font families loaded when a subset would do. The site is fast on your laptop and slow on a mid-range phone over mobile data. Stripping it back later is a bill for something that was free at build time.
Anything with a data model. Carts, orders, stock, accounts, payment providers, shipping rules. Generic tools do not carry your integrations, and the last mile has to be written by someone who has seen those services before.
The second change. Six months on you want to add a field to a form. Now somebody has to understand how the thing was assembled. When nothing was documented, a small change stops being small.
Where it lives. Some tools hand you files. Others keep the site inside a product you rent. Find out which before you build, not on the day you want to leave.
AI content and Google
Google has not banned AI-generated content. What its helpful content guidance actually asks is whether the page shows "first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge", and it states that using automation mainly to manipulate rankings breaches the spam policies.
Translated into practice: text that restates what is already known ranks nowhere, whoever or whatever wrote it. What ranks is the number only you have, the mistake only you made, the comparison nobody else will publish. If you are outsourcing the writing, our content work starts from that premise.
We also maintain an AI reference of our own, comparing models and prices against sourced evidence. Building it taught us that the hard part of working with these tools is not the tool. It is verifying what comes out.
The number you should actually compare
People compare build cost to build cost. The figure worth comparing is build plus one year of keeping it running: the small monthly changes, the updates, and the day something breaks and somebody has to answer for it. What a website really costs separates those lines out.
Our position: below a certain threshold, building it yourself with an AI tool is the correct decision, and we tell people with no budget exactly that. Above it, what you are buying is not code. It is somebody who picks up the phone when the site goes down on a Friday. Design work from our team sells the second thing and not the first.
If you built one, check these four
Open it on a mid-range phone on mobile data rather than on your laptop. Paste in a long, real block of your own text and watch what the typography does with it. Confirm you hold the code and the design files instead of renting access to them. Then make one small change: if the small one was hard, the next ones will be harder.
Questions we get asked
Can an AI-built site rank?
If it is fast, crawlable and answers the query, yes. Google does not ask who wrote the code. The problem is that those three conditions are usually not met by the default output.
Can I migrate to a custom build later?
Yes, and you pay for the build twice. If you already know the site is going to grow, decide at the start.
Is it good enough for an online shop?
For a product showcase, yes. For cart, checkout and order management, no. At that point the problem stopped being appearance.
A practical next step: read the seven stages of a project and mark which ones the tool does for you. Whatever is left unmarked is the thing you are actually buying.
Last reviewed: August 2026
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