AI can build a website. But should it build yours?

I’ve been seeing more AI-built websites during marketing audits lately – three just last week.

Some have been created with tools such as Claude and Lovable. They can look polished. They can be produced quickly. And for a business that needs a website without a large development budget, the appeal is easy to understand.

AI has changed what is possible.

Where Does That Leave The Traditional Website Build?

For me, the question isn’t whether AI can build a website. It absolutely can.

It’s more about what you are giving up, or taking on, when you choose how that website is built.

Because a website has a much longer life than its launch.

It needs to be found. It needs to represent the business. It needs to feel credible to convert the right people. It needs to evolve as the business evolves. Someone needs to maintain it, secure it and make changes when the business, technology or search landscape changes.

"AI can build a website remarkably quickly. As a Fractional CMO, I look beyond the benefits of getting it live today. I'm more interested in understanding if it can support the business as it grows, adapt to changing needs and continue delivering value over the next three years."
Kelly Dimkovska

Will Google Be Able To Find An AI-built site?

Yes, generally. Google doesn’t penalise a website because AI built it, and Google’s search robots are perfectly capable of reading websites built with modern web code, even the more complex kind AI tools often produce.

The bigger question is “do I have control over the things that help it rank in Google?”

Some of the things worth checking:

Can you edit the meta data that shows up in Google search results?
Can you tell Google which version of a page is the “real” one, when duplicates exist?
Can you give Google a map of all your pages, so nothing gets missed?
Can you control which pages Google is and isn’t allowed to look at?
Can you set up a redirect if you move or rename a page?
Can you add the behind-the-scenes tags that help Google understand what a page is about (a product, a service, an event, and so on)?
Can you control the heading tags and how information is organised on the page?
Can you link your pages to each other sensibly?
Can you easily add new pages later?
Can you see and fix problems if Google has trouble finding or ranking your pages?
Can you make these fixes yourself, without needing the platform’s permission or the original builder?

All of this is about whether you’re the one holding the steering wheel.

There’s a second layer too: will you still have that control in three years? A setup that works fine today might not flex once your content grows or your needs change.

Will Every AI-built Website End Up Looking The Same?

There’s research behind this worry. A 2026 Microsoft research study looked at whether AI tools are making websites look more alike.

The researchers found that AI tends to reproduce the most common design patterns it was trained on and that the more people just accept the AI’s first suggestion without pushing back or adding their own ideas, the more that sameness spreads across the web.

That doesn’t mean every AI-built site looks identical. But it’s worth sitting with the question: if you looked at five websites built with the same AI tool, would you be able to tell they’re five different businesses? Would you get a sense of who they are, not just what they sell? Would they still feel credible?

AI can help you build something distinctive. It can also make it very easy to settle for “good enough and familiar” instead of pushing for something that feels more like you.

How Much Can You Customise?

AI website tools can be quite flexible. Lovable, for instance, says customers own the website code it generates, and that code can be moved into a code-hosting service called GitHub – meaning you can take a full copy of it elsewhere if you want to.

Claude’s outputs can be viewed, edited, and exported too.

Owning the code, though, is a different question from how far you can customise it.

Templated and AI-driven platforms are generally built to make common things easy – colours, layout, basic content, while less common things may hit a wall.

Areas that can get harder to customise on these kinds of platforms:

Connecting to a specific customer-management or sales system
Organising content in a non-standard way
Adding advanced search or filtering
complex forms
One-off custom features
Technical tags that help with search visibility
Custom tracking of visitor behaviour
Personalising content for different visitors
Specific accessibility needs (for visitors living with disabilities)

Therefore, it is worth testing directly against your own needs before committing rather than assuming it’ll bend to fit.

A site can look completely custom on the surface while the underlying structure is far more rigid than it appears, and that’s invisible just from looking at the homepage.

Who Owns The Website?

Before starting any AI website project, I’d want clear answers to:

Can I take a full copy of this and leave?
Can someone other than the original builder maintain it?
Can I move it to different hosting?
Can I take my customer/data records with me?
Can I rebuild the connections to other tools and services?

These matter most when your website depends heavily on one platform to function.

Lovable, for example, says customers own the sites and apps they build, and that the code can be exported. But its terms also draw a line between what’s yours (your content, your generated code) and what belongs to Lovable (the platform itself, its infrastructure, its databases, its behind-the-scenes services).

That’s useful to understand: you can own your code while still depending on someone else’s plumbing to run parts of the system around it. Before signing up to any platform, get clear on exactly what would leave with you if you walked away.

What Happens If The Platform Changes?

Some questions worth considering:

What happens if the company raises its prices?
If a feature you rely on disappears?
If the product changes direction entirely?
If the person who built your site moves on?
If you decide you want to switch providers?

And yes – what happens if the company doesn’t exist in five years? That’s not far-fetched.

Tech companies get acquired, pivot, or shut down all the time. The smart move is figuring out your exit route before you need one.

A website you can copy, move, and run independently gives you options. A website tightly bound to one company’s private systems gives you fewer of them.

What About Security?

No way of building a website is risk-free. Traditional website software needs constant updates and careful upkeep to support security. AI-built websites carry their own version of that risk – it’s just a newer, less familiar one.

1. AI-written Code Sometimes Has Mistakes

This includes security ones. Researchers looked at over 300,000 code changes made by AI tools across thousands of websites and apps. They found roughly 484,000 individual problems – things like code issues, bugs, and genuine security weak spots.

More importantly: about 1 in 4 of those problems were still there, unfixed, months later. In other words, once AI introduces a mistake, it doesn’t reliably get caught and cleaned up — it can just sit there.

2. Having AI "Help" Doesn't Automatically Make Things Safer

A separate study put professional developers to the test – half the time using an AI coding assistant (GitHub’s Copilot), half the time without.

What they found is that using the AI assistant didn’t meaningfully improve how securely they handled sensitive information. Even more telling — many developers thought their work was secure when it wasn’t. The AI didn’t just fail to spot and fix the problem; it gave people false confidence.

3. Security Measures

To their credit, some AI companies are building in safety nets. Anthropic (the company behind Claude) added an automatic security check to its coding tool – it scans for common weak spots, like ways a hacker could sneak into a database or slip harmful code into a page. But Anthropic is upfront that this is meant to support human oversight, not replace it.

The simple takeaway. AI can help you build faster, and it can even help catch some security problems — but it’s not a substitute for a real person checking the work. Treat “AI built it” the same way you’d treat “an intern built it”: promising, often good, but needs a second pair of eyes.

The Other Kind Of Security Risk: What You're Telling AI

This one’s less about code and more about privacy.

When you build a website with AI, you often end up sharing a lot with it along the way – things like internal documents, customer information, passwords, or unpublished content.

Basically, whatever you type in or upload.

An important question to ask is “what happens to what I share with it?” That answer is different for every tool and every plan you’re on. Some things worth checking before you kick off a build:

Does this tool store what I share, or just use it temporarily?
Could my information be used to train the AI for other users?
Does the company limit what the AI itself can access on my computer or accounts?

Some companies are getting better about this – Anthropic, for example, has added ways to limit what its coding tool can reach on your systems.

Lovable also publishes details on how it keeps customer data separated and controls access.

The simple takeaway: before you add anything into an AI tool, take the time to check what that company does with what you give it.

Who's Going To Manage This Website In Six Months?

Building the site is stage one. Living with it is stage two, and this might be the most important question on this whole list.

Six months from now, your business will probably have changed in some way: new positioning, a new product, a new piece of software you use to run things, new content, a new person managing your marketing, or a search-visibility problem that requires attention.

Someone has to be able to make those changes. And that person needs to understand how the site works.

The research on AI-written code backs this up – problems that AI introduces often don’t get cleaned up quickly; they can sit there for months. So it’s worth asking: “who will understand this website in three years?”

If the honest answer is “we’ll just ask the AI to fix it,” it’s worth sitting with that answer for a moment.

What About Speed & Accessibility?

A website can look great and still be slow or clunky to use – this comes down to how it’s built, how images and content load, hosting, and how well it plays with other plugins that power it.

This should be tested, not assumed.

The same goes for accessibility – making sure the site genuinely works for people with disabilities.

That includes things like:

Can someone navigate the whole site using only a keyboard?
Is the text large and clear enough, with enough contrast against the background?
Do images have descriptions for people who use screen readers?
Do forms clearly label what information they’re asking for?
Does the site work well on phones and tablets, not just desktop computers?

These are basic quality questions no matter how the site was built.

So, WordPress or AI?

There’s no single right answer. It depends on what the site needs to do.

If you need something simple, speed to launch and low cost matter more than customisation and ongoing maintenance, an AI website builder can be a great option.

If you’re running a more complex website – one juggling search visibility, is content rich, has multiple connected tools, and you are chasing ongoing improvements, are in a regulated industry – it deserves more careful thought and assessment.

There’s also a middle path: AI doesn’t have to mean “hand the whole thing over”. A traditional website can be built and maintained with AI’s help, while a developer keeps their hands on the steering wheel.

What A Website Specialist Brings That AI Can't

There’s a piece missing from everything highlighted so far, and it’s worth calling out directly: judgment that comes from experience.

AI can give almost anyone the ability to build a website, but building one and knowing how to build a great one are very different things.

An experienced web designer and developer brings years of knowledge about what works across design, user experience for specific industries, SEO, accessibility, performance, technology and conversion.

They know which decisions are likely to create problems later, which details are worth refining and how different elements of a website work together.

That is difficult to replicate when the person creating the prompts doesn’t have the best practice knowledge to assess, challenge and refine what the AI produces.

Questions To Ask Before Choosing An AI Website Builder

Category	Question To Ask
Search Visibility	Can I control what I need to, both now and later, to help people find me on Google?
Content	Can my team easily add, edit, and improve content themselves?
Design	Will this genuinely reflect our brand, or will it look like every other AI-generated site?
Features	Can it support what we need now, and what we’ll may need later as we grow?
Ownership	What do we own?
Portability	Can we take our code, content, customer records, and connected tools with us if we leave?
Security	How is our data protected, and who’s checking the code that gets generated?
Maintenance	Who can keep this running if the person who built it isn’t around anymore?
Speed	Can we test and improve on site speed?
Accessibility	Can we meet the accessibility needs of our audience?
Exit Plan	If we want to leave this platform in three years, what will that involve?

The Website Isn't The Whole Project

A website represents your brand and is a foundational piece of all your marketing activity.

It helps people find you, captures leads, and shows people what you know and what you’re good at. It’s possible it will also be running long after whoever built it has moved on to something else.

AI has made building a website faster and more accessible than ever. That’s genuinely valuable, but speed doesn’t remove the thinking behind it.

So yes, by all means use AI. Experiment with it. Build a rough version quickly. Let it speed up your work. Just don’t let speed replace the strategic decisions.

This is a fast-moving space, and it will keep moving. The specifics of any one tool or platform may look different in six months. The underlying questions about ownership, control, and who’s responsible for what happens next won’t.

FAQs

Will an AI-built website hurt my Google rankings?

It doesn’t appear so. Google can read and rank websites built with AI tools just fine.

What matters is whether you have control over the basics: meta data, site speed, how your pages are organised, whether you can fix problems if they arise, and whether you can make changes without needing permission from the platform.

The AI itself isn’t the issue – losing control over those details is.

Will my AI-built website end up looking like everyone else's?

It’s a real risk. Research has found that AI tools tend to lean on the most common, familiar design patterns they’ve seen before and if you just accept the first version without pushing back or adding your own input, that sameness can show.

It doesn’t mean every AI-built site looks identical, but it’s worth asking: does this still look and feel like us, or could it be anyone’s website?

Who fixes my website if something breaks six months from now?

This is worth sorting out before you build, not after. AI tools can generate a site quickly, but someone still needs to understand how it works to update it, fix problems, or add new features later.

If the website is built on a widely known CMS used by developers world wide such as WordPress, then there is generally less risk. If the plan is “we’ll just ask the AI,” stop and consider what that means first.

About the Author

Kelly Dimkovska

Founder & Fractional CMO

Kelly has spent over 19 years helping organisations in healthcare, B2B, and non-profit sectors transform marketing challenges into growth opportunities. She is motivated by meaningful impact, partnering with teams and leaders to shape the marketing function into a force that drives business growth.