Should I use AI to build my website?

Where AI genuinely helps

AI builders are good at the work that used to eat the first week: a coherent layout, sane spacing, grammatical copy, and a page that does not fall apart on a phone. If you have no designer, that is a real gain — the honest alternative is usually a template you fight for three evenings, or a site that never gets built at all. They are also good at revision, which is the underrated half. Describing a change in a sentence and seeing it applied is faster than editing markup by hand, so you will iterate more, and iterating more is most of what makes a page better.

What a model cannot do is know anything about your business that you did not tell it. Left to fill the gaps, it writes the average of every page it has seen, which is why generated sites converge on the same reassuring nouns. That is a positioning problem rather than a tooling problem, and it is the one part of the page worth writing yourself — see how do I position my startup. The same split applies once the thing exists: marketing a vibe-coded app is the same job as marketing any other app.

The failures you cannot see in a browser

The reason to verify rather than launch is that generated pages tend to fail in one specific, quiet way: everything renders, and the machinery behind what rendered is missing. We publish AI-generated pages for our own customers, which meant reading a lot of generated markup closely. Four faults came up often enough that they are worth checking by hand every single time.

• A form that submits nowhere. The most common fault and by far the most expensive, because a page that captures nothing looks exactly like a page that works. On one real customer page the enquiry form had no destination at all, and separately not one of its fields carried a name — so even wired to a working inbox, every message it sent would have arrived empty. We now rebuild the field names and repoint the form at a real endpoint on the server before a page goes live, rather than asking the model to remember.
• Assets that only exist on your machine. Images and fonts pulled from another site render fine while you preview the file locally, then vanish once the page is served somewhere with stricter rules about what it may load. Nothing errors visibly; you just get a blank rectangle you will never see, because you are looking at your cached copy. Embedding images into the page itself removes the whole class of problem.
• Text that describes a category, not a business. Read the page as a stranger and ask which sentence a competitor could not have written. If the answer is none of them, the page is decoration. This is usually a five-minute fix: replace the abstractions with the specifics you know and they do not — who you serve, what you charge, where you work, what you refuse to do.
• No way to tell whether anyone came. Generated pages rarely include analytics, so the first thing you learn about your new site is nothing at all. Add something before you launch, not after you start wondering — and know what your numbers can and cannot see, since counts taken at the origin miss anything served from a cache.

The verification itself is mechanical and takes ten minutes. Open the published URL rather than the preview, on a phone, on mobile data. Fill in your own form with a real message and confirm it arrives somewhere you actually read. Click every link. Then send the URL to one person who has never seen it and watch what they do first.

Publishing is not distribution

One expectation worth setting before you start: a published page is not traffic. When we turned on publishing for our own customers, the first enquiries that arrived through those pages were the owners' own test submissions — which is exactly the right thing to do, and also an honest picture of week one. A new page has no inbound links and nobody looking for it, so the site going live changes nothing by itself. What comes next is the actual work: why is my website not getting traffic covers the ladder, and turning visitors into signups covers what to do with the ones who arrive.

So the answer is yes with a boundary. Use AI for the draft, the layout, and the endless small revisions; keep the offer, the proof and the verification for yourself. That boundary is also how we build AgentCeres — the AI Growth Officer at agentceres.com: a roster of specialists drafts the pages, posts and outreach, and a person approves anything that goes out. The draft is cheap and worth automating. Deciding it is true is not.