Should you use AI to build your business website?

Tools like v0, Lovable, Bolt and Framer's AI can put a respectable website on the internet in an afternoon. We use AI every day in our own work, so this article isn't going to tell you those tools are bad. They're genuinely impressive, and pretending otherwise would insult your intelligence.

The honest question isn't 'AI or agency?'. It's 'what does this website need to do, and who is accountable when it doesn't?'

Where AI builders are genuinely the right choice

• You need something online this week: an event page, a menu, a CV site, a landing page to test an idea.
• Budget is close to zero and the site failing quietly costs you nothing.
• You enjoy tinkering and the site is a side project, not a sales channel.
• You want a prototype to show investors or partners before committing to a real build.

In those cases, paying an agency would be the wrong call, ours included. Ship the AI site and get on with your business.

Where the gap opens up

A website that has to win customers is a different job. The visible design is maybe a third of that job. The rest is deciding what the site says and to whom, how visitors are moved toward contacting you, whether it loads fast on a cheap phone on mobile data, whether search engines can read it properly, and whether anyone will maintain it in a year.

• Positioning: an AI will happily generate confident copy about the wrong message. It can't interview your customers.
• Conversion: button placement, form length, page order and trust signals are decisions made against data, not aesthetics.
• Performance and SEO: generated sites often ship heavy code with no performance budget and thin technical SEO. You won't notice; your traffic will.
• Accessibility: real customers use screen readers, keyboards and old devices. This is engineering work, not a toggle.
• Maintenance: when something breaks at a bad moment, a prompt can't take responsibility. A partner can.

The way we actually see it

AI is an accelerator for professionals, not a replacement for judgement.

The strongest results we see come from using these tools inside a process run by people: AI speeds up drafts and boilerplate, humans make the calls that decide whether the site earns money. That's how we work, and it's why our projects launch in weeks rather than months.

So: if the site just needs to exist, use AI and don't look back. If the site has a job to do, hire someone accountable for the result, whether that's us or another studio you trust.