What is an AI website builder?
An AI website builder uses AI (artificial intelligence) to generate a fully coded website for you based on a written prompt or interaction with a chatbot that builds and adjusts your site in real time. It allows users to generate functional websites without needing to understand or write code.
AI website builders have been popping up left and right over the past couple of years, allowing anyone to launch a site quickly. They often claim to remove the need for web design experience and website development (or coding) skills, making them an attractive, affordable option for the masses. Even marketing agencies and web developers have embraced these tools to speed up production.
An AI-built website can be just as effective as a traditionally built site … if you choose the right AI builder. As more AI website builders enter the market and gain popularity, it’s increasingly important to understand exactly what they offer, what you’ll get, and what you can expect from the experience.
In this article, we’ll cover some of the most common issues with AI website builders. Understanding these limitations and shortcomings will help you know what to look for and choose the right AI builder for your project. Doing a little research up front and picking the best AI website builder for your needs will save you time and hassle down the road as you’re building your site and using it to generate business.
Key Takeaways: What to look for in an AI website builder
- Not all AI website builders are the same. Understanding your goals and the limitations of different AI builders will help you choose the best one for your project.
- Pay attention to the cost structure. Some AI website builders charge a flat subscription fee, some charge a subscription plus additional fees for AI usage, and some are strictly usage-based, which can drive up costs or stop progress when limits are hit.
- Choose an AI website builder that specializes in your specific industry and is transparent about what framework and sources it uses to establish layout, content, SEO, and technical best practices. A vibe coded site can look good but not have the right best practices in place to perform well, rank in search and AI, or convert visitors to customers. The ultimate goal is not to have a website; it’s to have a website that drives business.
Table of Contents
- Understand what you need and each platform’s limitations.
- Make sure the AI builder specializes in your specific industry.
- Know how the AI makes its design and coding decisions.
- Be mindful of usage limits or credit costs.
- Choosing the right AI website builder.
Understand what you need and each platform’s limitations.
The first place to start when you’re thinking about using AI to build a website is to understand what you expect the outcome to be.
You might be saying to yourself, “Duh, the outcome is having a website.”
But think about it this way: When you’re looking to buy a new car, you probably don’t just want any car. You want one that fits your needs. Gas mileage, number of seats, how well it will handle the weather where you live, transmission type, power, price. Those and a million other factors go into your decision about what car to buy.
Choosing an AI website builder is similar. You need to break down what “having a website” means to you and what you expect that website to do.
Do you want whatever solution you choose to be able to:
- Host your site (ie, allow it to go live and be accessible online)
- Allow you to manually make tweaks and edits to the design or content
- Support forms, online ordering, or appointment booking
- Integrate with other software you use
- Handle SEO best practices for you
- Include analytics or other marketing tools
These are just a few of the things you should be thinking about. Understanding your needs falls into two main buckets:
- Your technical needs (what you want the AI website builder to be able to do)
- The results you want your website to drive (get found online, generate leads, sell product, etc.)
Before you choose an AI website builder, make a list of requirements for each of those buckets (to the best of your ability). This will help you evaluate the pros and cons of popular AI builders.
For instance:
Lovable is popular for launching AI-built websites and apps, but as your site gets more complex, it becomes harder to manage. Many people say it’s good for mocking up ideas, but not as great for a long term solution if you want to grow.
Claude is another popular AI solution, but it’s not specifically a website builder. It can create a website, but it doesn’t have hosting options. If you want to take your Claude-built site live, you need to be tech savvy enough to load it into a hosting platform. Plus, if you want to make changes using Claude in the future, you’ll need to do the whole process again.
Carrot (in the spirit of transparency) isn’t the best solution for an e-commerce website. Carrot’s AI website builder is geared toward local lead generation for home service providers and real estate professionals.
Understanding your needs will help you pick the right AI website builder to work with … before you spend hours trying to get it to build the perfect site only to get stuck.
Make sure the AI builder specializes in your specific industry.
You wouldn’t go to the grocery store for lumber, you’d go to a hardware store. It’s the same thing with websites — whether you’re using an AI website builder or working with a web designer and developer. You want to work with someone who understands your industry and goals so they can produce a site that works for you, not a generic website that doesn’t actually fit your needs.
If you look at reviews and forums, getting a “generic” site is a common complaint when people use AI website builders. AI can build a site, but unless you spend a lot of time telling it exactly what you need, it’s going to give you something generic that likely won’t meet your actual end goals.
Look at the AI builder’s home website. Does it mention your industry or show examples of sites that are similar to what you need? Many solutions claim you only need to start with a simple prompt or idea and “watch it become a website.” But if they’re that broad, they’re treating all sites as fundamentally the same. The reality is, a restaurant site is different from an e-commerce site is different from an HVAC website. They need different pages, need to show visitors different things, fit into SEO and AI search differently, and need different contact methods. But a generic AI website builder doesn’t know — or care — about these differences. It’s just going to pop out a site and promise you that it’s great. (Hint: it’s probably not.)
Taking the time to find an AI website builder that specializes in your industry will result in a better site. These systems know exactly what you need, from the right pages to include to the best language and keywords to use to overall best practices to accomplish your goals.
Know how the AI makes its design and coding decisions.
This one is a bit deeper level, but knowing these details can save you a lot of headaches, wasted time, and lost customers.
Like with choosing an AI builder that specializes in your industry, you want to make sure the builder you work with builds sites based on real, up-to-date best practices. Art is subjective; what makes a high-performing website isn’t. Teams of people have spent decades testing and refining website design, SEO, and web copy best practices. (Including the team at Carrot, who have been constantly testing and refining websites for our customers for over a decade.)
The thing is, best practices change over time — and these changes are important. Following out-of-date SEO “best practices” can get you penalized by Google, meaning your site won’t show up in search. AI search optimization is similar to modern SEO optimization, but some small differences are beginning to appear. Having an AI-generated site that doesn’t understand those nuances means you’ll miss out on an increasingly important online lead source. (Just because it is AI doesn’t mean it knows or will implement best practices to make a business show up in AI search.)
You can tell an AI builder to create a site that is optimized for SEO and AI search, but how is it deciding what optimized is? What best practices is it referencing? You’ll either need to give it references to follow (which requires time and expertise on your part), or ask it where it’s referencing for best practices (then spend time validating — and potentially correcting — those … which also takes expertise).
The same goes for the backend code of your site. As you use the AI to make changes and tweak your site, is it generating clean code, or is it adding new code to the existing base until you end up with a sloppy, slow backend that will negatively impact site speed and performance?
Knowing how to check for these details requires a certain level of knowledge that many people using AI website builders don’t have. Choosing a builder that makes its methodology transparent gives you peace of mind … and a better performing site.
Be mindful of usage limits or credit costs.
This is a big one, and one people don’t always think about until they run into a very big hurdle.
Because AI is still relatively new, companies are still figuring out how to price their products. In the case of AI website builders, companies often take one of three approaches:
- A flat subscription fee for their software (like you would pay for a traditional website)
- Usage-based pricing (often in the form of credits, tokens, or hours)
- A subscription fee plus an additional fee for the AI usage (either a flat “AI Add-On” fee or a usage-based fee)
The benefit of the flat fee approach is that you know you’ll be able to finish your project without hidden fees or limits that stop your progress. The upfront cost might seem higher, but so is the ceiling, giving you more room to experiment.
On the flip side, usage-based pricing can drive your costs to unexpectedly astronomical levels or put a stop to your work until your usage resets (sometimes hours, sometimes the next day, … sometimes the next month). This can delay your site’s launch or mean you have to switch to a more economical solution midway through your project (without getting your initial spend back).
The other challenge with usage-based pricing is that you may not know how long it will take to build your site. If this is your first AI-generated website, you may find yourself making a lot of edits or realizing your prompt wasn’t as detailed as it needed to be. In these scenarios, every little change goes against your usage.
When evaluating an AI website builder, look at its pricing model, its usage limits (if any), and Google how long it typically takes people to build websites on that platform. YouTube and Reddit are good resources to see what the experience is like and how long it might take.
And remember, you’ll want to factor in what other features and tools the platform offers (like domains, hosting, SSL certificates, analytics, and integrations) and account for the cost of moving to a higher plan to get the features you need or purchasing additional software.
Choosing the right AI website builder.
Choosing the right AI website builder for your project comes down to understanding your ultimate goal, the technology and framework underpinning each AI builder, and your personal tech-savviness. While anyone can vibe code a website with an AI builder (that’s their appeal after all), the end result isn’t always easy to use, maintain, or performs well.
Most AI site builders do exactly what you tell it to do … and nothing more. That means SEO optimization, conversion optimization, and quality content often go out the window with AI. And technical elements you’d get in a traditional setting — like a clean sitemap, proper heading structures, a robot.txt file, and optimized image alt text — might not be in place unless you know to ask for it.
Before you lose hours playing with different builders or commit to a solution, you need to understand what they offer, how they work, and what struggles you might run into … while building and after launch. Reading reviews and watching videos about different AI builders you’re evaluating is a great way to see how it works, understand pros and cons, and evaluate if it will fit your needs.
Finally, make sure you choose a solution that offers help from an actual team. Help center articles and video tutorials are great, but sometimes you need to talk to a person to solve a problem or figure out what’s going on. AI can help you build a website, but it isn’t a replacement for good customer support yet. That personal touch can make or break your experience.
