As of 12 August 2026, AI can only partly build your website.
Most people should hand this to a purpose-built tool.
Can you do it?
30 minutesto a draft.
2 hoursto something you’d act on.
Cost, all in£12/month
Skill neededchat-fluent
Who has to check ityou
What the alternative costsA freelance designer commonly charges £500 to £2,000 for a small business site.
If this goes wrong: the site quietly embarrasses you, wrong prices, broken forms, pages nobody can use on a phone, and you find out from a customer rather than from the tool.
What to actually do
Use a tool built for this
The route this page recommends
Purpose-built software does the mechanical share of this.
Squarespace
£12 (Basic (billed annually))
Templates, hosting, domain and AI-assisted copy in one place at £12/month (Basic, billed annually): the honest version of AI builds your site, because the builder also keeps it running.
WordPress.com
Free
The Free plan carries ads on a wordpress.com subdomain, and it is a real, zero-cost way to have a working site today and to learn what you actually need before paying.
Do it yourself
Second choiceA chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 2 hours until you can act on the result.
Prompt
Plan the website for the business below before any tool builds it. List the five pages it actually needs, the one action each page asks of a visitor, and draft the home page copy in plain English with no cliches. Flag every factual claim in your copy that I must verify before publishing, and list what the site will need that no tool generates: photographs, prices, opening hours, legal pages. Business: a two-person plumbing firm in Leeds that wants local emergency call-outs.
Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.
Hand it to a person
The distant thirdA person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.
What it gets wrong
- The copy it writes is confidently generic and occasionally false: invented testimonials, placeholder claims and services you do not offer survive into published pages.
- A generated site can look finished while failing at the basics that need a human decision: what you charge, what you promise, and which page a visitor is supposed to act on.
- Accessibility is a duty the generators do not guarantee; the W3C's guidance is the standard the output still has to meet.
What caps this at PARTLY: taste and context depth.
How we scored this
Five axes, each scored nought to two by hand: ten means AI carries the task cleanly, and the thresholds that turn a total into YES, PARTLY or NO are published in the methodology. Each axis name links to its definition.
| Axis | Score (0–2) |
|---|---|
| Output | 2 |
| Inputs | 1 |
| Verification | 1 |
| Liability | 1 |
| Effort delta | 2 |
| Total | 7 / 10 |
The methodology and its thresholds are published in full.
FAQ
- Can AI build our website?
- Partly. The answer here is PARTLY. Site builders with AI genuinely produce a working, hosted site in an afternoon. What they cannot produce is your content: real prices, real photographs, honest claims, and the decision about what the site is for. The build is now the easy half.
- Can I just ask ChatGPT to build me a website?
- It can write pages of code and copy, and then you own hosting, domains, updates and security yourself. For a small business that wants a site that stays up, a builder with AI features is the honest tool, and the chat is better used to plan pages and draft copy you then verify.
- What does a small business website cost?
- With a builder, from £12/month (Basic, billed annually) on Squarespace, or free with ads on WordPress.com's Free plan while you decide. A freelance designer commonly charges £500 to £2,000. The real cost either way is your time writing truthful content, which no tool removes.
- Will an AI-built website be found on Google?
- Not by being AI-built. Search rewards useful pages about real services in a real place, whoever generated the markup. The generated site starts invisible either way: what earns discovery is content only you hold, your services, your area, your prices, kept current.
Nearby answers
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