You've seen it before you knew the name for it: A site loads, and something about it just feels off -- not broken, not ugly exactly, just... really generic and sorta missing a chromosome. Plus you feel like you've seen this exact layout somewhere else -- and you probably have.
This is the world of AI Websites and corporate page builders and here's what's actually happening:
Squarespace, Wix, and the newer AI builders like Airo all work the same fundamental way: a limited set of templates, a limited set of layout patterns, and an algorithm (or a dropdown menu) picking from them.
When millions of businesses are drawing from the same finite deck of designs, duplication is guaranteed. Your competitor down the street is one template swap away from having the same homepage as you. Hopefully people don't think you stole it from him.
Check out this ATV Mods domain For Sale page we made using AI for some domain we ended up with. It doesn't look bad per se but it definitely looks cheap-- but as it happened fast and cheap is what we needed. And sometimes that's fine.
Hell, I remember the days of spending hours coding something stupid like this and even though we took shortcuts (reused code, assets etc) it didn't turn out much better and took a helluva lot longer. I bring this up because this is exactly what AI is doing... it's going through it's "Domain For Sale" knowledge and returning what matches closest to what you instructed. If it needs to change some layouts, colors etc no problem. Want some horrific looking SVG image icons? Say less my friend.
AI website builders don't come over with a camera and shoot your business-- they pull from the same stock and AI-generated image libraries every other user of that tool pulls from. That smiling team in the "About Us" section, the laptop-and-coffee hero shot -- customers have seen it a hundred times attached to a hundred different businesses.
It doesn't build trust, it screams that nobody bothered to capture the real thing or god forbid pay someone a few bucks to do it right, to do it authentically.
Though it also feels like much of the backlash against AI isn't just the slop, it's the assumed cheapness and unearned extravagance of it all.
This Old Restaurant Menu vs AI Menu post by Robert Komaniecki hits the heart of the issue. We know the restaurant owner on the left has a box of letters and numbers and periodically adds them to the plastic menu board. That's good honest work.
In the AI Restaurant menu we know some AI Kung Fu Karen hopped on the old Macbook and really impressed the hell out of herself with her May Specials menu. And to be honest, her menu looks kinda cool, but moreover it looks fake and fake isn't the vibe you want to convey when you're selling food.
AI-generated copy optimizes for grammatically correct and then vaguely on-topic, which is because AI doesn't want to be "random" or wacky, it wants to be reliable and steady.
Which is fine, but it doesn't know your customers, your differentiators, or the specific objection someone's thinking about right as they decide to call your competitor instead. You can of course tell AI all of this and the result reads fine on skim but says nothing on a second look -- and customers, even ones who couldn't articulate why, feel that gap.
For instance, you're probably reading this because you want to find out if these builders and AI websites really suck bad enough to open your coin purse and pay a professional -- or because you already agree with the premise and want to believe it even more. If I write something that rings true you'll like me, this blog and my company Foxco. If I write something boring or stupid you won't. Extrapolate that to your own website and business.
A website that looks templated tells a visitor something before they've read a word of it: that the business behind it didn't think the site was worth any effort or money.
Fair or not, people extend that judgment to the business itself: if the website feels generic, why would the service feel custom? If they can't be bothered to hire a designer or web developer why should I be bothered to hire them? You can kind of see society crumbling down this slippery slope of thinking, and maybe it is.
And now for some good old fashioned, non-AI, homemade human shameless self promotion:
This is exactly the gap Foxco built the $999 website package to close -- a genuinely custom WordPress build, not a template pulled from the same deck everyone else is drawing from. We get your assets and guidance and make something basic but respectable.
Free domain, hosting, SSL, security, a strategy plan and a site built around your business, not auto-generated around a prompt. You don't need a big budget to avoid looking like everyone else you just need to make a different choice than everyone else.
On the other end of the spectrum: if you're an enterprise that needs a sprawling web portal -- thousands of discrete features, real-time data pipelines and API integrations across a hundred different SaaS platforms all talking to each other without falling over -- Foxco does that too.
Luckily for us, complex systems architecture and integration is still, for now, a human problem.
Big agencies bring big-brand experience, and small teams bring agility and a sharp focus on your niche -- Foxco is an Arizona micro agency that gives you both. With 500+ companies and 100+ years of combined experience in competitive markets behind us, you work directly with senior people, get decisions made fast, and get the kind of expert, hands-on execution big agencies just aren't built to deliver.