Let us concede the interesting bit straight away. You can describe a business to a machine and have a working website back before the kettle boils. It will have pages, a menu, a contact form and a photograph of somebody who does not work for you. It will be, in every technical sense, a website.
People keep expecting web studios to be defensive about this. We are not, because producing the pages was never the expensive part of the job.
What you actually get
A generated site is a confident average of every site the machine has seen. That is genuinely useful when you need something to exist by Friday. It is much less useful when the goal is to be chosen over the four other firms your customer has open in other tabs, because an average of everyone is by definition indistinguishable from everyone.
It also does exactly what you asked. If you ask for a page about your services, you get a page about your services. Nothing in the process stops to ask whether your customers care about your services or about the problem they woke up with, which are rarely the same thing and never the same words.
The three questions nothing has automated
What should this actually say? Most business owners describe what they do. Customers are searching for what they need. Sitting between those two and translating is the work, and it takes somebody willing to argue with you about it.
What should be left out? This is the one that separates sites that convert from sites that merely exist. Every business wants its full history, its accreditations and its twelve services on the homepage. Deciding what to cut requires knowing what the visitor is deciding, and being prepared to defend the decision.
Did you need this at all? Sometimes the honest answer is that your website is fine and your Google Business Profile is the thing costing you work. No tool that exists to build websites will ever tell you that you do not need one.
So what did get cheaper
Production did, and considerably. Hand-cutting templates and fighting browser bugs used to eat a serious share of any budget, and studios charged for that time because the time was real. It largely is not any more.
The honest question to put to any studio in 2026 is not whether they use modern tooling. Everybody does. It is whether the saving reached the invoice, or quietly stayed with them. We have written about where we think this is heading and what it means for what you pay, including the predictions we expect to get wrong.
Where AI genuinely earns its place
Not in deciding what your website says. In the unglamorous machinery behind it.
The quote that takes forty minutes to put together. The enquiry that sits unanswered until Tuesday because it arrived at six on Friday. The report somebody rebuilds by hand every month. Those are real hours, they belong to a person who would rather be doing something else, and automating them is worth actual money. That is a different service, and we treat it as one: AI and automation for the work behind the website.
And sometimes the cheap answer is the right one
If you are testing an idea and do not yet know whether anybody wants it, spend a weekend and a small amount of money rather than several thousand pounds. Find out first. We would genuinely rather you came back in a year with something proven than spent the budget on a guess.
When you do know it works, and the website has to start earning its keep, the thing you are buying is not the typing. It never was.
