What makes the best AI website builder?

 

What makes the best AI website builder?

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Right now, AI is the hottest marketing buzzword around. And unfortunately, it doesn't really have an easy definition. There are lots of different tools all claiming to use AI, even though they do different things. 

When it came to the apps on this list, I relied on two things to decide whether or not they were using AI: their claims and my judgment. 

Some apps essentially had me fill in a survey about who I was and what my site was for, while others could build a rough site from a typed prompt like "make a website for Harry Guinness, an Irish landscape photographer who specializes in sunrise seascapes." If my input genuinely made a difference to the end-product, I was happy to consider it AI-powered, regardless of if it was a form or a prompt. But if a so-called AI websitebuilder took what I said and slotted it into the same generic theme it uses for everything, I was happy to write it off as a poor attempt to cash in on the current AI boom. 

On top of actually feeling like an AI, I was looking for website builders that checked a few important boxes:

·         Enable you to make a great-looking site. Theme-based website builders have set the bar really high here, so there's no need for a website to look like it was built using Dreamweaver in 2005. This requirement actually tripped up some of the most AI-powered builders I considered: they could take a written prompt, but they somehow managed to make something awful from it.

·         Make it easy to get the results you want. Picking a WordPress theme is pretty simple. No matter how AI-powered an app is, if you have to spend ages crafting prompts to get it to produce good, relevant results, or need to spend a lot of time tweaking things afterward in a mediocre site builder, it didn't make this list. 

·         Truly build custom sites. The cynical way to make an AI website builder is to have it take a prompt and then slot that information into a single generic theme. Changing the prompt just changes the headers and maybe the images, not the actual layout of the site. I won't link to them, but I ran into a few tools like this. For an app to get featured here, it had to allow you to build genuinely custom sites. It should be an AI-generated website, but it shouldn't feel like an AI-generated website.

·         Offer a good overall experience. The whole point of AI tools is that they make things easy; if any app makes you battle with a bad interface, awkward AI, or anything else, there's no point using it. There should also be solid documentation in case you do get tripped up.

There were also a couple of things I wasn't looking for. 

·         Standard website builders with generative AI for content. This list is showing off AI-powered website builders, so the AI tools had to actually build the website. Some of these apps also use AI to generate content, but I wasn't considering any apps that just had ChatGPT baked in to help you write copy.

·         AI design apps. There are lots of apps popping up that help designers mock up websites using AI, but they don't produce working websites with functional code. This list was narrowly focused on the kind of AI tools that allow you to build and launch a website.

Do you actually need an AI website builder?

Website builders are already really easy to use and have approximately a zillion templates, one of which will definitely work for you. 

I'm still a long way from convinced that you need artificial intelligence to make a great site. And I'm 100% not convinced that being able to build a site from a written prompt in 30 seconds will ever be more than a party trick. 

I don't imagine for a second most people would be able to launch a site without doing some customizing themselves. That's why I'd suggest finding an AI website builder that's backed up by a solid non-AI website builder. It's the best of both worlds.