AI can now build you a website ridiculously quickly… You answer a few questions, choose a direction, and suddenly you’ve got a homepage, colours, sections, buttons, and copy... all without spending weeks putting the thing together yourself.
Which, I won’t lie, is pretty impressive.
And as someone who uses AI in my own business, I’m definitely not going to sit here pretending every AI tool is terrible, and we should all go back to doing everything the slow way!
BUUUUT I do think there’s an important difference between being able to generate a website quickly and creating a website that actually gives somebody a reason to choose you.
Especially if you’re an established coach or service provider selling expertise, trust + a relatively high-ticket service.
Because at that point, the difficult bit of building your website isn’t really putting a headline above a button. The difficult bit is deciding what that headline needs to say in the first place.
AI can build the page. It can’t make all the strategic decisions for you.
Most established coaches already have plenty of things they could put on a website. You probably have several offers, client results, testimonials, years of experience, a methodology, opinions about your industry, qualifications, podcast appearances, free resources... and perhaps a very overwhelming Google Drive containing all of the above.
The problem usually isn’t finding enough stuff…. It’s deciding what actually matters to the person considering working with you.
What do they need to understand first?
Which problem are you leading with?
What makes your approach different?
Which testimonial actually backs up the claim you’ve just made?
What deserves space on the homepage and what can wait until later?
Those are judgement calls. An AI website builder can generate sections, layouts, and copy. But if the information you give it is vague, you’re still likely to end up with a vague website.
And if you don’t know what the page needs to communicate strategically, having it generated faster doesn’t necessarily solve that problem…
The biggest risk is ending up looking like everybody else
This is probably my biggest hesitation with AI website builders for coaches. The offers you’re selling are usually deeply personal. People are choosing your expertise, yes, but they’re also choosing your perspective, experience, personality, methodology and way of approaching a problem.
They’re choosing the person they might spend the next 3, 6 or 12 months talking to! Your website needs to give them a sense of that. But if you give an AI website builder generic information, you’re going to get fairly generic answers back.
Everything can look perfectly nice without really telling me why YOU are the one I should choose. And when your potential client has hundreds of other people they could hire, being forgettable is a very expensive problem.
“Professional” copy isn’t enough
AI is very good at producing copy that sounds correct, and honestly that’s almost part of the problem.
Tell it you’re a leadership coach and suddenly you’re helping people “unlock their leadership potential”, “navigate challenges with confidence” and “step into the next level of their career”.
Nothing is technically wrong with those phrases. They just don’t tell me very much. And they are EVERYWHERE.
Compare that with a leadership coach who’s spent years working with newly promoted senior leaders and knows that one of the first things they often say is: “I feel like everybody expects me to have all the answers, but I don’t feel like I do.””
That gives me something specific. It tells me who the work is for and shows me that this person actually understands what’s happening behind the polished LinkedIn job title.
Good website copy comes from knowing your clients really well. Their language, worries, objections, desires and the little details that make them recognise themselves. AI can absolutely help organise that material. I’d just be VERY cautious about letting it invent the material for you.
Coaches need more than a nice-looking website
There’s another reason I think this matters more for coaches than it might for some other businesses. You’re often selling something intangible. I can’t pick your coaching up and inspect it before I buy.
So I’m trying to make a judgment based on everything I can see.
Do you understand the problem I have?
Have you helped people like me before?
What do you believe about the problem I’m facing?
How do you work?
What have previous clients experienced?
Do I like the way you communicate?
Would I actually feel comfortable opening up to you?
Your website is helping answer those questions. So if it looks nice but contains very little of you, the person reading it still has a lot of work to do before they feel confident enquiring.
Good websites are made from hundreds of tiny decisions
I think this is one of the things that becomes almost invisible when you see a finished website. A really good site can look incredibly simple. But that simplicity usually comes from making LOADS of little decisions behind the scenes.
Should this section come before the testimonials?
Does that paragraph actually need to be there?
Which CTA makes sense at this point?
Would a potential client understand that offer name without another explanation?
Is this testimonial actually proving anything useful?
Do we need all three services here, or is the main one enough?
What information can disappear completely?
A lot of website design is choosing what not to include. And a lot of website strategy is understanding what somebody needs at different points in the page so they can move from “hmmm, interesting” to “yep, I want to know more”.
That’s the thinking I’d be very reluctant to skip just because a tool can technically build the page faster.
Where AI website builders CAN be useful
I don’t think AI website builders are automatically bad. There are plenty of situations where they make sense. If you’re right at the beginning of your business and simply need somewhere online, getting something live quickly might be far more important than having the perfect strategy. If you’re testing a new idea or building a temporary landing page, speed might be exactly what you need.
And AI can be genuinely useful behind the scenes too. It can help organise information, explore different page structures, summarise research or get you past the blank-page writers block stage.
I’d just be careful about assuming:
“AI built me a website”
automatically means:
“AI built me the right website.”
Those are very different things.
The more established your business becomes, the more specificity matters
If you already have clients, proof, years of experience + a clear body of work behind you, there’s a lot more for your website to communicate. At that stage, you don’t need a generic online presence. You need one that shows the depth that’s already there.
Your best proof
Your strongest opinions
The way you work
The things clients consistently value about you
The specific problems you’ve become very good at solving
The personality people experience when they hire you
That specificity is what helps somebody understand why your service is worth the investment. And it’s also what makes it much harder for someone to swap your name for another coach’s and barely notice the difference.
Cutting corners can have a cost
I completely understand why AI website builders are appealing. We all want things faster. We all want to spend less where we can. And if a tool can genuinely save you time without compromising something important, amazing!
But when your website is one of the places potential clients go to decide whether they trust you with a problem that matters to them, I’d be careful about cutting the corners that create the connection in the first place. A website that technically works but doesn’t communicate your value very well can still cost you if the right people keep landing on it and leaving without enquiring.
So the question I’d ask isn’t really:
Could AI build me a website?
Obviously it can.
I’d ask:
Will the finished website make it easier for the right person to understand why they should choose me?
That’s the part that matters!
Want a website that actually feels like your business?
If you’ve already built the experience, proof + client results and you want a website that communicates all of that properly, that’s what we do inside Web in a Week.
We work through your positioning, audience, offers + proof first, then I create the branding, write the copy and build you a completely new Squarespace website in one focused week.
So you still get the speed... just without skipping all the thinking that makes the finished website actually feel like YOU.
Work with me
→ Web in a Week - done-for-you positioning, branding, website copy + Squarespace design for when your online presence has fallen behind the level of your business.
→ Ongoing Marketing Partnership - long-term done-for-you strategic + creative support across content, email, website updates, launches + more, for when marketing keeps getting pushed aside.
