Why AI-built websites all look the same
You’ve probably noticed it without being able to name it. A lot of new sites look identical now. Same soft gradient behind the hero, same centered headline in the same rounded font, a row of three little cards with icons, a photo of a “team” that’s obviously stock. It’s clean. It’s competent. And you’ll forget it thirty seconds later.
That’s the AI-builder look, and the problem isn’t that it’s ugly. It’s that it looks like every other business that used the same tool. When your site looks templated, it quietly tells people your business is templated too. Interchangeable with the next result down the page.
Good design makes a site feel like it belongs to you and not to a theme gallery. You can’t bolt that on at the end, and it doesn’t take a big budget or an art degree, just a few deliberate choices instead of the defaults.
A few tells I’d fix first:
The stock photos. A grinning headset call-center woman does not make your roofing company look bigger. It makes it look fake. One real photo of your actual work beats ten polished ones of people who don’t work there.
Everything centered and evenly weighted. When every element shouts equally, none of them land. Most of good design is just deciding what matters most, letting it be bigger, and getting everything else out of the way.
The default everything. Default font, default blue links, default spacing. Nothing wrong with any of it. It’s just anonymous. Pick a typeface with some character, give things room to breathe, and the small choices add up to “a person made this on purpose.”
None of this is about winning design awards. The bar is lower and more useful than that: a site that looks like a real business made real decisions. That alone puts you ahead of most of what’s shipping right now, because most of it is coming out of the same three tools.
If you want to see the difference, my work is all hand-built, no templates, each one made to look like the business it’s for. And if you’re eyeing your own site wondering whether it’s the slop version, two related notes: why it might not be getting you leads and whether you need a rebuild or just a fix.