Build a website with AI.

AI generators are now reliably good at turning a short description into a complete, responsive and visually coherent website within minutes — colour scheme, section layout, image selection and filler copy included. That is no small achievement. What used to need a concept meeting, a design round and a copy loop now sits on the screen before the coffee goes cold.

What works well in practice: the basic design, meaning typography, spacing and a consistent palette. The rendering on mobile, because the underlying templates are built for it. A first draft of the copy that is good enough to argue about. Imagery for areas where real photographs do not matter. And the standard shape of a page: hero, services, reference block, contact.

The biggest benefit is not the finished product but the draft. Show an agency or your own team three generated variants and you save an entire round of alignment — nobody debates ideas any more, everybody debates screens. We use generated drafts in exactly that way; more on this further down.

One use stays underrated. A generator is a good instrument for testing an idea before any money moves. If nobody fills in the form on a quickly assembled page, a more expensive version will not change that. For the systematic version of the same thought we build prototypes for idea validation from CHF 10'000 — but the free pre-test that comes first is legitimate and right.

Generated websites rarely fail on looks and almost always fail in five places: information architecture, SEO basics, legal texts, distinctiveness and maintainability. These five turn up whatever the provider, because they do not follow from the design. They follow from the business behind it — and the model does not know that business.

• Information architecture. A generator builds what you describe. It does not ask whether your four services need four separate pages because they serve four different searches, or whether they belong in one section. The result is often one long home page that touches everything once, and not a single page that answers a concrete question in full.
• SEO basics. Titles and descriptions come out of the same template set and repeat across subpages. Heading levels get handed out for visual reasons rather than structural ones. Internal linking does not happen at all, because the model has no idea which of your pages should point at each other.
• Legal texts. Privacy policy and provider identification are generated from patterns that belong to the language area of the training data — for German-language content, usually Germany. They then describe duties and legal bases that do not fit a Swiss business, and above all they do not describe what your website actually processes.
• Distinctiveness. Generated copy is linguistically correct and substantively interchangeable. It offers adjectives instead of numbers, promises instead of processes, "tailored solutions" instead of the one statement that is true only of your business. That one statement is exactly what sells an offer — and what a language model might later quote from your page.
• Maintainability. The site is finished for as long as nobody changes anything. The first real test is the first rebuild: a new service, a second location, a French version. That is when you find out whether the structure grows with you or whether everything has to be generated again.

None of these points is an argument against AI. They are an argument for treating the generated state as what it is: a starting point.

SEO basics are not a setting you switch on but a handful of concrete decisions: one URL per search intent, a distinct title and description for every page, exactly one H1, a clean heading hierarchy, internal links inside the running text, structured data, and a sitemap that reflects the pages that really exist. None of that costs budget. It costs attention — and attention is precisely what a generator cannot supply, because it does not know the search demand in your market.

The most common and most expensive mistake is the single long page serving many intents. Handle "driving school Zurich", "first-aid course" and "prices" on one URL and you compete, for each of those searches, against providers who devote a full page to it. The second recurring pattern is duplicate snippets: identical or near-identical titles across several subpages. On our own website we check this with an automated gate that blocks exact and near-identical titles and descriptions site-wide — because otherwise this error creeps in unnoticed.

Then there is the machine-readable layer. Structured data as JSON-LD tells a search engine unambiguously who the provider is, which service is described and where the business sits. Without that mapping, a system has to guess. Speed is equally un-automatic: the Core Web Vitals depend on how much script and image weight a template carries, and generic templates typically carry more than any single page needs.

If you take one thing from this section: after generating, check whether each of your pages answers, in full, a question somebody actually asks. What that work looks like systematically is described under ongoing SEO; the technical half of it sits in our article on technical SEO, PageSpeed and structured data.

Legal texts are where generated websites are most often factually wrong, because a model produces a template that matches the language area of its training data — and for German-language content that is predominantly Germany, not Switzerland. Two points affect virtually every Swiss company website.

First, provider identification. Switzerland has no general duty to publish an imprint in the way Germany does. Article 3 paragraph 1 lit. s of the Federal Act against Unfair Competition does, however, require anyone offering goods, works or services in electronic commerce to state their identity and contact address clearly, including an email address. The term is read broadly and catches considerably more websites than the word "online shop" suggests.

Second, the privacy policy. Since the revised Data Protection Act, practically every website needs its own policy satisfying the duty to inform under Article 19 FADP. "Its own" is meant literally: it has to describe which data this website collects — contact form, analytics tool, embedded fonts, maps, video player, booking system — where that data is processed and who receives it. A generated standard policy instead lists whatever the template assumed. At best that is incomplete; at worst it is an untrue statement made to your customers.

A third point often gets overlooked: accessibility. In Switzerland the Disability Discrimination Act binds public bodies in the first place; private companies are not generally covered. In practice, though, more and more tenders and larger clients demand compliance with the WCAG criteria, and those cover things a template does not bring along: contrast ratios, keyboard operability, alt text, a sensible focus order. We have set this out in our guide to accessible web design. What stands here is an orientation and not legal advice — where you are unsure, the text belongs in front of a lawyer, not in front of a prompt.

A builder is enough when the website mainly has to exist, and it is not enough when the website has to earn something. That distinction carries further than any feature comparison, because it concerns your situation rather than the tool list.

A builder is usually enough when: your customers arrive through referral, passing trade or a platform anyway, and the website only has to confirm that you exist. When you are presenting a project or an association with no competition for search queries. When you are testing an idea before investing. When you are under time pressure and need something presentable, with the proper version planned for later. When the total budget is smaller than the entry price for a custom-built website.

A builder is usually not enough when: your enquiries really do come through search and a competitor answers the same question better. When you have several services or locations that each need their own page. When your website has to calculate, configure or connect to an existing system. When you work in several languages and the language versions have to be marked up correctly. When a single won enquiry is worth more than the difference between the two routes.

The most honest test is a single question: what does it cost your business if this website is not found for three months? If the answer is "nothing worth mentioning", take the builder and put the money into your offer instead. If the answer runs into four figures, the discussion about tools is over. For smaller businesses we have described the middle path under web design from CHF 3'000; the numbers behind it sit in the article on website costs in Switzerland.

The most expensive property of a website does not show at launch but at the first serious rebuild — and there it comes down to who owns the content and how easily it can be taken elsewhere. These questions should be answered before launch, not after.

• Who owns the domain? It should be registered to your company, not to the provider or an agency. This is the one position that cannot be repaired later if the relationship ends.
• How does the content get out? Before you build, check whether an export exists and what it contains. Copy and images can almost always be taken along; layout and template blocks almost never, because they are bound to the system.
• Where is the data processed? For form submissions and analytics the processing location matters, because it has to appear in your privacy policy and because disclosure abroad triggers additional requirements.
• What happens on a price change? A builder is a subscription. If the price rises or the feature set changes, the cost of moving is your negotiating room — and that room shrinks the more tightly the site is bound to the system.
• Who edits the content day to day? That decides the choice of editing system. We explain the differences in the glossary entry on the CMS and in the comparison headless CMS versus WordPress.

If you are planning the move for later, know the sequence. The critical part is not the rebuild but the redirect list: every old URL with visits or inbound links needs a 301 redirect to its new counterpart. The full order of operations sits in our relaunch checklist.

We use AI across the whole production path, but strictly as an accelerator before the decision — never as a replacement for concept, code and review. That is not a matter of principle but of experience: anything that runs unchecked from a model into a project comes back later as a correction, and corrections cost more than careful work.

What gets accelerated here: research into market, search demand and competitors; structure and outline proposals, which are then checked against real search data; first drafts of copy, which are edited and have their claims replaced with figures we can support; image variants for drafts; code generation in clearly bounded modules that go through review and tests; and translation drafts that a language-competent person reworks.

What stays human: the information architecture, meaning which pages exist and which question each one answers. The substance, meaning the numbers, processes and limits that can only come out of the business. The technical build in Next.js and TypeScript against our own performance budget. The structured data. The clarification of legal texts. And quality assurance before going live.

How you can check this: the website you are reading contains tools no generator produces — a project calculator, a configurator and an SEO check. Delivered client projects sit under work. What we do not do: ship a generated page unchanged under our name. How the job description shifts because of all this is set out in our article on AI in web development.

There are three starting positions in which a builder is the right decision and a commission to us is the wrong one — and we say so in the first conversation, even when it costs us the job.

First: the entire budget for the digital presence sits below the entry price for a custom-built website. Then the money is better spent on imagery, on a well-kept Google Business Profile and on content than on a more expensive shell. For local businesses a properly maintained business profile almost always brings more enquiries in the short term than any website investment; how to do that is in our guide to the Google Business Profile.

Second: it is not yet clear whether the offer holds. Then the fastest route to an answer is a lean page and an advertising budget, not a development project. In such cases we would rather build a prototype for idea validation from CHF 10'000 than a complete website that expensively elaborates an untested assumption.

Third: there is nobody internally to look after content. A custom-built website with a good editing system is worthless if nobody writes in it. Then either a simpler system is right or ongoing support is needed — and that decision belongs before the build, not after it. Two adjacent questions have pages of their own: AI automation for SMEs and chatbot development.