In this Article:
- The Case for Nuance
- Design Implications of AI-Generated Websites
- SEO Implications of AI-Written Content
- AI and Web Development For New Zealand Businesses: The Solution
Have you recently considered getting a new website, or refreshing your existing one? If so, it’s almost a given that you’d have investigated using an AI-assisted website builder. Maybe you’ve even thought of going for a completely AI generated website. No judgement – for better or worse, it’s a reality now. Most of us are interacting with AI on some level almost every day.
But what does this mean for web development? Is AI a truly effective way to build a sustainable website? Or are we trading longevity for speed, and best-practice for a quick fix? Is a seemingly low-cost solution actually meeting your needs, or are there longer-term costs that you should consider?
The case for nuance
It would be a foolish quest if we were to write off the usefulness of AI in 2026. Failure to make use of its strengths would be akin to bringing a knife to a gunfight. I personally use AI tools almost on the daily – to research, to troubleshoot, even to generate some code. But without careful handling by an experienced operator in the relevant sector, AI’s strengths become its greatest weaknesses – a scattergun in the hands of an untrained operator, instead of a precision tool in the hands of a sniper. Nuance, understanding, and careful handling are essential to ensure handing your web design project over to AI doesn’t have disastrous consequences down the track.
Design Implications Of AI-Generated Websites
The Longevity Pitfall of AI-Generated Code
“Code” you ask? “But I don’t want anything to do with code! It’s just a basic AI-assisted drag-and-drop website builder so I can be online next week!”
Anytime you interact with a device, be it your phone, laptop, TV, or even your digital watch, you’re interacting with code. Web browsers are just software that make that code visually appealing and understandable to humans, and website building software is just the other end of the same equation – humans generating code in a visual and understandable way. Even if you’re not directly writing the code itself, that design software must generate it in a clean, orderly, and quality manner.
Well established web design software – WordPress for example – has countless thousands of human hours behind it. It is well developed and documented, and as such, the code it generates can be reliably understood and if necessary, repaired.
Rapidly generated AI code however, simply does not have the same reliability factor. AI models learn off human created code (including bad code), which it gathers by crawling forums, Reddit threads, GitHub repos, Stack Overflow answers, and other online knowledge bases, and then replicates the most-likely answer to your solution – but it does not provide the quality assurance that a human developer does, meticulously checking each line to make sure there aren’t errors.
While a few small errors might not have a noticeable effect on the front-end of a basic small website, as you grow and expand, these errors will compound in the backend. When something inevitably goes wrong, it can be a complete disaster. Because AI generates the code from literally thousands of sources, it could be almost impossible to discover where the critical errors are, leaving you with a broken site, and no way to repair it. 1
Maintaining Design Quality Over Time
In order to future-proof a website, it must be built in a consistent, well documented manner by an experienced developer or team, regardless of whether or not AI is integrated into the process.
You might have heard of ‘vibe coding’ – a term coined in early 2025. Vibe coding is the concept of developing a program, website, app, etc, by describing the ‘vibe’ that you’re going for to an AI model, which then generates the code, and in turn the final product. This can and does produce some good-looking results, but due to the lack of logical design flow and quality assurance, simply describing a visual outcome to AI cannot be relied upon to create a stable or durable product.
Even the guy who coined the term, Andrej Kaparthy, an AI software engineer who co-founded OpenAI and has worked for the likes of Tesla AI, said of vibe-coding, “The code grows beyond my usual comprehension…It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects…”. In effect, it’s a great way to play around with ideas for proof-of-concept, but not really an effective way to develop a stable, logical, maintainable end result.2
Most AI Website Generators are more-or-less just vibe coding software when it comes down to reality. They might produce something quite good looking. Under the hood, however, they can’t be depended upon to create a sustainable, future-proof website design.
SEO Implications OF AI-Written COntent
Thin AI Content will harm your Search Engine Rankings
Back in the day, SEO consisted of writing content for robots. If you wrote an article that the robots linked to the relevant keywords, they’d deliver it to the humans searching for those keywords, even if the article wasn’t particularly helpful. Ironically in the age of AI, writing articles for robots doesn’t work anymore. Search engines, and especially Google, now rank content that is actually useful to the human reader. Actually answering the relevant question is far more important than getting your keyword in enough times. Google’s Helpful Content systems reward depth and experience – human-refined AI content is a great hybrid partnership, but pure AI drafts often lack the nuance.
Full disclosure, AI is a great tool to help with writing SEO friendly content. Heck, I’m using AI to research this article. But it is absolutely non-negotiable that SEO practices in 2026 are human-centric. 10 years ago, probably even more recently, if today’s AI Language Models were around then, I could have asked it to generate this article without my input, stuffed with relevant keywords, and it probably would have great results. Not so today – solely AI generated content is generally far too thin to be considered ‘helpful’ by search engines.
That’s not to say that search engines actively penalize AI written content, but as a general rule, an article that a human put effort into researching will be considered far more authoritative. An AI generated article is more likely to be considered ‘low effort’ content, as the AI model simply compiled data (possibly including false information) from multiple sources, and then output the most likely answer. It might get it right, or it might not. A well-researched article, properly referenced, well-written, and showing authoritative experience on the relevant topic is much more likely to be considered ‘helpful content’ by a search engine, and thus ranked higher than its 100% AI counterpart. 3
Robotic, low-quality AI content carries serious SEO penalization risk
Let’s use music as an example – and no shade to your musical tastes, IT’S JUST AN EXAMPLE 😉
You’ve heard the polished, over-produced pop songs that dominate radio airplay these days. Catchy, clean, easy to listen to. And then a few months later – gone. These tracks have one goal – spam the airwaves and manipulate the charts. Massive #1 for a couple of weeks, gone the next.
SEO used to be a bit like that. Like I mentioned earlier, this method used to work well, and todays AI tools would have worked magic. Sleek, polished websites that look fantastic, with over-produced content, but kinda lacking in depth, soul, and any sort of quality for longevity.
Effective SEO today is more like a classic stadium rock anthem. Timeless, full of genuine soul and creativity. Authoritative musical experience. People still go to see the band play live even though they’ve not charted or released new music for a decade or more. It’s quality stuff that lasts the test of time.
AI content that has not been paired with an experienced human touch, will most likely be low-quality, robotic sounding ‘slop’. Content solely written with the intent of manipulating search engines. Search Engines will, more likely than not, flag this content as spammy. Perhaps, you might get some traction from it, but ultimately, you’re going to lose out. Content that has been well researched and well written will overtake you eventually. Cutting corners at the beginning of the process puts you at risk of penalization for low-quality content in the long run.
AI and Web Development For New Zealand Businesses: The Solution
The temptation is real. For little to no cost, your small business website could be online by next week with an AI Website Generator. And sure, if you’re after something basic, with no need for future expansion, that might just work for you.
For most businesses however, inbuilt growth potential is absolutely necessary. Save yourself pain and unnecessary cost down the road by ensuring that your website is well-built and future proofed.
Ensure that there is a human element to your website so that the code is logical and easily repairable when necessary, and your content is helpful, human, and doesn’t risk being penalized for being too thin or robotic.
If you need help, check out our web design packages. And if you really do need something on the cheap with a quick turnaround, check out our Rangitoto package. It’s basic, but it’s well built, and we know how to expand and grow it if necessary 😊
