I get asked about AI constantly. Business owners want to know if it’s going to replace people like me, whether they should just build their site with it, whether the content it writes is going to hurt them on Google. And a lot of them expect me to trash it — I’m the custom-build guy, after all.
But that’s not my honest answer. My honest answer is that AI is a genuinely useful tool that has made certain parts of my workflow faster. The problem isn’t AI itself. The problem is what happens when people treat a starting point as a finished product.
Where AI Actually Shines: Getting Unstuck
Here’s where I think AI earns its keep. You’re planning a website and you’re stuck. You don’t know what sections your homepage needs. You can’t picture what your “About” page should say. You’re staring at a blank page and the blank page is winning.
AI is excellent at breaking that freeze. Ask it for homepage layout concepts and you’ll get five solid structures in seconds. Ask it to draft taglines or headline ideas and you’ll walk away with options you can react to — even if your reaction is “no, none of these, but that one word in the third one gave me an idea.” That’s real value. I’ve used it exactly this way when I’m mapping out early concepts for a project.
Same with design directions. AI-generated mockups can help you figure out the mood you’re going for — modern versus warm, minimal versus bold — before anyone writes a line of code. As a jumpstart, that’s a win.
The Line Most People Cross
Here’s where it goes sideways. The person who was stuck yesterday now has AI-written homepage copy, an AI-generated header image, and AI-drafted service descriptions, and they’ve pasted all of it straight onto their website. Word for word. They feel done. They’re not — they’ve just published a rough draft that was never about their business at all.
AI doesn’t know your customers. It doesn’t know that half your clients find you through word of mouth in your town, that you’re the only shop in the area that offers a specific service, or that the number one question people ask you before hiring is whether you’re insured. It writes what’s generically true for a business like yours. Generic is exactly what your competitors’ sites already sound like — and generic does very little for you on Google.
When I build a site for a client, the copy starts with a real conversation about their actual customers. That’s the stuff that makes a website convert — specifics, not averages. AI can organize those specifics once you have them. It just can’t invent them for you.
What AI Gets Wrong About SEO (and Why It Matters)
This is the part that gives people the wrong impression. Ask AI about SEO and it will confidently hand you advice — some of it fine, some of it outdated, and some of it exactly the kind of thing Google has spent years learning to ignore or even penalize.
A few traps I see over and over:
- Keyword-stuffed writing. AI can produce content that repeats your target phrase in every other sentence. That hasn’t worked in years. Google reads it the way a human would — as unnatural and low quality.
- Volume over substance. There’s an idea floating around that publishing dozens of AI-written articles will boost your rankings. What actually helps is fewer pieces that answer real questions better than anyone else in your area.
- Generic answers to local questions. If you’re a local business, your advantage is your specificity — your town, your service area, your actual customers. AI’s output tends to wash all of that out.
- Confidently wrong advice. AI tools can state outdated SEO “rules” with total conviction, and if you don’t know the field, you can’t tell which recommendations are solid and which will waste your time.
The pattern: AI is optimistic about what works, because it learned from a internet full of advice that was already repeating itself. Your judgment — or the judgment of someone who does this for a living — is the filter.
The Workflow I’d Recommend
If you want to use AI on your website without getting burned, here’s the approach I’d suggest:
- Use it to generate options, not answers. Layouts, headlines, structure, first drafts. Treat everything it gives you as raw material.
- Rewrite in your own voice, with your own facts. Run your real customer questions through it, then edit hard until every sentence sounds like you and could only be about your business.
- Fact-check every claim. If it says something about SEO or your industry that you can’t verify, don’t publish it. Confident and wrong is still wrong.
- Get the technical foundation right regardless. No amount of content — AI-written or human-written — saves a site that’s slow, broken on mobile, or missing basic SEO structure. That foundation is still the part worth doing properly.
So, Good or Bad?
Neither, honestly. It’s a power tool. In the hands of someone who knows what they’re building, it speeds up real work. In the hands of someone who just wants a website to exist, it produces the generic shells I end up rebuilding later — and I’ve written about exactly that before.
The businesses that come out ahead are the ones that use AI to think faster and then do the work of making things their own. Your customers hire you because you’re specific to what you do. Your website should sound like it too.
If you’re sorting out how AI fits into your site — or you’ve got AI-generated content and want an honest read on whether it’s helping or hurting — give me a call at 603-973-4094 or visit apexdesignservices.com. Happy to give you a straight answer, no strings attached.
