Have you noticed that a lot of websites look the same lately? Not kind of similar. The same.
The same soft color fade behind the headline. The same tiny label sitting above it in small capital letters. The same row of six boxes, each with a little icon and two lines of text. The same "Step 01, Step 02, Step 03." The same "Get Started" button showing up eight times on one page.
There's a reason for that. More and more websites are being designed and built by AI tools. You type in what your business does, and a few minutes later you have a website. It looks polished. It also looks exactly like the thousands of other websites that same tool made this week.
I see it every day, including where it shouldn't be
Once you see it, you can't unsee it. The part that really gets me is where I'm seeing it: on the websites of other agencies that sell web design. Their own websites. The ones that are supposed to show you what they can do.
I'm from Iowa, so I'll say this as nicely as I can. If an agency's own site looks like it came out of a chatbot, think hard about what yours is going to look like.
How to tell a website was put together by AI
You don't need a design degree to spot these. Once you know what to look for, they jump out:
- Emojis used as headings, or as the little icons next to each service.
- A small all-caps label sitting above nearly every headline.
- Those long dashes stuck in the middle of sentence after sentence.
- Rows of identical boxes where only one word changes, like twenty "locations" cards that all say the same thing with a different city name.
- Numbered steps on a page where there isn't really a process.
- Big claims like "trusted by businesses everywhere" with nothing to back them up.
- Sentences that sound nice but don't say anything, like "Elevate your brand. Empower your growth."
Why this matters for your business
Your website is often the first time a customer meets you. If it looks like every other site out there, they have no reason to remember you. People are also getting very good at spotting AI-made content, and when they spot it, a lot of them assume corners got cut somewhere else too.
There's a search side to this as well. Generic copy gives Google and AI tools like ChatGPT nothing specific about your business to point to. The more your site sounds like everyone else, the harder it is for anything, human or machine, to recommend you by name. And what looks fine on the surface can be a mess underneath. I cracked one open to show you what I mean.
The more your site sounds like everyone else, the harder it is for anyone to recommend you by name.
Where I stand
I have a BFA in Digital Arts & Multimedia Design, and when I was cutting my teeth as a junior designer, web design is where I started. I've been designing websites for almost 15 years.
I am not a template shop. I don't grab a theme, drop in your logo, and call it custom. AI doesn't design my websites. I do, and I code them by hand. I'm a human, and I will always be a human.
Here's what that looks like in practice. Every client gets their own fonts and their own layout, picked for their business and not recycled from the last one. Photos go where they earn a spot, not to fill space. No emoji headings. No cute gimmicks that make the design feel like a costume for your trade. And the words on the page come from you and your customers, smoothed out so they read like a real person wrote them, because one did.
If you're not sure whether your website has "the look," send it to me. I'll tell you honestly what I see.