The Rise of AI-Built Websites; Toupee Vibes Included

AI Site Builders

I'm building a new website, so this news caught my eye. WordPress.com launched a "free" AI-builder tool. This was interesting to me at first because I build all of my sites with WordPress. But then I realized it's tied to the WordPress.com ecosystem, not the self-hosted WordPress.org systems (I know it's a little confusing if you don't work in WordPress on a regular basis).

The AI tool allows you to tell WordPress what you want, and it puts together a site for you. GoDaddy offers a similar service with its Airo product. Airo is a free product with the purchase of a domain, so similar to WordPress' offering, it's technically free, but you have to pay for something else to get it.

GoDaddy Airo also has a tier that helps setup and run a business. If this was available 15 years ago when I was setting up my LLC, I might have tried it.

The concern with these AI-created websites is: Is it any good? I can't answer that right now, but my guess is it will still need some work after the site has been created.

There will be some basic templates that it uses as the foundation, and the content that is generated probably won't be that great. As we've seen over the past 2 1/2 years, AI systems get better with time. Anyone late to the party will have a long way to go to be able to produce content that is passable, let alone good.

My hope is that the Internet doesn't get flooded with these low-effort, low-cost, low-quality sites.

Does AI-Generated Content Hurt SEO?

Yes and no.

Google is telling people that AI-generated content isn't going to hurt SEO if the content is helpful, original, and relevant. But, Google won't promote your content unless it's helpful, original, and relevant. And it's hard to create original content when you're using AI that just remixes content that has already been created by someone else.

As SurferSEO reminds us, it costs Google money to crawl pages, so it's not going to be happy if it's crawling through all of the AI slop that comes from many of these systems.

So, are GoDaddy and WordPress setting up these new businesses for failure? If a small business is using automated systems like this, it's likely that they don't know much about marketing, copywriting, or design to do it on their own. Or they don't have the time. If the small business owner isn't taking the time to edit the content the AI systems are creating, Google probably won't promote their business. Which means, yes, GoDaddy and WordPress are setting these new businesses up for failure while selling more services.

Easy and cheap usually means it's not good. I don't know for sure that's the case with GoDaddy and WordPress' AI offerings, but I'm skeptical.

Disclosure: I registered my first domain with GoDaddy in 2002 and have used it for hosting my WordPress sites on and off over the years.

Remember: AI is like a bad toupee. Everyone can see it, even if you think they can't. And they're silently judging you if it's painfully obvious.

Thanks to Seth Goldstein for the tip on WordPress' AI offering.