How new AI tools are making website building accessible for all, and exploring which ones are the best fit for your specific needs.
Over the past several years, AI has begun to lower the barrier to website creation for people worldwide in palpable ways. In previous decades, building a professional website would have required either a large budget or a degree of technical expertise that was, frankly, uncommon. Trying to circumvent these necessities in the past often led to lackluster outcomes, because building a website is substantially more complicated than you might think. However, thanks to new AI tools, this process has been drastically simplified, putting the power back in the hands of business owners.
These tools include the ability to generate complete HTML and CSS files from a plain-language description, as well as platforms that ensure your site is prepped and ready to be recognized and further recommended by AI-powered search engines. With these advanced tools at their disposal, entrepreneurs and small business owners can build, deploy, and optimize a web presence faster and more efficiently than ever before. The key, however, experts say, is knowing which tools to use and how to use them responsibly.
How AI Helps Non-Technical Founders Build
The most immediate use case for AI in web development is simple: building the site itself. Instead of hiring a developer or learning the ins and outs of the complicated process themselves, business owners can now turn to large language models like Claude and ChatGPT to generate working website code from a description alone.
Mike Michaels, founder of M41 Strategies, has built his consultancy around exactly this approach. The team utilizes AI chatbots to generate simple static websites (HTML/CSS) for free, bypassing expensive platforms and designers.
He details, “You don’t need to pay for a subscription. If you’re just like a small company and you need a three-page website, you can go to Claude and say, ‘I need a website,’ and it’ll make you the files. Then you take those files and put them on a web server.”
This same methodology applies to the actual hosting of the website as well, which M41 frequently outsources to AI tools.
Michaels explains, “I use Cloudflare Pages; it’s just free hosting. You can take a screenshot of the dashboard, put it into the AI, and say, ‘I am trying to put this site on Cloudflare Pages. What do I click on?’ And then it’ll look at the screenshot and tell you exactly the steps.”
Furthermore, the company treats the AI as a conversational partner, not a search engine. “You haven’t built the site. You talk with it. Maybe you don’t like the top or the bottom. You don’t like the colors. It’ll change it for you.” This enables rapid, iterative design changes, from colors to fonts to layouts, and allows the AI to ask clarifying questions.
The Rise of the Non-Technical Builder
These new AI tools have enabled an entirely new segment of the populace to begin coding effectively, in a manner very different from how professionals and tech experts have been coding for decades.
Natalie Lambert, founder and managing partner of GenEdge, refers to what this new generation is doing as “vibe coding,” a term coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy to describe the practice of building software by describing what you want in plain language.
She explains, “The idea of vibe coding is that ability to express what you want and have it built. And the more detailed you can be, the better it is. I have vibe-coded probably 20 or 30 different applications at this point.”
Lambert also points out how efficient this kind of website-building can be, especially for independent business owners.
“I have a solopreneur who came to take the class, and she had just gone out to multiple agencies to do an RFP on a small website she needed, and she was quoted $15,000 for this website. She built the entire thing, and more, in my $800 class. And just my weekly task of posting a blog went from 45 minutes to about 30 seconds.”
While some people are understandably apprehensive about new tools, Lambert implores her clients to look past surface-level concerns and explore the possibilities they offer.
“A lot of people worry that AI is cheating and they feel that they won’t be respected. My belief on that is it’s a productivity tool. It’s an efficiency tool. You still need to be putting your ideas in there. You can’t outsource your thinking to it. If you are putting in the work and using these tools, it is an efficiency scaler and one that we all should be using.”
Lambert emphasizes, though, that these tools still require human input, review, and oversight to deliver reliable results.
The Challenge of AEO
Once a site is built, it needs to be found not just by human visitors but increasingly by AI agents powering tools like ChatGPT and Google.
That is the challenge Michael Shaskey, founder and CPO of Klove, is solving with a new discipline called Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO).
“AI obviously understands code, but it’s effectively noise for them. When they visit a page, they don’t want to see JavaScript code or all this styling. They’re trying to get the answer quickly. And if they hit a page and see what’s effectively a mess, they’re just going to leave and go elsewhere,” Shaskey says.
AI search is growing roughly 20 times year over year, and traditional websites were never designed for how AI bots retrieve information. Bloated JavaScript and CSS act as noise, slowing extraction, and agents that cannot quickly find an answer will simply abandon the page.
That’s where Klove can make a difference, according to Shaskey. “On Klove, you can build agentic pages; parallel versions of your website that are stripped back. We remove all styling, images, and JavaScript, and pull it back to the basic structure optimized for information retrieval. The typical page we build is around two to four percent the size of a normal modern web page, and they load at about six milliseconds, whereas your typical page can take up to three, four, or five seconds to load.”
Klove builds “agentic pages,” while also tracking AI rankings, monitoring competitors, and surfacing content strategy recommendations. “We’re seeing around a 20 times multiplier on search year on year right now, that’s being moved to AI as opposed to the likes of Google search and Bing. SEO is absolutely still the foundation of good AEO. If you don’t have the right page structure or a great SEO strategy, it’s going to make it a lot more difficult for you to be optimized for AEO. This is just an extension of SEO, but a fast-growing and soon-to-be massive one.”
AI Is Democratizing the Web
From first-time founders building sites with a few prompts to established businesses rethinking how their content reaches AI-powered search engines, today’s tools have made a professional web presence achievable for nearly anyone. Across every use case, the most effective approach boils down to a consistent principle: start with a clear goal, use AI to accelerate the work, and keep a human in the loop to catch what automation misses.
