AI and Web Design in 2026: What's Changed and What Hasn't

AI and Web Design in 2026: What's Changed and What Hasn't

AI is reshaping web design, but probably not in the way you think. If you've been paying attention to the hype cycle, you've heard two opposite narratives. On one side: "AI will build websites in 30 seconds and designers are done." On the other: "AI-generated design is soulless garbage." Both are wrong, or rather, both are telling about a third of the truth.

The reality is messier and more interesting: AI is phenomenally good at automating the scaffolding (the boring parts), and completely inadequate at the architecture (the parts that matter). And understanding which is which is the single most important thing for your career if you're a designer, or for your wallet if you're building your own site and wondering whether to hire someone or do it yourself.

Let's separate the hype from what's actually happening.

What AI Is Genuinely Good At (And You Should Be Using)

Squarespace alone has rolled out over 20 AI-powered features in the past 18 months. Blueprint AI generates personalized website designs from 1.4 billion possible combinations, guided by brand personality settings: Professional, Playful, Sophisticated, Bold, Quirky. The Layout Switcher analyses your existing content and suggests alternative arrangements. The AI Content Generator writes first-draft copy for pages, blog posts, and emails. The AI Product Composer, Discount Composer, and FAQ Composer handle e-commerce grunt work. And Squarespace GPT lets you start building a site directly inside ChatGPT.

These tools are genuinely excellent at what they do: generating starting points, fast. A small business owner can build a functional website in a weekend instead of a month. That's not hype. That's a genuine shift in what's possible.

Beyond Squarespace, the landscape is vast. Wix's AI can generate an entire site from a chat conversation. Framer AI turns text prompts into wireframes. Adobe Firefly has captured about 29% of the AI image generation market and produces commercially safe imagery. Midjourney produces stunning visuals. GitHub Copilot and Cursor are writing code at a pace that would have been impossible three years ago. And ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude—these tools can help you think through design problems, structure content, write copy, debug code.

The genuinely useful pattern: use AI to handle the repetitive, low-judgment work. Write the first draft of a product description. Generate placeholder layouts. Create alt text suggestions. Resize images. These are the tasks that used to consume hours and took zero creative thought. AI is fantastic at them. And the time this frees up can go toward the things that actually matter.

The New Frontier: AIO (AI Optimisation)

There's something genuinely new happening that's more important than the obvious AI tools. It's called AIO, or AI Optimisation, and it's the practice of making your website visible not just to Google's traditional search algorithm but to AI-powered search and content tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's own AI Overviews.

Squarespace has just launched an AIO Scanner that monitors how your brand appears across these AI platforms and gives you a visibility score with optimization suggestions. This might sound niche. It isn't. This is potentially the most significant shift in how people discover content since SEO was coined in 1997.

The practical upshot: your site still needs to be well-structured with clear heading hierarchies, descriptive meta titles, and properly organized content. But now you also need to think about whether your content is the kind of thing an AI tool would want to cite or reference. Specific, authoritative, original. The AI tools are pulling from a wider range of sources than traditional search, and they're giving credit to the sites they cite. If your content is good enough for an AI Overview to mention, you get traffic. If it's generic regurgitation, you don't.

What AI Can't Do (And This Is Where It Gets Interesting)

Here's the counterintuitive truth about AI: it's astonishingly good at producing plausible design. It can generate a website that looks like a website. It can write copy that reads like copy. It can arrange elements in a layout that resembles a layout. And for a lot of use cases—a landing page, a placeholder site, a minimum viable web presence—that's perfectly adequate.

The problem is that "plausible" and "good" aren't the same thing. A website that looks like a website is not the same as a website that makes someone feel something, trust something, buy something, or remember something. And this is where AI consistently falls short.

Think about the best websites you've ever visited, the ones you actually remember. They almost certainly had a point of view. A personality. Something unexpected. Maybe the copy sounded like a real person talking rather than a marketing department broadcasting. Maybe the layout made a convention-breaking choice that worked perfectly. Maybe the colour palette had an edge to it. These are acts of judgment, taste, and creative courage. They're precisely the things AI struggles with.

AI can generate a hundred homepage layouts in ten seconds. It cannot tell you which one is right for your particular client, with your particular audience, at this particular moment in their brand story. That requires understanding context, reading between the lines of what a client is actually trying to achieve, knowing when they say "clean and modern" they really mean "I'm scared of looking unprofessional." That's not data processing. That's empathy.

Designer Michal Malewicz warned about this sharply: the bigger risk isn't AI replacing designers. It's that "people will lower their expectations of what design is." When you can generate a website in 30 seconds, it's tempting to accept what comes out. But accepting AI-generated mediocrity is the equivalent of eating ready meals when you could have a proper home-cooked dinner. It'll fill a hole. It won't be memorable. And over time, it erodes your sense of what a website can actually be.

The "Good Enough" Trap

This is the real danger, and it's more subtle than "AI will take your job." The danger is that AI will slowly lower the bar for what constitutes acceptable design. And clients, overwhelmed by the sheer ease of generating a site, will stop asking for anything better.

We're already seeing it. DIY site builders fire up Blueprint AI, get a perfectly serviceable website in twenty minutes, and think: "That'll do." And for some businesses—a simple informational site, a temporary landing page, a side project—it probably will do. No shame in that.

But for any business where the website is a primary revenue driver, where first impressions genuinely matter, where the difference between "fine" and "exceptional" is the difference between browsing and buying, "good enough" is a trap. It's like wearing a clean but forgettable outfit to a job interview. You won't get rejected for it. But you won't be remembered either.

The businesses that thrive online are the ones whose websites feel intentional. Where every choice—from the typeface and the spacing to the tone of voice and the speed at which the page loads—reflects a coherent vision. That coherence is something AI cannot produce. AI generates elements. Humans produce experiences.

The Gehry Lesson: Tools Don't Replace Vision

In the 1990s, architect Frank Gehry faced an impossible problem. His buildings had swooping curves and impossible geometries that traditional construction couldn't handle. Contractors' bids came back at double the budget. The software CATIA, built for designing fighter jets, changed everything. His team scanned their cardboard models, translated them into digital form, and suddenly they could describe every curve with precision contractors could work with. The result was the Guggenheim Bilbao, 33,000 unique titanium panels, each one impossible to describe without software but meaningless without a human who knew what they wanted to say.

This is the story of every transformative tool. It closes the gap between vision and execution, but it doesn't replace the vision.

The same dynamic is playing out with AI and web design right now. AI will not replace a designer who understands brand strategy, user psychology, accessibility, and the hundred small decisions that separate a website that converts from one that merely exists. But AI will replace designers whose only value proposition is "I know how to use Squarespace," because increasingly, everyone knows how to use Squarespace, or rather, AI knows how to use it for them.

If You're a Designer

The move is upward on the value chain. Stop selling website builds. Start selling strategy. Stop charging for how long something takes. Start charging for what it's worth. Use AI to handle the scaffolding (first-draft copy, placeholder layouts, repetitive code) and spend your freed-up time on the things AI can't touch: understanding the client's business, crafting a brand voice, designing for emotion and conversion, making the hundred tiny judgment calls that turn a website into a competitive advantage.

New services become viable in an AI world. AIO audits: helping clients optimize for AI platform visibility. Brand voice development: so AI-generated copy actually sounds like the client. AI-output quality control: reviewing and refining what the machines produce. Strategic consulting on when to use AI and when to override it and do something weirder and better.

The architects who thrived after CATIA weren't the ones who refused to learn it. They were the ones who learned it, used it to amplify their vision, and created buildings that wouldn't have been possible without it. They didn't become software engineers. They became more powerful architects. Same opportunity here.

If You're Building Your Own Site

AI is your new best friend, with a caveat. Use Blueprint AI to get started. Use the AI Content Generator for first drafts. Use the Layout Switcher when you're stuck. These tools are genuinely excellent at getting you from zero to something faster than ever before.

But don't stop there. The "something" that AI produces is a starting point, not a finished product. Read through the AI-generated copy and rewrite anything that sounds generic. Look at the suggested layout and ask: does this actually reflect my brand, or does it look like every other site in my industry? Check whether the colour palette, the typography, the tone of voice all feel like you, or like a statistical average of everyone who's ever built a website about what you do.

The businesses that stand out online in 2026 won't be the ones with the most AI-generated content. They'll be the ones where a human—whether that's you or a designer you've hired—has made deliberate, thoughtful, opinionated choices about what the website says and how it says it. AI can give you the ingredients. Only you can cook the meal.

The Practical Reality

Here's what's actually happening right now, at scale, in early 2026. Agencies and designers are using AI to move faster and charge smarter. They're building sites in half the time, using the freed-up capacity to serve more clients or go deeper with fewer. Small business owners are using Blueprint AI to get themselves online without hiring anyone, with mixed results. The results are serviceable for informational sites, weak for anything that needs to convert or differentiate.

Corporate design teams are using AI for the repetitive work (comp generation, copywriting, alt text, icon creation) and focusing their human effort on strategy and refinement. The sites that come out of this pipeline are often better than traditional agency work, not because the AI is so good, but because the humans have been freed up to actually think.

The ones falling behind are the ones pretending AI doesn't exist, or treating it as a threat rather than a tool. They're competing on speed and cost against software that's faster and cheaper. That was never a winnable game.

The Direction of Travel

AI will keep getting better at the boring parts. Generating layouts. Writing copy. Creating images. Suggesting accessibility fixes. Within a year or two, you probably won't hire a designer to create a website architecture—you'll prompt an AI. What you'll hire a designer for is to make a website that actually moves people, that reflects your specific brand, that converts better than the template, that looks like nothing else in your category.

Squarespace will integrate more AI features. So will WordPress, Wix, Webflow, and every other platform. The baseline will rise. Building a site won't require technical knowledge. But building a great site will require clarity about who you are and what you want your site to say. That clarity can't be generated. It has to be thought through, by a human, usually in conversation with another human who understands how to translate clarity into design.

The job isn't changing. The job is changing. The parts that were busywork are being automated away. The parts that require thinking, judgment, taste, and empathy are becoming more valuable than ever. And the people who understand that, who adapt to it, who use AI as a tool to amplify their thinking rather than replace it, are the ones who'll be thriving five years from now.

What to Do Now

If you're building your own site: use Blueprint AI to get to something fast, then spend time making it yours. Rewrite the copy. Question every layout choice. Make sure the colour palette reflects your brand, not a statistical average. If you're a designer: start experimenting with AI tools, not to replace yourself but to create more capacity for the work that matters. If you're considering hiring someone: hire for judgment and strategy, not for software skill. The software part is increasingly table stakes.

And understand this: the AI tools available to you are changing monthly. By the time you finish reading this, there's a new feature or a new platform. The only constant is that they'll keep getting better at the scaffolding. What won't change is that humans still value human judgment, human creativity, human taste, and the feeling that someone actually cared about their specific situation.

CATIA didn't make architects obsolete. It made lazy architecture obsolete. The same is happening in web design right now. And honestly, it's long overdue.