Should AI Update Your Website

When AI can help with website content and design, and when your business still needs professional expertise.

It is becoming remarkably easy to make changes to your own website. You can ask ChatGPT or Claude to rewrite a service page, get Gemini to suggest ways to improve your homepage, upload a screenshot and ask an AI agent what it thinks of the design, or use one of the growing number of AI tools built directly into website platforms.

For a small-business owner, that can be incredibly useful. Something that once meant contacting a web designer or paying for professional SEO services can sometimes be investigated in a conversation with AI over a cup of coffee. Personally, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

I use AI extensively in my own work. It can make research faster, help explore different solutions, analyse information and occasionally spot something I haven’t. Used properly, it is an extraordinarily useful tool. But there is a fairly important phrase in that sentence: used properly.

AI can give you an answer remarkably quickly. What it can’t guarantee is that it has been given enough information to give you the right one. And when you are changing an existing business website, that distinction matters.

AI doesn’t know what you haven’t told it

Imagine copying the content from one of your service pages into an AI tool and asking:

“Can you optimise this page for SEO?”

Within seconds, you will probably receive a rewritten version. It may have better headings, additional keywords, new sections and a much more enthusiastic call to action. It may look considerably more “optimised”. But what does the AI actually know about that page?

Unless you have provided the information, it doesn’t know which searches already bring people to it. It doesn’t know whether its suggested topic is already covered by another page on your website. It doesn’t know which internal links are important, whether the page has recently been changed or whether it already generates some of your best enquiries. It may not even know that the supposedly under-optimised page is sitting near the top of Google for one of your most valuable searches.

AI hasn’t necessarily given you bad advice. It has answered the question using the information it had available. The problem is that you may not know which information was missing.

That, for me, is one of the biggest differences between using AI yourself and using someone with professional experience. The value isn’t simply knowing how to make the change. Increasingly, AI can help almost anybody do that.

The expertise lies in knowing what should be checked before the change is made.

Could AI rewrite your website content?

Absolutely. In fact, content is probably one of the most obvious ways small businesses can use AI.

If you have written a paragraph that doesn’t quite make sense, AI can help you clarify it. It can suggest headings, help organise a complicated explanation and show you several ways of saying something more simply. It can also be very useful when you’re staring at a blank screen thinking, “I know what I do, but I have absolutely no idea how to explain it.”

Where I become more cautious is when AI moves from helping you express your expertise to replacing it.

Generic input tends to produce generic content. Ask an AI to “write a page about person-centred counselling” or “write an SEO-friendly article about tax returns for an accountant” and it can produce something perfectly competent. The problem is that thousands of other businesses can ask exactly the same question. The useful information is often the material AI doesn’t know until somebody provides it: how you actually work, what customers ask you, what you do differently, the mistakes you regularly see, the decisions you make and the experience you have accumulated from doing the job.

AI can help shape that information. It shouldn’t be allowed to quietly replace it with 800 words that sound impressive but could belong to anybody.

What about asking AI to improve your website design?

This is another area where AI is becoming genuinely useful.

Show an AI a screenshot and it can comment on spacing, colours, headings, buttons, layout and visual hierarchy. Depending on the tools you are using, AI may even be able to make some of those changes for you. Again, some of its suggestions may be excellent. But design advice has exactly the same context problem. Suppose AI tells you that your homepage contains too much text and would look cleaner if you removed half of it. Maybe it’s right.

But is some of that content bringing visitors to the website through search? Does it answer questions customers regularly ask before contacting you? Does removing it make the page prettier while making the business harder to understand? Or perhaps it recommends making a particular button more prominent. That sounds sensible too, but do you know whether visitors are already using it? Is that actually the action you most want them to take?

Good web design isn’t simply arranging attractive things on a screen. A business website has a job to do. Design decisions should support that job.

A change can look successful before you know whether it was

This is particularly important with SEO.

If AI rewrites a page today, you can look at the new version immediately. The wording may sound better, the headings may appear clearer and everything can seem perfectly successful.

That doesn’t tell you what will happen in search.

Search engines need time to discover and process changes. Performance also fluctuates for many reasons, which makes it dangerous to assume that something improved or declined simply because a website change happened shortly beforehand.

That is one reason I don’t like making substantial changes to several important elements at once. If you rewrite the content, change the headings, alter the page structure and move internal links at the same time, what do you learn afterwards? So, if performance improves, you don’t really know which change helped. And, if it declines, you don’t know which decision caused the problem.

AI makes it extraordinarily easy to change things. Professional judgement sometimes means deciding not to change them yet.

“Make this better” isn’t really enough information

This is where using AI well becomes much more interesting.

Instead of asking it to improve a page in isolation, imagine being able to give it information about the searches that currently trigger the page, its historical performance, the purpose of the page, the audience, related pages elsewhere on the website and the business outcome you are trying to achieve.

Now the conversation becomes much more useful.

You are no longer simply asking AI to produce something different. You are asking it to help investigate a problem. There is still a human decision at the end of that process, but the quality of the AI’s contribution has improved because the quality of the context has improved.

This is one of the reasons I don’t see AI as a replacement for professional SEO or web design.

I see it as a tool that can make knowledgeable people considerably more capable.

Google doesn’t ask you to make every page look “optimised”

There is a tendency with AI tools to keep improving things because they can always suggest another improvement. Another heading could be added. A sentence could be rewritten. A keyword could appear somewhere else. Another section might make the page more comprehensive.

Eventually, you can end up improving the life out of something that was perfectly good to begin with!

Google’s own guidance takes a broader view. Its page experience guidance encourages website owners to consider the overall experience rather than concentrating on one or two individual signals. That is a useful principle beyond SEO too.

A website should work for the people using it. It should be understandable, accessible, trustworthy and technically sound. People should be able to find what they need and take the next step without fighting with the website.

A page doesn’t become better simply because an AI has found more things to change.

AI can be very convincing when it is wrong

This is probably the bit that worries people most, although I think the problem is sometimes misunderstood. AI doesn’t have to produce complete nonsense to cause problems, it’s the more difficult mistakes are the plausible ones.

A recommendation can sound completely reasonable. The explanation can be confident. It may use exactly the terminology you would expect from an SEO specialist, web designer or developer. And it can still be wrong for your particular website.

I’ve experienced this myself while using AI professionally. Sometimes a recommendation looks sensible until I compare it with the actual website, search data or previous work. Once the missing evidence is introduced, the sensible recommendation stops being sensible.

That isn’t a reason not to use AI. It is a reason not to confuse confidence with evidence.

Your website doesn’t exist one page at a time

This is particularly important when making SEO changes. You might ask AI to optimise your homepage, then your first service page, followed by your second service page. Each conversation can produce a perfectly reasonable answer when considered on its own. The problems can appear when you put everything back together.

Perhaps several pages now target essentially the same search intent. Maybe the homepage and a service page are competing to explain the same thing. You might create new content that duplicates an article already performing well. A website is a connected system.

That is why, when I work on SEO, I don’t want to consider an important page entirely in isolation. I want to understand its role within the wider website and what is already performing before deciding what needs changing.

The same principle applies to AI-readable content. As I explain in What Makes a Website AI-Readable?, clear content and a sensible site structure help both people and machines understand what a business actually does. Adding more AI-generated content isn’t necessarily the answer.

Sometimes clarity comes from removing, consolidating or simply leaving things alone.

When is it reasonable to make the changes yourself?

There are plenty of occasions when I wouldn’t suggest paying a professional. If you need to correct an outdated opening time, replace a photograph, change a staff biography or improve a slightly awkward paragraph, using AI to help you may be entirely sensible. The stakes are fairly low and the change is easy to understand.

You may also become very capable at managing your own website. Small-business owners often know far more about their websites than they give themselves credit for, particularly after several years of working with them. AI can make that independence easier.

I would simply become more cautious as the consequences of getting the decision wrong increase.

• Rewriting an important page that already performs well deserves more thought than fixing a typo.

• Changing URLs is different from changing a sentence.

• Restructuring navigation is different from replacing a photograph.

• Publishing twenty AI-generated location pages is different from asking AI to help improve the wording of one genuine service page.

The question isn’t really “Can AI do this?” It is “What happens if this advice is wrong?”

When does professional help make more sense?

I would consider professional input when you don’t know what the underlying problem is. Perhaps traffic has fallen and you don’t know why. Maybe the website receives visitors but very few enquiries. You might be planning a substantial redesign, changing important content or trying to improve search performance without knowing which pages already have value.

Those situations need diagnosis before implementation. They may involve search data, technical issues, content, design, conversion, competitors or several things interacting at once. That doesn’t mean the professional needs to disappear into a darkened room and perform mysterious tasks that AI could never understand.

Quite the opposite.

A good professional should be using the best tools available, including AI where it genuinely improves the work. What you are paying for is the ability to decide which information matters, what the evidence supports and what should happen next.

If you’re choosing somebody to help with that work, my guide to choosing the right small business web designer explains some of the questions worth asking before handing over your website.

Perhaps the real choice isn’t AI or a professional

I suspect this distinction will become increasingly important. The choice isn’t necessarily between doing everything yourself with AI and paying somebody to do everything manually.

There is an increasingly useful middle ground.

Business owners can use AI for the things it does well. Professionals can use it to research faster, analyse more information, explore alternatives and reduce repetitive work. Both can save time.

The difference is who is responsible for the judgement.

For my own work, AI is another tool in the process. It doesn’t get the final say simply because it produced an answer quickly. I still want to know what a page is supposed to achieve, what the available evidence tells me, what else on the website might be affected and whether changing it is likely to make anything meaningfully better. Sometimes the answer is a substantial piece of work. Othertimes it is one small change.

And sometimes the most useful professional advice I can give is:

Leave it alone. It’s already doing its job.

AI has made it easier than ever to change a website. Knowing when not to may become the more valuable skill.