Sitely has been offering an artificial intelligence powered website generator for some time now. After over a year we can say that it has been very positively received. Our stated goal is for the generator to provide a starting point for your website. While the generated starting points aren’t necessarily always exactly what you were looking for, in part due to limitations of the current generation of AI, and in part perhaps to our implementation, generally they’re good enough that you can start working with them and take them in the exact direction you need. So yes, a starting point.

Could the generator do more? There’s a new AI wonder to look at every week, though scratching the surface we find that while often results are very impressive, ultimately there’s a lot of marketing, omitting questionable output, or hiding aspects that just don’t respond well. Sometimes that translates to a tool that’s amazing maybe 10% of the time and great another 10% of the time. In practice this makes this sort of AI not super useful for day to day work. In all this we view our role as providing a no-nonsense practical productivity tool that gets the job done, which in our view rules out the direct integration of AI functionality that is frequently only moderately helpful. But that’s not to say we are ignoring what AI can do and ways in which it can help you boost productivity, it’s just not something that we will let out of the labs until it’s good enough, until it really helps.

But what about AI for your website content, AI is certainly used a lot for text or image generation. 

There’s an old school search engine optimization (SEO) line of thinking according to which the optimization process is a purely numerical exercise. Kind of like stock trading based on numbers instead of on company merit. Something like, take some relevant keywords with the right numbers, add some filler text to spread the keywords down to the right density, and voila, you have an optimized page.

It’s easy enough to do all this using one of the several chat AI tools, or with the Apple Intelligence tools integrated in macOS Sequoia. Our opinion on this is a net negative. Generated text and images are generally very recognizable, and considering the goal of search engines of finding the best answer on the web, generated text is likely to be penalized and not help with SEO.

A reformulation of this same concept is that AI-generated text is sort of a weighted average of existing web answers to what you’re asking from the AI (that’s their learning source after all), so because it’s not adding anything truly novel it will have a hard time being more relevant.

Additionally, a modern search engine that wants to be relevant will be ranking a page based on many signals, including some understanding of the content at a semantic level, in addition to some form of AI-generation detection. More importantly search engines have been collecting details about the behavior of real humans looking at a page, the definitive acid test on whether the content is interesting or valuable at all.

So AI-based content generation remains a tool for serial speculators, you can count on hearing stories from someone that built their whole product with AI while hanging from a hammock in the Caribbean. That’s not a market we’ll be catering to, and like all speculation it’s just opportunistic about this technology at this moment in time, not something you can predict or plan for.

But there’s more than search engines, increasingly search is moving to the AI chatbots, who are over time digesting everything that comes up on the web. While it’s very early to fully understand web traffic patterns, inevitably AI users will become a source of traffic to your website as well, so while there is a concern over your content ending up in the AI meat grinder, there can be aspects of your uniqueness that will manifest in answers to AI users, and ultimately end up coming back to you. AI chatbots are the go-to for who’s looking to get answers in broad terms, what your website can aspire to is to be the pinnacle of knowledge on specific topics, like a mountain of knowledge requiring more effort to climb, but offering a better perspective.

To sum it up, we strongly believe in well thought out prose that comes across as authentic, honest and honestly compelling content, your website as a reflection of you as a person or as an institution, something to interest and entice your website visitors and customers with. The role of AI in Sitely is, and is going to be, that of accelerating your work, never replacing it.