Looking for an AI-powered website builder? Here's your best option in 2025

Generative AI and web development seem tailor-made for each other. Web design combines coding, creative text, graphics, and overall design. These are all tasks that AI performs quite well.

So when I set out to find the best AI-based website builders, I expected to see all of these capabilities wrapped around hosting dashboards. What I found was nothing close.

Also: The best web hosting services: Expert tested and reviewed

This article is the result of a six-month, 70-hour research project. Much of that time was spent wrangling hosting providers who claimed to offer AI, sending and replying to 236 emails, setting up test accounts, and trying to find evidence of AI capabilities in their services.

I also built test sites using each of the services. To ensure each site faced an equal challenge, I decided to model them on a business called “Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective.”

There were design notes drawn from the Sherlock concept: consulting and private detective themes could be applied; dark academia would be an ideal color and design choice; and deerstalker hats and magnifying glasses are clearly appropriate iconography. Sherlock is such a universally known character that most AI engines should derive insight from the reference alone.

Also: The best e-commerce website builders: Expert tested

Some website building AIs did better than others. One (10Web) even knew that Sherlock’s address is 221B Baker Street. Others sort of got the private detective idea, although some generated food-related pictures. One actually created a crime scene so graphic and gory I can’t even show it to you.

Overall, the current state of the art in AI website builders is fairly mediocre. AI works in spots but doesn’t manage the holistic whole. Things like site-wide fonts and spacing can’t be done via AI. Some layouts were pretty bad.

Some of the help systems had limited AI support, but most didn’t. So when you wanted help, you were just dropped into the same old help systems that hosting providers have used for years. And where there was AI chat support, the support bots weren’t integrated with site development. They often couldn’t answer even the most basic questions –and that’s when they didn’t simply crash, hang, or produce blank white pages.

Also: The best AI for coding (including two new top picks – and what not to use)

None of the website builders seems to have a clue that AI can code, so none of the CSS sections (used to customize a site’s color, fit, and finish) had AI coding support. This was an unforced error, because it would have been an even easier API integration than adding text-generation support to text fields.

The top AI-powered website builders

Let’s dig into the individual website builders. But before we do, I want to note that all of these are from excellent hosting providers in their own right. I’m just evaluating their AI components or alternatives. 

Please also note that when I talk about a website builder, I’m talking about a category of service. Some of the hosting providers call their website builders “Website Builder,” with initial caps. That’s how they brand their website builder service.

1. Squarespace

• AI for interview to determine site focus and pages – no
• AI for choosing initial layout – no
• AI for choosing colors or themes – no
• AI for choosing fonts – no
• AI for helping write headline or body text – yes
• AI for text to image – no
• AI logo designer – no
• AI coding for CSS blocks – no

If you’ve ever watched a YouTube video, you’ve seen a Squarespace promotion. The company is known for its hosting service and good-looking website templates.

Initial website setup gives you the opportunity to choose a “brand personality” for your site. You can choose from Professional, Playful, Sophisticated, Friendly, Bold, Quirky, and Innovative. Once you make that selection, Squarespace gives you six pre-canned templates to choose from. You can then choose the pages you want on your site, decide on colors, and so forth.

I used Squarespace’s website builder for more than an hour, but I couldn’t find the AI that had been advertised as Blueprint AI. I had to email my PR contact to learn that the only generative AI feature existed in the text style dialog.

Squarespace does a great job of making it easy to set up a great-looking site with a few clicks. But it’s the result of a lot of well-considered, pre-canned options packaged into a helpful wizard. Other than text generation in text-edit fields, it’s not AI.

2. Wix

• AI for interview to determine site focus and pages – yes
• AI for choosing initial layout – yes
• AI for choosing colors or themes – yes, limited
• AI for choosing fonts – yes, limited
• AI for helping write headline or body text – yes
• AI for text to image – yes
• AI logo designer – doesn’t work
• AI coding for CSS blocks – no

Like Squarespace, the Wix website builder started with a wizard. It asked for the title of the site and a short description. From that, it determined that I’d want a consultant-type website with booking, portfolio, and blog pages. It then suggested a tagline perfect for Sherlock: “Unraveling mysteries with precision and expertise.”

Wix calls its AI website builder Astro. Astro helped pick services that Sherlock could offer, including Investigation Class (an interesting line extension), Case Consultation, and Crime Scene Analysis. That was spot-on for Sherlock. It also generated success stories that were quite good.

There was an option to generate a site layout and look. The overall layouts were fairly mundane, but it did make some color palette recommendations. After three regeneration attempts, it generated a look that seemed reasonable.

AI image generation worked quite well. It was helpful to generate images right where they were needed, rather than dropping in and out of ChatGPT or Midjourney.

The images generated were definitely on theme but, as is often the case with AI, were off a bit. The left image above was supposed to have two people but had one. The right one was supposed to be of Sherlock investigating, but it looks more like Jack the Ripper out on the town. And I can’t even show you the first few crime scene images Astro generated. They were that disturbing. Let’s just say slasher-movie directors would have loved them.

Overall, Wix has a solid AI website builder, but the AI only sees the entire site during setup. After that, each individual AI-generated item stands alone. Still, it’s definitely a good start.

3. 10Web

• AI for interview to determine site focus and pages – no
• AI for choosing initial layout – no
• AI for choosing colors or themes – no
• AI for choosing fonts – no
• AI for helping write headline or body text – yes
• AI for text to image – yes
• AI logo designer – yes
• AI coding for CSS blocks – no

Let’s kick it off with what 10Web’s AI website builder did well. It understood the Sherlock references enough to write 221B Baker Street into the Visit Us section without prompting.

It also automatically generated a near pitch-perfect illustration for the Legacy and Mission page.

But those were the high points. The Expertise section was fun, but the images had text problems. Instead of “crime,” it read “crince,” which seemed fairly cringe. And there is something in the Pacific Ocean — strangely, an island called Legal. I’m also not sure why the AI generated a world map.

The malfunctioning image-text generator also diminished the usability of the site’s logo-making tool, generating “Sierloik Holmes, Conslligy Detect.”

Generative text was a little rocky as well. I fed it this description as part of my 63-word site description — “I operate a consulting detective practice in London, offering services to private citizens, Scotland Yard, and foreign dignitaries.” I got back, “Welcome to my esteemed consulting detective practice based in London, where I provide a range of investigative services to private citizens,” as an intro to the rewritten, now 98-word description. Why?

The AI, which 10Web calls Co-Pilot (Microsoft must love that), also returned a bunch of errors and failed throughout my testing. It shows promise, but it’s definitely not fully baked.

4. GoDaddy

• AI for interview to determine site focus and pages – no
• AI for choosing colors or themes – no
• AI for choosing fonts – no
• AI for helping write headline or body text – sort of
• AI for text to image – no
• AI logo designer – maybe
• AI coding for CSS blocks – no

GoDaddy was another provider where I had to reach out to the PR team to find the actual AI website builder functionality. Because GoDaddy offers so many hosting options, I specifically used their Website Builder functionality.

I tested the base $9.99 plan, which handles AI text descriptions. Apparently, higher-end plans for social media and e-commerce support include specialized AI features for those functions.

Considering GoDaddy’s history as a domain juggernaut, you need to register a domain prior to setting up the site. I really wanted NoSh__Sherlock.com, but this is a family show, so I decided instead on TalkWithSherlock.com.

First, I used the logo designer, which produced fine, if uninspired, logos. I’m not entirely sure this was actually AI — the icons could have been chosen from pre-canned detective category selections.

When I started the site, I added some basic information, then pasted in my short backgrounder on Sherlock. GoDaddy’s AI generated a website. I love the main picture — it’s perfect for the Sherlock theme. The color scheme is workable, although while I often use black menus, I never like a full black background.

There is no AI support for changing the color theme or fonts.

There is a weird “get copy suggestions” feature in text fields, but I found it very slow and odd. It doesn’t allow you to tell it what you want; it just cycles through suggested text. The suggestions repeat over just a few choices, so it offers the same options over and over. I couldn’t find any evidence of real prompt-based generative AI text generation.

Likewise, while the chosen images were appropriate to the detective theme, there is no sign of a text-to-image generator. GoDaddy is true to its upsell DNA, offering the option to purchase images from iStock by Getty Images.

I’ve been a GoDaddy domain customer for years, and I’ve come to really like the folks there, but calling anything on their website builder service “AI,” even their phrase chooser, is a real stretch.

5. Hostinger

• AI for interview to determine site focus and pages – no
• AI for choosing initial layout – yes
• AI for choosing colors or themes – yes
• AI for choosing fonts – yes
• AI for helping write headline or body text – yes
• AI for text to image – not really
• AI logo designer – no
• AI coding for CSS blocks – no

Hostinger offers two entirely different services with AI elements. The first is their Website Builder, which matches the basic AI features offered by the other builders we’ve discussed. It does a pre-interview and generates a starter template. It generates some text in the various text blocks. And that’s about it — nothing to write home about.

And then there’s Hostinger Horizon, an entirely different service with its own pricing structure. Hostinger Horizon does AI website generation the way you’d expect — via a chat interface.

The only problem is that it doesn’t work all that well. It struck out on logo design. It failed hard on my request to change the main image. At one point, I asked for a building in London but got back a building that looked more like an old Yonkers neighborhood. I asked it to tighten up the margins, but nothing changed. I asked it to change the color scheme to dark academia, but it only changed the background to another dark shade.

It’s definitely not something I’d recommend you pay extra for — yet. Hostinger appears to be on the right track, allowing a generative AI system to recode the site based on chat requests.

It’s not clear how it would handle integrating changes based on chat requests with user-made edits, but the AI implementation is nowhere near ready for such issues.

Unlike the other hosting providers, which focused on adding AI to pinpoint features to their website builders, Hostinger is clearly looking at the holistic whole. They have a long way to go, but they’re taking an interesting approach. This one is definitely a stay-tuned opportunity.

What about ChatGPT?

An alternative solution

Here’s the thing: none of the hosting providers made a compelling case for using their AI website builder services. Sure, it’s nice to click an image and ask the AI to generate a new one. But that capability quickly becomes annoying when the AI generates unusable images.

Also: How to turn ChatGPT into your AI coding power tool – and double your output

Likewise, it would seem easiest to click a text block on the website and have the AI generate new text, but in practice there are quite a few clicks — usually into the text formatter, then into a separate form.

And don’t even get me started on color choices. None of the hosting providers’ AI website builders gave me anything resembling a quality color palette for Sherlock, nor did they give me any opportunity for an AI to generate CSS.

ChatGPT can do all of this with ease and a fair level of reliability. I used it heavily when creating my music site, along with Midjourney to create images. That was in the summer of 2023. ChatGPT’s image creation has gotten much better.

Also: I asked ChatGPT to write a WordPress plugin I needed. It did it in less than 5 minutes

Even so, it’s hard to recommend a hosting provider’s AI website builder, especially if there’s an increased cost for use, compared to just cutting and pasting from ChatGPT. The free version will get you quite far, although I use the $20/mo Plus version. Keep in mind you can amortize that expense over a wide range of applications, not just web hosting.

The future of AI-based website building

As I said earlier in this article, AI and web development seem tailor-made for each other. Today’s web hosting providers have contented themselves mostly with offering website builders that make API calls to large language model providers, embedding added features here and there into their text-editing and image-selection engines.

That’s a fairly straightforward first step, except it’s clear some providers went with the lowest-bidder strategy for their LLM choices. Hopefully those LLMs will improve over time, or hosting providers will be willing to shell out the extra pennies per query to get better quality results.

What many hosting providers are really advertising when they talk about AI website building is their onboarding process. The promise is you answer a few questions and a perfect site will be built for you. This has long worked for vendors like Squarespace, who carefully craft a large library of templates. A hard-coded interview wizard helps get you to the right templates.

This practice can be extended slightly, with AI able to help choose the right template. If hosting providers focus on using AI-based website builders to modify and tweak existing sites, they can avoid the need to bolt on AI in multiple areas of the site.

Even if not much actually worked in practice, Hostinger showed how having an AI chatbot in one pane and the website in another pane is a very workable interface.

This idea needs to be extended with AI aware of the entire site structure, so users can give instructions to the AI like they would to a designer — for example, “Make those columns a little closer,” “Make the fonts a scosche bigger,” “Make the man older,” “Add a section on return policy,” “Show me some fun fonts and let me choose,” and so forth.

This shouldn’t be a big reach. Many coding AI tools, like GitHub Copilot and Gemini Pro 2.5, offer the ability to manage and code across a multiple-file project. A website is nothing more or less than a multiple-file coding project with image assets.

Also: I retested Microsoft Copilot’s AI coding skills in 2025 and now it’s got serious game

Another direction we may see is for the big players, particularly Microsoft and Google, to offer AI-based website builders as extensions of their office offerings — especially for those who pay for upgraded versions of Copilot and Gemini.

Also: Gemini Pro 2.5 is a stunningly capable coding assistant – and a big threat to ChatGPT

I have high hopes for this category. The technology is already there to do all that it needs to do. What’s needed now is dedication to integration, some usability design, forward-thinking product management, and a little time.

Stay tuned. I’m sure we’ll be back with updates as the offerings improve. For now, I’d like to give a shoutout to Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy, 10Web, and Hostinger for being willing to subject their still-being-formed AI offerings to my analysis and for being so responsive to all my questions over the six months this project took to complete.

What do you think about AI website building?

Have you tried any of the platforms mentioned, and if so, how well did the AI features work for you? Do you believe AI should handle more of the web design process, or do you prefer a more hands-on approach? Which features, like text generation, layout suggestions, or CSS coding, do you think hosting providers should prioritize? Let us know in the comments below.

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