AI-generated websites for six firms. The dentist and the mechanic got the same headline

The dental practice got the headline “Twój piękny uśmiech w dobrych rękach”, which means “Your beautiful smile in good hands”. The car workshop got “Twój samochód w dobrych rękach”, or “Your car in good hands”. Both pages were written by an AI. We wanted to see what an AI-generated website looks like when a business owner asks for one in the simplest words.

No list of requirements and no design knowledge. The way someone would ask if they spend their days baking bread or fixing cars.

How the test worked

We wrote the request in Polish. Here it is.

Zrób ładną stronę internetową dla mojej piekarni. Odpowiedz tylko kodem jednego pliku HTML, bez żadnego innego tekstu.

In English that reads “Make a nice website for my bakery. Reply only with the code of one HTML file, without any other text.”

Then we sent the same request for five other firms. Only the type of business changed. They were a dental practice, a car workshop, a hair salon, a flower shop and a language school.

We said nothing about design. We kept it short on purpose, the way someone writes when they ask AI for a website for the first time. Asking for one HTML file meant we could open each page in a browser right away and put them side by side.

What repeated across the six pages

All six pages had a small label above the headline. In every headline one word was in a different colour from the rest. Below the headline there were always two buttons.

Four of the six had a circle shape on the right side. Three of the six used the same display font for headings, Playfair Display.

The dentist's headline and the workshop's headline differ only in what is “in good hands”. A smile in one, a car in the other. The rest of the sentence is the same.

None of these elements is a mistake on its own. Two buttons or a highlighted word in a headline are ordinary, sensible choices. What is odd is that they showed up everywhere, even though these firms have nothing in common.

Different people go to a bakery and to a car workshop, and for different reasons. Yet the pages looked as if they came out of one mould.

Numbers nobody gave

The dentist, the hair salon and the car workshop all got the same client count on their pages, 8,000+. They also got the same rating, 4.9. Nobody gave the AI these numbers. The request said nothing about clients or ratings. The AI made them up.

For a business owner this is the most dangerous part of the test. The page looks tidy, the numbers sound believable, and it is easy to publish without reading. Then your own website shows a figure you cannot back up when a customer asks. A 4.9 rating looks like an average from Google reviews, and someone may go looking for it there.

So an AI-generated website has to be read sentence by sentence before anyone else sees it. Delete every number and every review you did not give it yourself.

The AI did exactly what we asked

This is not an article about AI being bad. We use it in our own work.

We asked for a nice page in one file, and that is exactly what we got. A short, general request got the most predictable answer. That is how it went in our test, six times in a row.

If a bakery came to us with this job, we would start with questions about who buys there and how it differs from other bakeries. The AI in our test could not ask anything, because the request told it to reply with code only.

The trouble is that people who don't know what to ask for won't ask for it. A bakery owner won't write a word about page titles for Google, or about how fast the page opens on an old phone. They won't ask for a look that sets them apart from the bakery across the street. They won't ask anyone to check whether the name and the domain are still free.

AI does what you ask. The whole difference is in who tells it what to do and who checks the result afterwards.

Before you publish an AI-generated website

Treat the first result as a draft. A better request is longer. It describes who your customers are and what you do differently from the firm next door. It asks for page titles and descriptions for Google, and for light images. It says plainly that the AI must not invent numbers or reviews.

Even then, someone has to read the result and check it. If you would rather hand that to someone who knows what to ask and what to look for, that is the work we do.

Read the page as a customer who knows nothing about you. Fix every sentence that would also fit a competitor and every number you did not provide.