I’ve Built Websites for 25 Years. Here’s How I’d Make a Business Stand Out in an Internet Full of AI Slop.

I built my first website in 1999. I was just an art school kid teaching myself HTML in a bedroom. My competitive advantage was very simple: my sites looked better than the ones the programmers were making.

Back when most business websites looked like spreadsheets with hyperlinks, one that appeared professionally designed communicated authority. Traffic and revenue followed.

Between 1999 and 2005, I bought more than 200 domains and launched over 60 websites. Some became real businesses, and a few made some real money. Clearing the “does this look serious” bar was truly difficult, but I did it.

That advantage expired a while ago, but most business owners still haven’t realized what replaced it.

I’m now the CEO of Builderall, a marketing platform that’s hosted hundreds of thousands of small business websites. I get to watch patterns play out at scale, in real-time, across every industry and country. A huge number of operators are still running on a concept of the internet that stopped being true years ago.

They think, “If I get a website up, customers will find me.”

That was accurate in 1999, and it was still reasonable in 2015. However, it’s not applicable today, and pretending otherwise costs people their businesses.

Here’s what the actual internet looks like right now. According to Netcraft’s March 2026 Web Server Survey, there are about 1.43 billion websites online. Around 208 million of them show signs of active maintenance. The other 85% are parked domains, expired sites, redirect-only pages and abandoned projects. The internet is a graveyard of websites that nobody visits. AI is building lots more even as you read these words.

I’ve watched the barriers to putting a website online collapse through three distinct eras. Every time a visible limitation gets easier to overcome, the genuinely competitive advantage shifts.

First era: Hand-coded, 1999–2010

The first restriction was access. If you could get a site online at all, you were ahead of most of your competition. Once you cleared that barrier, the next question was quality. That was scarce because HTML was hard, and design sensibility was rare.

My art school background gave me an edge over programmers. Their websites worked, but mine looked like magazines. Guess whose phone rang?

The lesson was that professional design was difficult to produce, so it functioned as a meaningful signal. Pretty design was evidence that an actual operator had invested time and thought in the business behind the site. It wasn’t the reason the sites worked. It was the proxy for something harder. Once almost everyone could clear the visual bar, that signal lost most of its value.

Second era: No-code website builders, 2010–2022

Then no-code platforms and increasingly sophisticated content-management systems arrived. Wix, Squarespace, Builderall and better WordPress themes let anyone produce a site that looked professional without touching code or hiring a designer.

By 2015, WordPress was powering roughly 24% of the web. By 2025, it powered more than 40%. The floor moved up, and design became table stakes.

What separated businesses that grew from ones that stalled was whether the messaging was sharp and the audience was clearly defined. The offer answered a question the customer was asking. Positioning became the new scarce resource.

I watched this happen from the platform side. Two customers could launch the same template in the same industry on the same day. One would build a business, and the other would sit at zero. The difference was that the successful operator understood who they were selling to and what that person needed. They knew why their offer was different enough to deserve attention.

Now: The age of AI-generated everything

Today, I can open an AI tool and describe a business in one paragraph. It will generate a credible website in under 60 seconds, with no learning curve and no designer or copywriter needed. The site will look good.

15 years ago, this output would have been indistinguishable from a $10,000 agency project. And the speed keeps compressing. According to Wix’s first State of Websites report, the average time to publish a website on its platform fell from 8 days in 2025 to just 4 days in 2026, which is a 50% drop in a single year.

AI automated the entire visible surface of running an online business. Anyone can now generate a website, a logo, landing pages, a hundred blog posts, a social media presence and an email sequence in an afternoon. The barrier to appearing to have a functioning business is approaching zero.

Here’s the shift that most people are missing. AI is generating more content and websites than ever, but it’s not sending customers to them. Wix’s own data shows that large language models like ChatGPT currently drive less than 1% of website traffic. Search still drives 42%. Direct still drives 40%. The gap between AI-generated supply and demand is enormous, and it’s still widening. Which means the barrier to creating a meaningful business online is higher than ever.

The pattern nobody is naming

Every time this shift happens, the reflex is the same. Business owners rush to clear the new easy bar. They launch a site and then wonder why the phone isn’t ringing. Clearing the easy bar has never been what produced results. Value came from scarcity.

In 1999, a professional-looking site was a proxy for whether you were a serious operator. In 2015, sharp positioning was a proxy for whether you understood your customer. Today, having a website is a proxy for nothing. It’s the ticket into the room, and that room is packed with 1.43 billion tickets, most of which were free.

Having a website today tells the market roughly what having a phone number told the market in 1995. It’s a prerequisite, but not a business.

The website is no longer the business — it’s the front door

What distinguishes the businesses that are winning right now? The website is now the front door, and the business is the system behind the door.

Operators winning in 2026 have stopped thinking of their website as a completed project. They think of it as one node in a larger system, whose job is to earn attention and build trust until the customer is ready to buy.

The gap is huge. Research from RAIN Group and others puts the average B2B purchase at more than 62 touchpoints across 3.5 different channels before a deal closes. Even simpler SMB deals take 5 to 12 direct touches. Forrester has found that 82% of customers view five or more pieces of content from the winning vendor before making a purchase. 77% of B2B buyers won’t even speak to a salesperson until they’ve done their own research first.

If your website is your only touchpoint, you’re bringing just 1/62nd of what it takes to convert someone. AI can now generate that 1/62nd in 60 seconds. It can’t generate the other 61/62nds. Here’s what the system behind the front door should look like.

Capture attention before it disappears

Someone who lands on your website and leaves is worth almost nothing. If a site visitor gives you permission to reach them again, through email, a phone number, a follow, or a text opt-in, that person has started a relationship with your business.

At that point, your job is to give the visitor a compelling reason to continue the conversation. The job of a small business website in 2026 is to convert anonymous traffic into an identifiable audience. Almost every AI-generated site I’ve seen skips this entirely. It has a generic “contact us” form and treats the job as complete.

Build trust after the first visit

Once you have permission to be in someone’s life, most businesses waste it. They might send one automated welcome email and disappear, or they blast out promotions until the person unsubscribes.

Trust is built by showing up consistently and being useful before you ask for a transaction. You have to produce evidence over time that you can deliver what you promise. The ongoing relationship is the asset. The website is just one place where that relationship begins.

Convert at the moment of readiness

Most purchases don’t happen the first time someone encounters a business. They happen on the fifth touch, or the tenth, or the twentieth, when the customer’s situation finally lines up with what you sell.

If you don’t have a system for staying in the conversation between touch one and touch twenty, you don’t have a marketing system. All you have is a nice business card that AI can generate in 60 seconds. That’s not the same thing as building a business.

Good news for operators with depth

Here’s the part most people miss when they read pieces like this and get anxious. This shift is good news if you have real depth.

For 15 years, operators with genuine expertise were drowning in a sea of tactical bloggers and template site builders who could produce enough surface-level content to compete for visibility, even if they lacked substance underneath. 

Depth was hard to see through the noise. Now the noise itself has become free and infinite. AI can produce more surface-level content in a day than a human could produce in a decade. The reader has already learned to scroll past it. Real depth is winning again for the first time in a long time.

The operator who has done the work and understands a specific customer better than anyone else now stands out more sharply against an AI-generated background than they did against a human-generated one. The customer’s ability to sense authenticity in all this noise has gotten sharper, because it had to. The signal they’re now looking for is a real person doing real work.

AI can imitate the language of expertise, but it can’t manufacture your track record or the trust you’ve accumulated over years of showing up. The depth behind your system is one thing AI can’t fake.

What to do this week

If you launched a site with AI recently, or you’re about to, stop treating the launch as the finish line. That’s not even the start of the race. Ask yourself these questions.

How does someone who lands on this site give me a way to reach them again? If the answer is “they don’t,” fix that before you spend another dollar on traffic.

What am I sending to people I have permission to contact, and would I actually want to receive it? If you can’t answer this, you don’t have a nurture system. No amount of new traffic will fix that.

What proof of depth do I offer that AI could not credibly fake in five minutes? If the answer is “nothing,” you’re competing directly against free infinite AI slop, and you’ll lose.

Could a competitor slap their logo on my content and have it still make sense? If the answer is yes, your brand lacks a unique viewpoint. Content that’s “safe” enough to be viewed by anyone will be ignored by everyone.

I’ve watched this pattern shift three times in more than 25 years. The tools got easier every time, but the businesses that won never did.

AI didn’t eliminate the barriers to building an online business. It eliminated the visible barriers. That forced the competitive advantage deeper, into systems, relationships, trust and proof. The businesses that recognize this shift and build for it are about to have an easier time than they’ve had in a decade. The businesses that don’t will find themselves parked next to the other 1.2 billion sites nobody visits.