Every AI website looks the same

You can spot them now without trying, and once you can, you cannot stop.

The hero is centered. The headline is large and slightly purple, or sits on a gradient that goes from violet to blue for no reason connected to the business. Under it, a sentence containing the word seamless. Under that, two buttons, one filled and one outlined.

Then three cards. Always three. Always equal width. Each with a small icon at the top in a rounded square, a two word heading, and a sentence of filler.

Then a section with a fake screenshot built out of rectangles, showing a product that does not exist, with a fake sidebar and fake rows of data and a little green dot.

Then testimonials from Sarah Chen and Michael Rodriguez, who are the two most prolific customers in the world, having endorsed approximately four hundred thousand startups.

The font is Inter. It is always Inter.

None of this is bad, exactly. Every individual choice is defensible. That is precisely the problem: these are the safe answer to every question, and applying the safe answer to every question produces a building with no face.

The purpose of a website for a small business is to be distinguishable from the other people who do the same thing. A visual language shared with every other site generated that week does the opposite, efficiently and at scale.

The fix is not to be weird. Weird for its own sake is its own template. The fix is specificity. A real photograph of the actual truck. The color the shop already paints things. Type chosen because it suits the trade rather than because it was the default. Copy containing a sentence only this business could write.

The tools are fine. I use them constantly. But a tool that gives everyone the same answer has given you an average, and average is the one thing a small business cannot afford to look like.