I get asked a lot whether I’m worried about AI replacing Mogul’s website work. It came up again recently in a conversation with someone deep in the Sunshine Coast tech and innovation scene, and it’s clearly a question a lot of people are thinking about right now.
I get why. Every week there’s a new tool that promises to build you a website in minutes. Vibe-coding, AI drag-and-drop builders, increasingly capable versions of Squarespace, Wix and Shopify. The barrier to getting a website up and running has never been lower.
But I think we should be shifting the question from whether AI can build a website to whether what it builds is actually beneficial to your business – and who’s accountable when it isn’t.
A website is not a brochure
If your website primarily serves as a digital business card (confirming your existence and listing your phone number) then cool, AI can probably handle that job – and cheaply. And that’s a legitimate choice for some businesses.
But for the organisations that come to Mogul, a website is core business infrastructure and its most visible business asset. They need it to get found, win work, attract staff, and create internal efficiencies — often with sales, marketing and inventory integrations that connect directly to how the business operates. That’s not a template solution. That’s a strategy, architecture and engineering challenge that requires a deep understanding of your customers, your commercial model, and the systems that sit behind your front door.
The prompt problem
Yes, AI can generate a website. But it can’t replicate the commercial thinking that goes into a good one. That thinking is only as good as the prompts you feed it.
Mogul’s prompts draw on nearly two decades of working across construction, food and agribusiness, manufacturing, professional services, education and member organisations. We know what questions to ask because we’ve asked them hundreds of times, in dozens of industries, for clients whose businesses we strive to understand as well as they do themselves:
- What are the three things that make your best customers choose you over a competitor?
- How does your sales process actually work, and where does the website need to support or accelerate it?
- What does your inventory system need to talk to, and how?
- What happens to your business if your website goes offline for 48 hours?
If you don’t know the answers to those questions (or you haven’t thought to ask them) then what you feed into an AI builder will reflect that. Garbage in, garbage out. A fast, cheap website built on shallow thinking is a website built on shallow thinking.
The governance question nobody is talking about
A website built by AI still needs to be owned, secured, maintained, governed and evolved. But who holds the credentials? Who manages the hosting environment and ensures it’s patched and protected? Who’s responsible when the site gets hacked, when a critical integration breaks, or when the business changes direction and the website needs to change with it? Who notices when performance drops, and knows why?
Serious operators want a partner who is accountable for all of that over the long term. We have clients we’ve worked with since 2008. That relationship isn’t just about building websites. It’s about knowing their business well enough to make the right calls, ask the right questions, and flag the risks before they become problems. No AI starts a new project with years of institutional knowledge about your business.
Why AI actually makes good websites more valuable
Here’s a bit of irony though – rather than making well-built websites redundant, AI is making them more valuable.
AI is only as good as the information you feed it. When someone searches using an AI-powered tool – whether that’s a traditional search engine, a large language model, or an AI assistant – it draws on what’s available about your business online. A thin, poorly structured, content-light site gives AI almost nothing to work with. A purpose-built digital infrastructure, with clear architecture, rich and relevant content, and strong technical foundations, gives it everything.
I wrote about this in more detail in my post on feeding AI vs letting it scavenge. The businesses that will get found, recommended and profiled accurately by AI-powered search are the ones that have invested in their digital infrastructure.
Who should actually be worried
Squarespace, Wix and Shopify’s entire value proposition is removing complexity so non-technical people can build something acceptable. That abstraction layer is exactly what AI now does – faster, cheaper and with more flexibility. If you can describe what you want in plain language and get a functional website, why do you need a drag-and-drop template system at all?
Specifically, the work most exposed to AI disruption is what I’d call the execution of the predictable – taking a brief, choosing a template, populating it, going live. That workflow has very few steps that genuinely require human judgement, insight or experience.
The complex, custom, commercially-led work we do is considerably harder to commoditise. Not because we’re precious about it, but because it requires exactly the kind of judgement, relationships and institutional knowledge that AI doesn’t have at the start of a new client engagement.
So no, I’m not worried. But I’m definitely paying attention.
