By Hiten Shah · medium.com · @hnshah on X · LinkedIn
Crazy Egg's team tested 19 AI website builders by generating 51 pages (product, course, and local service pages) and scoring them against 60 criteria covering usability, conversion design, and SEO. The author finds AI builders produce professional-looking layouts quickly, but the pages often lack trust signals, proof, and persuasive specificity. Top performers were prompt-to-design tools like Base44, while traditional builders trailed. The main takeaway is that AI accelerates the drafting stage, but a human must supply intent, audience clarity, and proof. Because the value lies in editing and judgment rather than generation, this matters for anyone shipping marketing pages.
01Key takeaways
- Map your page's required sections, audience, and proof before prompting any AI builder.
- Write specific prompts that name the page type, audience, and content elements such as testimonials and pricing.
- Expect AI to include only what you mention; it cannot infer what matters to your visitors.
- Treat AI output as a first draft and rewrite copy to match your brand voice.
- Verify trust elements like testimonials, bios, and pricing context, which AI tends to omit.
- Judge pages on whether they persuade and convert, not just whether they look finished.
02Key sections
- Testing setup
- The team gave each builder identical, simple prompts and graded the first output without manual cleanup or advanced prompting. Pages were scored on layout, clarity, structure, copy quality, and conversion essentials.
- Platform results
- Base44 ranked first, followed by Figma AI and Bolt, while Squarespace and Wix lagged and minimal tools like Framer, Durable, and Jimdo scored lowest. Prompt-to-design systems performed best overall.
- Where AI succeeds
- AI reliably places calls to action, keeps layouts uncluttered, keeps headlines readable, and adjusts basic structure to match the prompt. These are pattern-recognition tasks suited to early exploration.
- Where AI fails
- Outputs looked polished but generic, missing testimonials, bios, pricing context, and any distinctive language. AI knows what a site looks like but not what it needs to accomplish for the visitor.
- Working with AI drafts
- Define sections, audience, and needed proof before prompting, then treat the draft as a first pass to refine copy, voice, flow, and calls to action. The edge shifts from generating layouts to judging and editing them.
03From the post
“Our team at Crazy Egg spent the past month testing 19 AI website builders. We created 51 pages and evaluated each one against 60 criteria that covered usability, conversion design, and SEO. The goal was simple. We wanted to see how far these tools have come and whether they can truly replace a designer or copywriter. The answer is more…”
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.