Artificial intelligence is becoming a standard part of the tools used to design, build and maintain websites. It can help generate ideas, analyze information, write and troubleshoot code, review content and identify potential problems faster than many traditional workflows.
That does not mean AI is replacing web designers, developers or other specialists. In practice, it is most useful when it supports people who already understand the work and can evaluate what it produces.
For web projects, that distinction matters. A website still needs to reflect a business, serve real users and work reliably across devices, browsers and assistive technologies. AI can make parts of that process more efficient, but strategy, design decisions, technical implementation and quality control still require human judgment.
AI is becoming part of the creative process
Designers have always adopted new tools as the technology around creative work evolves. Generative AI is increasingly becoming one of them.
According to Adobe’s 2025 Creators’ Toolkit Report (opens in a new tab), 86% of surveyed creators were using creative generative AI. Common uses included editing and enhancing existing work, generating new assets and brainstorming ideas.
For web design and graphic design, those capabilities can be useful during the early stages of a project. AI can help explore visual directions, organize ideas, generate placeholder content, experiment with imagery or compare different approaches before a designer begins refining the final experience.
It can also make repetitive creative tasks faster. Removing objects from an image, extending a background, creating variations of an asset or quickly visualizing an idea can save time that would otherwise be spent performing those tasks manually.
But generating something is not the same as designing it. A successful website still needs hierarchy, consistency, usability, accessibility and an understanding of the organization behind it. The designer remains responsible for deciding what belongs on the page, what should receive attention and whether the finished result actually works for the people using it.
AI can make web development faster, but the code still needs a developer
Web development is one of the areas where AI has seen especially rapid adoption.
The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey (opens in a new tab) found that 84% of respondents were using or planning to use AI tools as part of their development process, while 51% of professional developers reported using them daily.
There are good reasons for that adoption. AI can help developers explain unfamiliar code, troubleshoot an error, draft a function, identify syntax problems, write documentation or handle repetitive development tasks. It can also provide a useful starting point when evaluating different technical approaches.
The same Stack Overflow survey, however, highlights an important limitation. More developers said they distrusted the accuracy of AI tools than trusted them. The most commonly reported frustration, cited by 66% of developers, was receiving AI-generated solutions that were almost correct, but not quite.
That gap between almost correct and correct is significant in professional development.
Code can appear to work while introducing accessibility problems, security issues, performance concerns or conflicts elsewhere on a website. AI also does not automatically understand the complete architecture of a project, its history or all of the decisions that led to its current implementation.
At Razorfrog, tools including AI can support our design and development process when they are useful, but the resulting work still needs to be understood, reviewed and tested by the people responsible for the website.
Accessibility requires more than automated detection
AI also has useful applications in web accessibility. It can help review markup, suggest alternative text for images, identify possible issues and explain accessibility requirements during development.
There is plenty of work to do. The 2026 WebAIM Million (opens in a new tab) analysis of one million homepages found detectable WCAG failures on 95.9% of the pages tested. Low-contrast text appeared on 83.9% of homepages, while 53.1% had missing alternative text for images and 51% had missing form input labels.
Automated tools, including those enhanced by AI, can make these issues easier to discover. They cannot determine every aspect of whether a website provides an accessible experience.
Alternative text is a simple example. AI may be able to identify what appears in an image, but appropriate alt text depends on why that image exists in a particular context. A decorative image may require no description at all, while the same image used somewhere else could communicate information that needs to be conveyed to someone using a screen reader.
The same principle applies throughout accessibility work. Automated analysis is valuable, but it should support rather than replace informed implementation, testing and review. Our web accessibility conformance process combines accessibility-focused design and development with auditing and testing throughout a project.
AI can support SEO without replacing useful content
Artificial intelligence has also changed how content is researched, organized and produced. For search engine optimization, it can help identify topics, organize information, analyze existing pages, generate ideas for titles and metadata and find opportunities within a larger website.
That does not mean publishing large quantities of AI-generated content is an effective SEO strategy.
Google’s guidance on generative AI content (opens in a new tab) specifically notes that generative AI can be useful for research and for adding structure to original content. It also warns that generating many pages without adding value for users can violate Google’s spam policies on scaled content abuse.
As Google’s search experience itself incorporates more generative AI, the underlying advice has remained familiar. In guidance published by Google Search Central in 2026 (opens in a new tab), Google continued to emphasize valuable, unique content and stated that established SEO best practices remain foundational for visibility within its generative AI search features.
That makes AI useful as part of an SEO workflow, but not as a shortcut around creating something worth finding.
A business still has knowledge, experience, examples, opinions and information that generic generated content does not. AI can help organize and refine those resources, while people provide the expertise and context that make the finished content useful.
The value is in knowing when and how to use it
AI will continue to change, and the individual tools used today will not necessarily be the tools used a few years from now. The broader role it plays in web projects is likely to be more durable.
It can accelerate research. It can help designers explore. It can assist developers with code. It can support accessibility reviews and make large amounts of website content easier to analyze. Used appropriately, those efficiencies can leave more time for the decisions that require deeper understanding.
Those decisions still include understanding the audience, establishing priorities, creating a visual system, organizing information, selecting the right technology, reviewing accessibility, testing functionality and deciding what should ultimately be published.
The goal is not to choose between artificial intelligence and human expertise. It is to use AI where it improves the process while keeping experienced people responsible for the result.
At Razorfrog, we continue to adapt our tools and workflows as the web evolves, while keeping the same focus on clear design, reliable development, accessibility and websites that can grow with the organizations behind them.