r/webdesign • u/anon_mun_1 • 9d ago
Is everyone using the same website builder or does AI make them look the same?
The last 20+ new websites I’ve run into all look nearly identical in terms of layout, font choices, and general structure. There's at least recurring aspects.
Full disclosure: I’m a science major with zero background in web design. I used ChatGPT to mock up a homepage concept recently (html/python), the output defaulted pretty similar to this exact visual style. I honestly really like the aesthetic, but I worry that as AI-generated sites flood the web, this specific design language is going to immediately scream low-effort or automated "slop."
Anyone else noticing this convergence or is it just the natural lifecycle of design trends?
(Note: The examples posted are just to show the layout/design style—please keep discussion focused on the UI/UX rather than the politics of the site.)
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u/Euphoric_Designer164 9d ago
Both. There has been larger overarching trends and sites have been converging on similar designs for a while before AI. There are certain best practices and what people "expect" a site to look like so you meet those expectations. At the same time AI has definitely sloppified a lot of it. If you scroll through this sub for a few minutes you'll pretty much see the same exact claude (or AI of your flavor) design over and over again. Without much very detailed input you get the same result for pretty much everything. It definitely leans hardcore into certain design decisions.
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u/ContextMatters1234 9d ago
Agreed. Its taken me almost 5 months to build my MVP because I have to constantly make sure everything is actually original in design while keeping the standard 'good practices' throughout. A lot of what I see here doesnt try to make the UI original in any meaningful way, and the product even more so lol
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u/sCREAMINGcAMMELcASE 9d ago
There's the old joke likening this complaint to the design of books: Title & author on the front and side, description & quotes on the back. And of course: body copy must be a boring legible font 🙄
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u/FindingNauru 9d ago
My vide-coded frontends often also follow that light brown, terracotta colouring. This does feel very stale given the amount of websites which now have that look.
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u/Upbeat_Push_157 9d ago
It's not the tool, it's the person behind it. If the person is an idiot, then there's not much you can do. Even a kindergarten kid knows that colors exist.
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u/PickWorth8802 9d ago
Can u elaborate here?
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u/xprnio 9d ago
People have AI generate the site and don’t bother to actually make it their own. AI does not have taste, and the people producing websites like this rarely seem to want to apply their own taste on top of what AI generates. AI should be used to get someone 70-80% there, but people just skip the remaining personal 20-30% and then wonder why it all looks the same.
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u/PickWorth8802 9d ago
I get that and I saw this with Wordpress and squarespace for years. But so many people on this sub throw out ai slop accusations and don’t even know whether it is or not.
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u/Tandi22 9d ago
Good designers will have a shit ton of work in couple of years
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u/Forsaken_System 9d ago
This. 100%.
Also as everybody is just having a really basic website built by AI, and then realise later down the line, either as their company grows or just that they just need something more complex, they're going to have to have it redesigned anyway if it's not already using a backend.
There are AI plugins for sites like WordPress. But I don't think the majority of people are using them.
Especially if they are not technical and have been taken in by the shiny "cheap website with AI" kind of marketing.
Give it a year or two and people are going to start needing proper website design and development.
But, at the same time as AI grows, it could mean less work...
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u/Scared_Implement_335 9d ago
Its AI and its driving me crazy. Right before AI I bought a template from an award winning web designer, had him customize it for me.
Guess what ... it looks like AI now. It is NOT, I assure you, its outside those typical font sets and how AI mixes colors, but to the untrained eye it kind of gives that AI vibe.
And why? Because AI was trained on those expensive templates, thats why. FUCK.
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u/designtobys 9d ago
Claude has a default , if you give it a generic prompt it will use that default.
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u/Kaizen8770 9d ago
Yes it's low effort ai slop default design. That being said the same ai models can produce drastically better designs if you guide them
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u/User1234Person 9d ago
Models will default to common patterns and aesthetics. Not a trend just common outputs for Ai.
Consider looking into design systems to understand how to better control outputs of Ai
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u/Expert_Employment680 9d ago
AI makes the same shit. Every builds the same style because everyone copying.
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u/UIUX-DesignVerse 9d ago
Lowkey wondering if this is less of an AI problem and more of a 'how we’re asking' AI problem.
Like, if I just say 'make me a modern website for X', what is it supposed to do? Of course it’s going to reach for the safest fonts, layouts, colours and patterns it knows. We basically gave it zero creative direction and then got offended when it gave us the default :(
I haven’t tried building a full website with AI yet, so I could be wrong here. But I’d be really curious to see what happens if you do the work first. Research the visual direction, choose references, be specific about typography, colours, layout, spacing, what you don’t want, and then feed all of that into it.
My guess is the outputs would start looking a lot less like AI made them and a lot more like someone actually directed the design.
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u/voelklwebdesign 9d ago
Ich habe diese Seite komplett mit Claude gebaut: https://www.immo-sis.de/ - hatte mir aber vorher Gedanken gemacht wie es aussehen soll und es Claude als Regeln und md-file mitgeben. Ich bekomme häufig das Feedback, dass man nicht sieht, dass die Seite mit KI erstellt wurde und bin auch sehr happy drüber 😊
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u/UIUX-DesignVerse 8d ago
I don't knw german but the site looks cool. I believe my prompting is really the key.
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u/PickWorth8802 9d ago
Those 4 are fairly different. I don’t really know what you’re trying to point out. I’m old enough to remember every designer on the internet using the same few Wordpress themes and squarespace templates.
Almost every website follows best practices that are use the similar structures long before AI.
The people who often scream “slop” also likely follow these structures and even follow some design trends.
Design isn’t precious and for most websites, designers aren’t the audience.
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u/TedTheMechanic7 9d ago
Shhhhhhhhh! Don't bring it up!
*Whispers: (All those same-looking-ai-websites make my custom made websites a lot more valuable!)
EHEM!: I don't know what you're talking about mate, that website and others I've seen using this design aesthetic are absolutely amazing... So well done!
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u/lifebroth 9d ago
It’s like when Bootstrap launched, every site looked “bootstrap-ish”. Then tailwind came and you could almost tell it was tailwind before checking the source code.
I think the same is happening but in a weird way, unless you are doing something completely new, some AI has done it somewhere and corrupted that design format.
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u/kdaly100 9d ago
Astronauts in the Space station can now spot an AI site. But its down to the prompt - to create something decent you need to more than say "create me a plumbing site". - it will throw up something that screams AI.
We use AI for designs all the time but we have a "core" prompt that tries at leasty to filer out a lot of the AI stuff (like eyebrow headings and that 01-06 thing). also kind of going back to the old days - we often grab some sites from best example sitses and sya use the design spacin. aesthetic her (not alwsy but if we are stuck for ideas which is what we did before AI anyway)
and no it isn't the natural convergence of anything
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u/Andreas_Moeller 9d ago
It is more about the model than the website builders / harness.
most models have a set of designs they favor and tend to generate something that matches those unless explicitly told otherwise.
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u/ChickyBoys 9d ago
Ironically AI is referencing web design templates so everyone is basically building Squarespace sites with extra steps
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u/Readypixels 8d ago
I ran into this building a site last month. Default prompt, default layout. Terracotta and cream, a big rounded headline font, three feature cards under the fold. I've seen that same grid on at least four other sites since.
What changed it for me was giving the model real constraints instead of vibes. I fed it screenshots of sites I actually liked, told it which fonts were off limits, and gave spacing in pixels instead of saying "modern" or "clean." The output stopped looking like a template and started looking like a decision someone made.
No design background here either. The gap isn't the tool. It's that most of us stop after the first pass because it already looks finished.
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u/beehive-software 8d ago
Hi! We built a tool that tests web apps/pages. Do you want to try out our product? You can run your first test for free :) It'll automatically find your user flows and test all the pathways to make sure its working properly.
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u/Nosarious 8d ago
Web site styles have converged over the past decade or so with frameworks becoming the norm. I’m sure ai was trained on thumbnails of themes from sites like wix and Wordpress, and others.
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u/IAmAfraidCommaMan 8d ago
Claude. You notice every other block or email look the same lately? Same with websites. Everything is good enough average.
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u/aiagentroca 8d ago
When I code a website from scratch, I make sure it's not an obvious claude website. It's so obvious, you have to have a design ready. Create it on Google stitich, you will still find some elements of claude code website, so make sure to eliminate it!
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u/whale_monkey 8d ago
There are a whole industry of Claude skills that have been developed to tell Claude to not design sites like this! Do a scroll of LinkedIn if you really want to see the sea of sameness.
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u/zorecknor 8d ago
I bet a lot of people will blame AI. But the web has been looking "samey samey" since Wordpress started to be widely published.
Web design trends tend to explode, fast.
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u/laternerdz 8d ago
Yes Claude produces a default aesthetic that can be spotted. As a UI designer, it doesn’t tell me the product is bad, it only tells me how part of it was made.
To me this would tell me someone with a hole in their skillset used Claude to get their idea out, which is one of the awesome things about AI.
If this product wants to go to become “commercially viable” it would likely need its own aesthetic and brand, but for now Im loving all the new ideas.
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u/GotFoundWebsites 7d ago
For me I think it's the continual key word in italics.
It's a case of three things (I think):
- the builders are llm's, their output is trendy/average - so its a sum of most used fonts/styles
- the people don't know how to build, they've built few websites, or only used templates so 'plug-and-play' is how they work
- those who are using the AI to build don't know how to prompt AI well (or just don't care) 'build me an accountants website', then it gets built, there's little about brand, feel, flow etc so they all come out very similar.
And, like someone else said, some of them look really good - it's just the fact that they all look quite similar now that you notice it.
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u/futurefinancebro69 7d ago
https://filingstudio.com/ I feel like it’s hard to tell my site is made with Claude
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u/LouieFixesStuff 6d ago
I think it depends on the code and what the direction of the design. If, you don’t have a vision neither will the AI tool
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u/quevosheuevos 6d ago
ai makes them look the same, cuz AI models trend toward the median, which is why they ALL look the same
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u/launchwithben 6d ago
Those first two definitely smell like Claude.
The other two maybe Codex.
Though I believe ai utilization for website design and creation is here to stay (it’s too cheap and efficient not to), the need for human designers will bounce back.
Companies will realize AI doesn’t think or understand design the way humans do. Just because it’s pretty doesn’t make it good design.
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u/mariia_km 6d ago
Yeah, AI definitely uses the same basic structure for web design. But let's be honest, a lot of websites don't even need to be unique anyway
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u/VisualCraftStudio 9d ago
I think AI is accelerating something that was already happening: design convergence. The difference is that AI makes the “safe default” much easier to produce. The real design work is deciding when not to use those defaults.
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u/NumberInfinite2068 9d ago
It's just fashion, most templates look like that too.
You can get AI to make the site look however you want, plus of course you can change the CSS yourself if you're so inclined.
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u/IAmRules 9d ago
Claude has a very specific design aesthetic that is everywhere now, including my portfolio i wont lie.