Even Canva is warning you not to look AI-made. That tells you where a website's value has gone

Canva has launched Canva Code 2.0, a tool that builds you a website from a plain-language prompt. You describe what you want, it writes the site. It is fast, cheap, and aimed squarely at small businesses without an agency budget. As SmartCompany reports, it generates code 75% faster than before and comes with fifty templates.

And in the same announcement, Canva’s own head of AI products, Danny Wu, said this: “In an age where anyone can generate content in seconds, looking like everyone else is the fastest way to get lost in the noise.”

Read that again. The company selling you the AI website tool is warning you not to look like you used one. That is not a throwaway line. It is the whole story.

Why AI-made sites all look the same

“Vibe coding” is the name for this: describe the vibe, the AI writes the site. The catch is that everyone is prompting the same handful of models, trained on the same designs, so the output converges. Canva itself named the tell, the identical heading hierarchies, the rounded buttons, the drop shadows, the dusky purple gradient. You get a passable website in an afternoon, and it looks exactly like the passable website your competitor generated the same afternoon.

That is not a knock on the tools. It is just what averages look like. An AI trained on a million websites produces the average of a million websites, and the average is, by definition, unremarkable.

When a vibe-coded site is genuinely fine

Let us be fair, because this matters. If you need a placeholder, a single landing page for a one-off, or a quick “yes, we exist” presence while you get going, these tools are great and you should use them. Not every business needs a bespoke site, and paying to hand-build a brochure page nobody scrutinises is often a waste of money. If that is you, prompt away with our blessing.

The trouble starts the moment your website has to actually win customers.

Where the template becomes the ceiling

When your site has a real job, to make a stranger choose you over the three other tabs they have open, the generic template stops being a shortcut and becomes a limit. Because the thing that converts is exactly what the AI hands everyone equally.

What a prompt does not give you is the part that matters: your actual story and expertise instead of filler copy, a layout built around how your customers really decide and act, genuine speed and performance, and being findable and trusted by search and AI (the same fundamentals behind what a fast website actually does and a properly built lean site). On the practical side, Canva Code does not even do ecommerce yet, so if you sell online, it is not the tool anyway.

The competitive picture just flipped

Here is the shift worth sitting with. When anyone can generate a passable website in an afternoon, “having a website” stops being any kind of edge. Everyone has one, and they all look related.

Which means your website has quietly become one of the few genuine differentiators left, precisely because everyone else’s looks the same. The edge moved from having a site to having one that is unmistakably yours and built to convert. Wu is right: in a sea of generated sameness, looking generic is how you disappear.

What to actually do

1. Be honest about which you need. A placeholder? Use the tool. A website that has to sell? Invest in the parts the tool cannot generate.
2. Spend the time you save on what a prompt can’t do. Your real story, real photos of your actual work, proof, and one clear next step.
3. Make it fast and findable, not just pretty. Pretty is now free. Fast and found is not.
4. Do not ship the default. If your site looks like the AI made it, a customer quietly assumes the rest of your business runs on defaults too.

The func.digital take

We are not here to tell you never to touch an AI website builder. They are good, they are getting better, and for plenty of jobs they are exactly right. We are here to point at the one thing the vendor itself admits they cannot do, which is stop you looking like everyone else.

In a market where every competitor can generate a decent-enough site by Friday, the businesses that win are the ones whose website is distinctly theirs and built to actually convert. If you want to know whether yours does the job, however it was built, and where the highest-leverage improvement is, that is exactly what a free digital systems audit is for. Get in touch.