Can you make money building websites for small businesses with AI?

Go search the 10 businesses closest to your house. It's almost certain nine of them have terrible websites. You could build a better one in five minutes, and once one is good enough, you can duplicate it for the next in two.

Is there real demand?

I see it constantly. Business owners come to me for a newsletter ad, and when I ask what else they're doing for marketing, they say they don't know and need help. That's happened with about half the businesses I talk to.

The first owner I talked to had no website at all. How am I going to promote a business with no website? I charged her extra to build one. It took me 20 minutes in v0.

How do I pitch it without a cold email?

Don't send "I can make you a pretty website, here's an example, want one?" They've heard that a million times.

Build their actual landing page in full instead. It takes about two minutes. Then send it: I was looking you up and decided to throw this together. Now they see what their own business could look like, and they want it.

I once spent 30 seconds redesigning a business owner's bad site. I dictated to the AI with Wispr Flow: I'm working with this person, their site sucks, make it good like 2026 with animations and good colors. Then I pasted the link to their site. That's how fast a new website for someone can start.

What comes after the website?

The website is the foot in the door. Next it's: show me all your business processes. What does your secretary do? Your sales guy? Your service person? Then you figure out how to streamline it with AI. See how to price AI automation work.

What should I charge?

A flat monthly fee works. One pitch I like: while making a business a page, mention that you looked at their website, it kind of sucked, and you can build a better one for $100 a month. For comparison, a member of a mastermind I'm in says their agency sells websites in the $10,000 to $15,000 range.

Should I offer unlimited changes?

I would. A buddy has run a digital marketing agency for pool builders for years. They charge about $125 a month for management and tell clients they get unlimited website changes. Clients ask maybe once or twice a year to swap photos, which takes five minutes.

"They want fixed costs. They want to know this is what I'm paying. It doesn't matter what I need to do or change it."

When I tried to buy websites years ago as a business owner, that offer would have sold me. If you want to protect yourself, cap it at something like twice a month. They're not going to use it that much anyway.

Does design still matter?

For selling, yes. Even when the site is built for AI search, design is a vanity play, and that's part of what makes the model work. If it doesn't look rock-star level on phone and desktop, people will think they can do it themselves or that it's not worth the money.

For my first five or ten clients, I planned to reuse about 95% of the same site for everyone. If it looks great, nobody's going to complain.

How long will this last?

Your margin is the gap between what you know is possible and what most people understand. That gap will close and websites will get commoditized, with more people doing it cheaper. I think it closes slower than people expect, because most people won't want to learn this stuff. More in how long the AI consulting window lasts.