AI Doesn't Make Me a Plumber. Can It Make You a Web Guy?

I got shit on. Literally.

2am. Upstairs in my house here in Jacksonville.

Toilet water and sewage leaking through into the room downstairs.

I called a plumber.

There was no AI back then. No chat window to ask.

So picture it today. Me at 2am, sewage coming through the ceiling, typing it into a machine.

It gives me a clean answer. Ordered. Confident. Probably right.

Then I realized something. I don't know shit about plumbing and I am not a plumber.

So why did I think AI would make me one?

Plumbers go to school for years. They are certified. They know shit I will never know. There's a huge difference between theory and years of hands on experience.

That's the whole post. The answer can be right. I'm still not the guy.

TL;DR (the short answer)

No. An AI website builder does not make you a web guy. It is the same reason a repair guide does not make me a plumber. The tool writes the code. You own what the code does. Accessibility, privacy and security all land on your business, not on the software. In 2025 there were 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court (Seyfarth Shaw, 2026). ADA Title III reaches the business that runs the site.

3 Things to Remember

I Didn't Pay Him for the Answer.

Think about what I actually bought from that plumber.

It wasn't the knowledge. Anybody can get the knowledge now. It's sitting on your phone at no cost.

I bought a license. I bought his insurance. I bought the fact that at 2am it was his problem and not mine.

He wasn't selling me the answer. He was selling me the part where he eats it.

AI doesn't sell that. It can't. There's nobody on the other end to hold.

The mistake: thinking the answer is the job.

The fix: ask who holds the bag when it goes wrong.

The payoff: you stop mixing up an answer with a person.

You Hit Publish. Now It's All Yours.

The day your site went live, a list of obligations came with it.

Nobody hid them from you. The tool just had no reason to bring them up.

Here they are, flat.

• It has to work for people with disabilities. Somebody using a keyboard instead of a mouse has to get through your contact form. So does somebody using a screen reader instead of eyes.
• It has to say what it does with what it collects. That form asks for a name and a phone number. You owe the visitor an explanation.
• It has to back up what it claims. Licensed. Insured. Voted best in town. Those are advertising claims, not design choices.
• It has to not leak. And when it does, telling your customers is your job. Not your platform's.

You didn't agree to that on purpose. You agreed to it by putting up a website. That's the only way anybody agrees to it.

Two of those four get their own post later in this run. This one is about the first one. It's the one with a courthouse attached, and it's the one AI is quietly making worse. I already wrote the one about what your contact form is actually plugged into.

The mistake: assuming the builder handled it.

The fix: name the four out loud, so they stop being invisible.

The payoff: you know what you signed up for.

3,117 Lawsuits Last Year. Guess Who They Sued.

This is the number that makes it real.

That's out of 8,667 ADA Title III filings that year. Website cases were 36% of the whole pile (Seyfarth Shaw, 2026).

Now I'm going to be careful, because this is where everybody else gets sloppy.

Nobody has read all 3,117 of those filings and counted how many named a software vendor. I haven't. So I'm not handing you a number I didn't check.

Here's what I can tell you. ADA Title III reaches the business that runs the place. Your website is your business. Squarespace is not a party to it.

And this lands on small businesses, not on Amazon. The ones getting named have a building and a site that doesn't work right. That's most people reading this.

Second number. This one is worse.

That's the eighth year WebAIM has run that scan. 2026 is the first year the number got worse.

Six years of slow progress, gone.

WebAIM says automated coding and coding done with AI is likely part of why. Heavier use of frameworks built by somebody else too.

Part of why. They did not prove AI causes broken websites. I'm not going to tell you they did.

The mistake: assuming this only happens to big companies.

The fix: look at who is getting named. It's shops your size.

The payoff: you size the risk against your business, not somebody else's.

Here's Where My Own Argument Gets Weak.

I just handed you a scary number. Now I'll take some of it back.

The federal courts don't agree on whether the ADA covers a website at all.

The Third, Sixth and Ninth Circuits want a link between the site and a physical place. The First and Seventh have held a website on its own can count. The Second has never decided it and its district courts are split. The Eleventh has no binding answer either, because the one ruling it made was vacated in December 2021.

Same law. Opposite answers. Depends what state you're standing in.

The Supreme Court has passed on it more than once. Still no ruling.

There's a second thing everybody gets wrong.

The Justice Department rule from April 2024 sets WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard. That rule covers state and local government. It is a Title II rule.

It does not create a legal requirement for a private business. Its compliance dates got pushed back a year in April 2026 (Federal Register, 2026).

So if somebody quotes that rule at you to sell you something, they either didn't read it or they're counting on you not reading it.

That's the honest picture. This law is a mess. Anybody who tells you it's settled wants your money.

Here's the part that survives all of it. If you have a physical location, the argument gets simple almost everywhere.

You have a shop. You have a truck with your name on the door. You are not the gray area.

Go Read What They Actually Promised You.

This is the strongest thing in the post and it needs no lawsuit.

It's just what the paperwork says. Four minutes to read.

Read it again. No warranties. On anything the machine makes for you.

Now hold that up next to the ad.

The pitch is that you don't need a web guy. You don't need anybody. Just you and the machine.

The contract says we promise nothing about what the machine makes.

Same company. One of those is in the ad. The other is in the fine print.

I picked Squarespace because their language is short enough to quote. Go pull up Wix. GoDaddy. Elementor. WordPress. Whatever AI builder is in your feed this week.

Go look. I have not found one where the platform takes on a breach, a lawsuit, a copyright claim, or a false claim that came off your site.

They sold you the part where you don't need anybody. They kept the part where nobody is on the hook.

One more. A few AI vendors do offer copyright protection. Read who gets it.

OpenAI's Copyright Shield covers Enterprise and API customers. Not the consumer tiers, as its terms read today (OpenAI, Copyright Shield terms).

You're on a consumer tier. So is almost everybody reading this.

The mistake: assuming somebody else is on the hook.

The fix: go read the terms on your own builder. Four minutes.

The payoff: no surprise later. That's the kind that costs money.

That Widget Isn't a Fix. It's a Bill.

You've seen the ad. One line of code. Instant compliance. Lawsuit protection.

The price is small enough that saying no feels careless. That's the point. It is aimed straight at you.

Businesses running those widgets have kept getting sued anyway.

That's not my opinion. There are named cases.

In 2024 UserWay was sued by one of its own business customers, Bloomsybox, over claims the overlay would ensure compliance and prevent lawsuits (Bloomsybox.com LLC v. UserWay, Inc., No. 1:24-cv-00844, D. Del., filed July 19 2024).

And disability plaintiffs have gone on suing businesses that had an overlay running the whole time.

There's a number people throw around about how many overlay customers got sued. I chased it down. It traces back to vendors selling the opposite product.

No count verified by a court exists. So I'm not repeating it.

The named cases are enough. A script on top of a broken page does not fix the broken page. It just bills you every month while it doesn't.

The mistake: buying the script.

The fix: build it right the first time.

The payoff: no monthly bill for a thing that doesn't work.

Check Three Things. It Takes Ten Minutes.

You don't need an audit. You need ten minutes and no vocabulary at all.

I picked these three on purpose. They are the three most common failures on the internet.

Low contrast text on 83.9% of pages. Missing image descriptions on 53.1%. Missing form labels on 51.0% (WebAIM Million, 2026).

If something is broken on your site, it's probably one of these.

• Tab through your own contact form. Open your contact page. Click in the first box. Press the Tab key five times. Did a visible outline move from field to field? If it vanished, somebody using a keyboard just got lost on your site.
• Ask if your pictures have descriptions. Every photo is supposed to carry a short line of text saying what's in it. That's what a blind customer's screen reader says out loud. You can't see it by looking at the page. So ask whoever built the site. If you get silence, that's what your customer gets too.
• Read your own footer. Just look at it. The gray text on the gray background at the bottom. Can you read it without leaning in? If you can't, neither can somebody who is 60 holding a phone in a parking lot.

That's the whole checklist. If all three come back clean, go run your business.

You are a plain talking website helper. My website is: [PASTE YOUR WEB ADDRESS].

Do these three checks and show me a short table.
1) Can someone move through my contact form using only the Tab key, with a visible outline showing where they are? Say yes, no, or you cannot tell from outside.
2) Do the images on my main pages have text descriptions on them, or are they empty?
3) Is any text on my pages too low contrast to read easily, especially in the footer?

Then do two more things.
4) Tell me in plain words what each answer means for a real customer trying to use my site.
5) Give me the exact questions to ask whoever built or manages my site, and tell me what a good answer sounds like for each one.

Rules: short sentences, no jargon, no scores, no scare tactics. If you cannot confirm something from outside the site, say you cannot confirm it instead of guessing.

Where the AI Builders Are Actually Good.

Weigh this before you take my side. I mean all of it.

AI builders get something live in an afternoon. That is real.

If you have no website at all, that's not a compromise. That's an upgrade over nothing. And nothing is what a lot of small businesses have.

They kill the blank page, which is the hardest part of any job.

They spit out first drafts fast enough that you can throw three away and still be ahead.

And they dropped the cost of looking sharp to about zero.

I use AI every single day. I'm not against AI. I'd be out of my mind to be.

I'm against pretending.

I've written about how I actually build with it and about what came out the other end after a couple hundred builds. The tools are real. They earned their spot on my bench.

Now the turn.

None of that makes you the person who answers for what the thing does.

A great first draft with nobody behind it is still a site with nobody behind it.

The builder's job ended the day the page went live. Yours started that day.

You Don't Need to Be a Web Guy. You Need One.

I never learned plumbing. I called a guy who did.

That's what I bought. Not the knowledge. The end of thinking about it.

Here's the thing nobody says out loud.

Every problem in this post lives in the site itself. The form nobody can tab through. The pictures with nothing behind them. The terms you never read. The widget billing you monthly to not fix it.

You can't patch your way out of that. You sure can't check your way out of it every quarter for the rest of your life.

So I don't sell you a checklist. I build the site. Fewer moving parts. Nothing bolted on that can quietly break. One name on all of it.

You don't need to be a web guy. You need one, and you need the thing he builds.

Let me show you what that looks like in your own market first.

Take a Test Drive →

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FAQ

This is post 1 of three about what AI hands you and what it doesn't. This one is about the build, and who is on the hook. Post 2 is about my own industry, and how easy AI made it to fake the work. Post 3 is about what your site owns and what it collects. Read them in that order and the argument builds.