AI Is Disrupting Web Builders From the Outside and the Inside at Once
For web-building platforms, the cure and the disease share the same name. As AI rewrites how websites are built, incumbents are laying off staff, flattening hierarchies, and rolling out new tools to keep pace with a fresh crop of rivals. Ironically, the harder these legacy players lean into AI themselves, the harder the market pushes back.
- Wix shed 27% after a Q1 earnings miss — and doubled down anyway, cutting ~1K jobs to fund a full pivot to an AI-native model.
- Even GoDaddy has halved in value over the past year — with its defensive AI tools doing little to ease fears of disruption.
Wider than web: HubSpot is fighting the same battle, too. Its Spring 2026 Spotlight dropped 100+ AI updates, including marketing tools and expanded agents, yet analysts cut price targets anyway. According to Piper Sandler, frontier AI models are beginning to compete for the same budgets, and the market is starting to reassess the value of pre-built platforms vs. a cheaper, DIY alternative. Even double-digit sales growth hasn’t been enough to move the needle — because when the build-vs-buy equation reprices, a strong quarter isn’t enough to change the story.
