Part 8 of our series: AI-Powered Websites
The web design brief has always been a strange document. It's meant to capture everything a client wants from their new website: their goals, their audience, their aesthetic preferences, their functional requirements. It should distil all of that into something a design and development team can act on.
In practice, most briefs are thin. Not because the client doesn't care, but because they don't know what they don't know. They can tell you they want a "modern" website. They can point to a competitor's site they like. They might mention they want it to "rank on Google." But the strategic depth that separates a genuinely effective website from a pretty one rarely makes it into the initial brief.
AI has fundamentally changed how we handle this. Every web project we take on now begins with an AI-powered research and analysis phase that transforms the brief from a starting point into a strategic document. The result is better websites, faster project timelines, and clients who feel genuinely understood from the first conversation.
What the old process looked like
Before AI, our brief process followed a familiar pattern. We'd meet the client, ask our standard discovery questions, review their existing site and their competitors, put together a proposal, and begin design. The research phase, understanding the competitive landscape, identifying content gaps, analysing what works and what doesn't in the client's market, happened largely in the designer's and strategist's heads, informed by experience and intuition.
This worked. We've built successful websites this way for over a decade. But it had limitations. The depth of competitive analysis was constrained by the time we could justify spending on it. The number of competitor sites we could meaningfully review was limited to three or four. And the insights we could draw were inevitably shaped by our existing knowledge of the industry, which might be extensive for sectors we work in frequently and thinner for new verticals.
What the new process looks like
Now, before we've had our first substantive meeting with a new client, we run a comprehensive AI-powered analysis of their market. Here's what that involves.
We feed AI the client's existing website and ask it to conduct a thorough review: what's working, what's not, what's missing, how the information architecture serves (or fails) the visitor, how the content positions the business, and what impression a first-time visitor would form. This isn't a technical audit. It's a strategic assessment of the site as a communication tool.
We then feed it the websites of their top competitors, usually five to eight sites, far more than we'd have reviewed manually. The AI analyses each one, identifying their positioning, their content strategy, their design patterns, their strengths and weaknesses. It then synthesises these individual analyses into a competitive landscape overview: where the market clusters, where the gaps are, and where our client could credibly differentiate.
We also use AI with web search to research the client's target audience: what they search for, what questions they ask online, what concerns they express in forums and review sites, and what their decision-making process looks like. This audience intelligence feeds directly into information architecture decisions: what pages to build, what content to prioritise, and how to structure the user journey from landing to conversion.
A real example
Recently, we began a project for a client in the bespoke kitchen industry here in Hertfordshire. Before AI, our research would have involved looking at three or four competitor sites, noting what we liked and didn't like, and drawing on our general understanding of how luxury markets work online.
With AI, we analysed eight competitor websites in depth. We identified a clear pattern: almost every luxury kitchen company in the UK leads with their portfolio photography (beautiful but undifferentiated) and buries the process information that actually builds trust (how long does a project take? What happens at each stage? What's the typical investment level?).
The AI found that potential customers in this market have a research phase that can last months. They visit multiple sites, compare approaches, and look for signals of quality and reliability beyond the photographs. The sites that performed best in terms of engagement didn't just show beautiful kitchens. They demonstrated expertise, process, and an understanding of the customer's anxiety about committing to a significant purchase.
This insight shaped the entire project. Instead of leading with a gallery, we recommended leading with the design philosophy and process. Instead of hiding pricing, we recommended being transparent about investment levels. Instead of treating the portfolio as a grid of images, we recommended in-depth case studies that tell the story of each project: the client's brief, the design challenges, the material choices, and the final result.
None of these recommendations were radical. An experienced designer might have reached similar conclusions through intuition. But the AI-powered analysis gave us confidence in those conclusions because they were grounded in data rather than gut feel. And when we presented the strategy to the client, we could show them exactly why we were recommending what we recommended, with specific evidence from their competitive landscape.
How this changes the client relationship
The most significant impact of AI-powered briefing isn't technical. It's relational. When a client sits down for their first strategic meeting and we present a detailed analysis of their market, their competitors, their audience's behaviour, and a clear rationale for our recommended approach, the dynamic shifts.
Instead of the client explaining their business to us and hoping we understand it, we're demonstrating that we've already done the work to understand it. The conversation becomes collaborative rather than extractive. The client isn't answering our questions. They're reacting to our analysis, adding nuance, correcting assumptions, and building on insights.
This changes the quality of the output. When the brief is informed by genuine market intelligence rather than a single discovery meeting, the resulting website is more strategically aligned from the start. There are fewer revisions, fewer "actually, we think we need to change direction" moments, and fewer compromises made because nobody had the data to argue for a better approach.
The speed advantage
There's also a practical time benefit. The AI-powered research phase takes hours, not weeks. We can go from initial client enquiry to strategic recommendation in days rather than the weeks it would take to conduct the same level of research manually.
This matters for competitive pitches. When we're one of three agencies pitching for a project, whether that's a Hertfordshire manufacturer, a London professional services firm, or an Essex retailer, the quality and depth of our initial proposal, informed by real competitive analysis rather than generic promises, sets us apart before we've built anything. Clients can see the difference between an agency that's done the homework and one that's presented a template proposal with their logo pasted in.
What we don't use AI for
To be clear about what this isn't: we don't use AI to design websites. The creative work, visual design, layout composition, typographic choices, brand expression, is done by humans. AI has no aesthetic judgement worth trusting for work that needs to be distinctive and memorable.
We also don't use AI to replace the client conversation. The research phase augments and informs the conversation, but the conversation itself, understanding the client's ambitions, their constraints, their personality, the nuances that don't show up in any analysis, requires human connection and human empathy.
What AI does is ensure that when we sit down for that conversation, we're already informed, already analytical, and already thinking strategically about the client's specific situation. The conversation starts at a higher level because the groundwork has been done.
Looking forward
Over this series, we've explored eight ways that AI is changing how we build and optimise websites for businesses across Hertfordshire, Essex, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, London, and beyond. From embedding intelligent features that serve end users, to automating technical SEO, to transforming how we research and plan every project.
The common thread across all of these isn't the technology itself. It's the principle that AI should make things genuinely better for the people involved: better tools for website visitors, better strategies for our clients, and better processes for our team. When AI is applied with that intention, it creates real, measurable value. When it's applied as a novelty or a marketing talking point, it creates noise.
We've chosen to invest in the former. If you've read this far, you probably have too.
If you'd like to explore how AI-powered features could work on your website, or if you're planning a web project and want a strategic approach informed by the kind of analysis we've described in this series, we'd welcome the conversation. It starts, as all good things do, with understanding your business. And that's something we're now better equipped to do than ever.
This is the final article in our series on AI-Powered Websites. Start from the beginning: [Why We're Building AI Into Client Websites, Not Just Using It Behind the Scenes](/blog/building-ai-into-client-websites)