More than half of the small business owners in a new Bluehost survey built their websites with AI instead of hiring a developer. Of 201 U.S. entrepreneurs surveyed in research commissioned by Bluehost, 53% said they used an AI website builder, TechRadar reported on Oct. 16.
Owners who built with AI reported average savings of $850 and about 32 working hours compared with hiring a developer or agency, according to Bluehost’s report. Most were happy with the result: 72% expressed strong approval and 97% were at least moderately satisfied. But only 9% published the AI’s first draft without changes. Setting up the domain or hosting was among the tasks owners were least likely to hand to AI, cited by 21%.
The survey lands as freelance postings for routine web work shrink. Historical recruitment figures from Freelancer.com show website design advertisements fell 59% between the second quarter of 2024 and the third quarter of 2026. PHP opportunities fell by the same margin, WordPress assignments dropped 58% and HTML programming vacancies fell 55%. Graphic design ads fell 43% over the same stretch, while data entry jobs rose 16%. TechRadar cautioned that the numbers come from a single marketplace and can’t show that AI caused the decline.
Entry-level developers have taken a hit in the wider job market too. Employment of U.S. software developers aged 22 to 25 has fallen nearly 20% from its late-2022 peak, according to Stanford Digital Economy Lab research using ADP payroll data through July 2025.
Some developers are going solo instead. In the 2026 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, based on 30,903 responses, the share of respondents working as a company of one rose from 4% to 10%. Stack Overflow said one possible explanation is that AI tools let a single worker handle many more types of tasks.
Software and web development jobs fell 21% in the first half of 2025, according to SEOScaleUp dataset analysis reported by LiveAIWire. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs 2025 report noted that independent workers tend to adapt faster than traditional employees because their skill development is self-directed.
The tools are getting better at the work, too. In a 2024 GitHub randomized controlled trial that recruited 243 Python developers, those using Copilot were 53.2% more likely to pass all 10 unit tests on a web server coding task.
Business owners who skipped AI so far aren’t ruling it out. Among survey respondents who hadn’t used an AI website builder, 71% said they would consider one for future projects.