Where AI genuinely improves the experience of a website — and where it only adds surface area.
The best uses of AI in a website are quiet. They shorten the distance between a visitor's question and an answer: search that understands intent, content that adapts to what someone has already read, forms that qualify without interrogating, and support that resolves the routine questions so people can reach a human about the complicated ones.
The failure mode is AI as decoration. A chatbot bolted onto a page that has no answers, or personalization applied to a site whose underlying story is unclear, makes a slow experience faster to abandon.
Design decisions still govern. Someone has to decide what the interface promises, what it refuses to do, and what happens when the model is wrong. That work — hierarchy, clarity, error states, trust — is unchanged by better tools.