Website builder Squarespace says it’s training its AI tools with curation and taste

Will generative AI tools help people build better websites, or will they just fill the web with spam? With the recent launch of Design Intelligence, a new website builder full of generative AI tools, Squarespace is betting on the former.

I spoke with chief product officer Paul Gubbay about Design Intelligence and Squarespace’s broader AI strategy. Our conversation began with a glimpse at what other (unspecified) AI-powered website builders deliver when prompted to create a generic spa website: confusing, ugly websites.

This was, of course, a setup for a demo of Design Intelligence, which began with a few prompts allowing Gubbay to specify things like the kind of website he wanted to build and the personality of the brand being featured. The resulting website featured AI-generated design, text, and images, but it looked — for lack of a better word — like a “real” site, with plenty of options for further customization.

Gubbay argued that while other website builders have “scrambled very quickly” to launch AI features, those competitors are asking, “How can we take this technology and use it to stand out to our customers?” while Squarespace has been asking something a little different: “How do we take all these latest technologies and really use it to help our customers stand out?”

Read a transcript of our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

When I imagine an AI website generation product, I imagine it looking like a prompt — like everything at the beginning of the demo. But here, with every step, you could still go in and customize it. It looks, in some ways, like Squarespace today. So I’m curious: How did you decide where you wanted the AI to step in and generate elements of the website versus where you wanted it to still be customizable by humans?

We’ve taken our time to really think about how these things come together. So we have this principle when it comes to building something like a website or anything visual: I know it when I see it. And I think that holds true for not just professionals, but for anybody.

Trying to build a website through a chatbot is really challenging. It’s like being in a car and typing in “turn left” or “turn right.” You want the system to be able to show you things, and when you see the thing you like, you want to go, “OK, that’s it.” But then you don’t want to be limited by that; you want to be able to continue playing. We want it to feel like a playground.

And so for us, it really was taking this “I know it when I see it” concept. And every time the team came and said, “How about we add a chat? How about we do these things that everyone’s doing?” we were like, “I don’t think that’s really the way people want to do this.” That just became the model for us, and once everyone adopted that, it became very natural for all of us just to think through that ideology.

It was very important for us, also, that we treat the customers’ information that they give us with a lot of respect. You’re telling us something about who you are, you’re entrusting us to take that and use it effectively for you. So we wanted to make sure that the concepts that we showed you in Blueprint would carry through into the system as well, so that you would feel like those choices you made up front weren’t just for naught.

You also talked about this idea of curation and technology. Often those things are set in opposition to each other, but it sounds like you’ve actually tried to build curation into the technology. You even said that you have a curation engine. Can you talk a bit more about what that looks like?

Our CEO says this sometimes; I think it’s true: The fact that we have text generation inside of our website tool, it’s great. But you could also go to Open AI and ChatGPT, type in something, get the text, and copy and paste it [into Squarespace], and that’s fine as well. The challenge a lot of people have is knowing how to prompt those engines the right way to actually get the right output from them.

We have a very specific, proprietary point of view on how we prompt engines and how we curate the content that comes out of them, to get the look and feel and the views that we think are going to be really valuable to our customers based on our experience, based on what they’re telling us, and based on our taste.

AI imagery is a great example of that. We built our whole library of how we prompt [AI models] specifically to get the type of imagery that we want to get out, that we feel is very Squarespace, very right for our customers. We tag and curate those things, and then we feed that back into the system again.

We do that when we look at color palettes; we do that when we think about layout switching. That’s the curation element. It’s our design and creative team spending lots of time thinking about: How do these elements come together? How do we prompt engines? How do we choose what comes out of this and discard the things that we don’t want that come out of this? We keep getting better and better, so you don’t have to do it. The whole point of coming to us is that you don’t have to do it.

It sounds like part of your approach is, you’re not necessarily trying to build all these models yourself. You’re focusing on how you present it and make it accessible and bring it together.

Look, we’re not the LLM experts in creating all these different types of content. We leverage them. We leverage Google, we’re leveraging OpenAI, Anthropic. We have great partnerships. But for us, the secret sauce is how we’re prompting and curating that content as it’s coming out, and making sure it fits what we know about you.

Obviously, Squarespace has made it easy to create and customize websites already. How do you think bringing more generative AI into the process will change that ecosystem? Are Squarespace websites going to look different than they do today?

I’d like to think that they’re going to look even better. It’s very, very important for us, and it’s always been incredibly important for us, that design is always at the forefront. People come to Squarespace because they believe that design is going to make a difference. And a big part of that difference is not just capturing their brand and who they are, but it’s about making sure that the thing that gets pre-created, at the end of the day, feels bespoke.

When you ask a question like that, it could imply they all look the same in some way. And that’s absolutely not what we would want, right? So I think we are going to give people the tools to get even better results faster, but we will always make sure that it’s going to adhere to the vision of what they want.

Squarespace works very closely with designers; you just wrapped up a whole event with design partners. How do you think designers, especially Squarespace partners, should be looking at a tool like AI? To what extent should they see it as a threat versus an opportunity?

I think it’s important to look at it as an opportunity. AI technology is clearly a huge part of our future, and just like any new technology, learning how to leverage it and use it the right way is going to enhance what you’re able to do. I 1 million percent do not believe it replaces design. It’s meant to enhance it. We will continue to play our role to ensure that it enhances it for our customers and our creators.

We just had Circle Day with many [design] professionals. And when I think about something like design intelligence, for me, it just helps them bring a vision to life faster to share with a customer. But of course, [customers are coming to us] to implement all of the things that they want on top of that. If we can inspire them with some choices that they will then change and go deeper on, fantastic. We’re just going to make the job faster for them and maybe easier for them, but we would never replace them.