I Tried GoDaddy’s New AI Tools So You Don’t Have To
What is GoDaddy’s Airo?
One of the most well-known domain registration companies, GoDaddy, is used by lots of businesses big and small. And Airo is their AI tool that can be used to automatically set up a website, create a logo, and write product descriptions/email content based on minimal input from you. Sounds fantastic for small businesses, in theory.
Read more about Airo here from GoDaddy here, and watch their 30-second promo video here.
Note: I’m not affiliated with GoDaddy in any way, they’re absolutely not paying me for this, but because they’re extremely popular, and because Airo is designed with small businesses in mind, I wanted to check out the tool and share my thoughts.
Spoiler: it’s… okay.
GoDaddy Airo Guide
When I first signed up for GoDaddy, I was asked to set 2-factor authentication. I chose SMS and I never got a verification code after multiple attempts. When I switched to use Google Authenticator instead, it worked fine. Not a great start though.
Next, I was asked a very basic question about what I wanted on my site: sell products, take appointments, or something else (you can select all 3 options if you want).
Then I was asked to choose a category for my business. You can choose from lots of options by searching. I chose “Hair Salon and Stylist” from the default list.
Then, after entering a name for your business, they take about 10 seconds to generate the site.
It’s fine, but it needs a lot of tweaking to make it even half-decent, and I’m apalled the capitalization is inconsistent in “Creating Your best Look”.
The rest of the page is pretty bland. It provides most of the basic information and structure you probably want, but in a bland way.
I repeated the process a second time for a hair salon and I got the exact same stock photo and website outline. So it feels more like they’re pretending it’s being AI-generated when actually you just choose a category and they give you their matching template with your business name at the top.
Airo isn’t just about website building though. They’re also touting their logo generation tool, which I also tested for the same fake hair salon. They take your business name, your chosen and you provide an additional few words about your business, and their tool generates a bunch of different logo examples.
These are the logos it generated after I chose “innovative” and “youthful”.
I like that they give you a big 1:1 logo and also a small landscape version. But the logos are effectively all the same - a single colour background, an icon, then your brand name underneath. They’re all functional, but they’re no replacement for hiring a graphic designer to create something actually creative.
Here are some of the options I got when I chose “luxurious” and “formal”.
I… don’t know if it made any difference? None of these seem any more luxurious or formal than the previous ones.
GoDaddy Airo Review
Overall, Airo feels like a splashy way for GoDaddy to jump on the AI bandwagon, but without doing anything new or better than anyone else, and in some cases it doesn’t even feel like AI is used at all.
If you already use GoDaddy, great, their AI tools might help you a bit. But for anyone considering what website builder is best for small businesses, other tools are better. For most businesses you can just pick a Squarespace template you like, which will already look much better than these GoDaddy AI ones, then customize it to suit your business.
And for logos, I’d strongly recommend working with a designer to create something great, or use Canva to create something better than what GoDaddy offers.
I also reviewed Wix’s AI website building tools here, which are a lot more full-featured than GoDaddy.
If you’re looking to create or improve the website for your own small business, reach out to me for a free consultation. Prices start at $1200 USD to create a professional, stylish, and SEO-optimized website.
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