Squarespace wants you to build a website with AI. Its Blueprint AI feature began life as a guided website design system in 2023, but, like many things these days, it was revamped with artificial intelligence. I’m a fan of Squarespace's website builder largely due to its bold templates, intuitive backend, and surprising power. Thankfully, the company doesn’t sacrifice those tenets with Blueprint.
It feels less like an AI website builder and more like a tailoring tool, something that can recognize the goals of your site and give you a starting point rather than forcing you to scroll through templates or, worse, start from scratch. It took me just a few minutes to create a website with Blueprint that was totally functional, without giving up the flashy design pillars Squarespace is known for.
First Creation
Squarespace via Jacob Roach
It starts with a topic: What is the website you’re trying to make? Squarespace gives you a list of topics to select from when you start with Blueprint AI, and there are a surprising number of options. You get top-level categories like photography and music, but after entering enough random queries, I stumbled upon everything from civil engineering to therapy services. I even entered “CPU,” and Blueprint correctly suggested computer hardware and components as a topic.
From there, select a few goals you want to achieve with your website—i.e., selling products or publishing a blog—and choose a name and tone. This sets the stage for your site, but the fruits of your labor don’t show up immediately. Squarespace largely uses these points to generate copy for your site.
Before you can get to that, you need to lay out your site. Although you can take any Blueprint website out into the full Squarespace editor, the core of your site is designed on a single page. Squarespace asks which sections you want to include, recommending those that fit your goals, and builds a one-page website with them. You’re given six options for each section, but they aren’t radically different from each other. It's a process on rails, never deviating too far outside of the boundary set by Squarespace's designers, even with AI at the helm.
After your main page is set up, you can add additional pages, though without the option to swap between different layouts. From there, you choose a color palette and your fonts, which gives Blueprint much more character, and you’re done.