The website is no longer “just” a digital brochure. In 2026, it’s the primary revenue engine, the core brand experience, and increasingly the place where AI interacts with your customers before a human ever does.
Webflow’s 2026 State of the Website report takes a close look at how prepared organisations really are for this shift. To find out, they surveyed 1,000 marketing and technology leaders (director level and above) across the US, UK and Canada, all working at organisations with at least 50 employees.
The findings are clear — and a bit brutal:
- 73% of organisations face technical barriers and integration issues that affect their ability to adopt AI.
- 92% of technical leaders say AI is critical for website innovation over the next two years.
- 96% of marketing leaders say the pace of innovation and customer expectations has increased the pressure on their department in the last year.
The central message: AI is ready. Customers are ready. Most web platforms are not.
The report frames this through four big themes: the AI adoption gap, a growing collaboration crisis, the weight of technical debt, and the path forward via AI-native platforms.
The AI Adoption Gap: Big Expectations, Slow Reality
If there’s one thing the report makes obvious, it’s that belief in AI is not the problem — the disconnect lies between what leaders want AI to do for their websites and what they can actually get into production. Almost everyone is convinced that AI will shape the future of digital experiences, but only a small fraction feel equipped to turn that conviction into tangible, on-site results.
On the upside, 92% of technical leaders believe AI is critical to web innovation in the next two years, unlocking better productivity, efficiency and personalization. Marketing and technical leaders are especially excited about:
- Improved SEO and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
- Better analytics and reporting
- Automated workflows and virtual assistants
- Stronger personalization and engagement
AEO, in particular, stands out as an urgent opportunity: as users increasingly search via LLMs and AI assistants, teams need structured, context-rich content that machines can easily interpret and surface.
But then reality hits:
- 95% of respondents say they experience barriers to adopting AI.
- 54% of technical leaders worry about using AI tools in production, especially around security.
- 64% hesitate due to resource gaps, uncertainty, or lack of direction.
- 67% of marketing leaders struggle to calculate AI ROI.
The report breaks blockers into two groups:
Hesitations
- Security, privacy and compliance concerns
- Lack of clarity on use cases and benefits
- Fear of choosing the “wrong” technology
Implementation barriers
- Integration challenges and ineffective tools
- Weak governance and poor data
- Brand protection concerns (can AI stay on-brand?)
A huge 73% of respondents face at least one technical or integration barrier when trying to implement AI – often because they’re stuck on platforms never designed for AI-driven workflows.
Despite this, teams are moving:
- 64% of marketing leaders say they’re already creating content with LLMs and AEO/SEO in mind.
- 69% are actively optimizing for visibility across LLMs and AI-generated search results.
The takeaway: AI is already reshaping how the web works, but legacy platforms and unclear strategy are capping the upside.
The Collaboration Crisis: Who Actually Owns the Website?
Beneath the technology story, the report surfaces a very human problem: the people who should be working together to move the website forward often aren’t aligned on who does what, who decides what, and who ultimately owns outcomes. The website sits at the intersection of marketing, design, product, and engineering — and unless these groups are pulling in the same direction, even the best tools won’t fix the friction.
Traditionally, marketing raised tickets, engineering shipped changes, and sites evolved slowly but predictably. Now, modern platforms enable marketers to own more of the website directly — but organisational structures, tools, and governance haven’t fully caught up.
The result: a tug-of-war over website ownership.
- Marketing and technical leaders don’t agree on who owns web strategy.
- 91% of technical leaders report some level of friction between technical and non-technical teams when making website changes.
- 92% think the relationship between marketing and engineering needs to improve.
This misalignment has real costs at every level:
Marketers lack autonomy:
93% say they’re at least somewhat reliant on developers, agencies, or external expertise for website changes.
Developers are dragged into non-critical work:
96% of technical leaders say platform and process gaps force devs to do tasks that non-technical stakeholders should be able to handle — rising to 100% for teams using headless CMSs.
Burnout and talent challenges:
93% of developers report frustrations working on their organisation’s website, and 58% of technical leaders link this to hiring or retention issues (76% for headless CMS teams).
On top of that, nearly half of organisations are struggling with execution:
- 46% struggle to consistently deliver web projects on time.
- 53% struggle to keep projects within budget.
In other words: even if you fix AI strategy, a broken collaboration model will still slow everything down.
The Weight of Technical Debt: Patchwork Stacks, Slower Teams
Zooming out from people and process, the report paints a picture of technical foundations that simply haven’t kept pace with what modern websites are being asked to do. Years of quick fixes, one-off integrations, and aging CMS decisions have accumulated into technical debt that quietly taxes every new idea, every campaign, and every experiment.
Years of layering tools on top of restrictive CMSs has created fragile, complex stacks that are expensive to maintain and resistant to change.
The report describes technical debt as:
- Outdated systems
- Inefficient integrations
- Workarounds that multiply over time
This leads to a situation where:
- Marketers are stuck relying on developers for even basic content or site updates.
- Developers spend their days maintaining brittle codebases instead of building scalable systems that empower marketing.
Meanwhile, the demand side is exploding:
- 92% of organisations say website update requests are growing in size and complexity.
- 95% say they’re receiving more web project requests overall.
Companies have tried to solve this by bolting tools together — analytics here, personalization there, experimentation somewhere else. But those fragmented stacks actually increase the load, rather than reducing it.
For technical teams, the impact is serious:
- 97% of technical leaders say technical debt is affecting their ability to effectively manage the website.
- Only 47% feel completely confident their current web infrastructure can support rapid innovation without introducing new security risks.
For marketing teams, the most time-consuming tasks are telling:
- Improving SEO
- Creating/managing/updating page templates
- Designing and launching custom experiences or pages
Those should be fast and high-leverage activities. Instead, technical debt turns them into slow, coordination-heavy projects. It’s no surprise, then, that only 34% of leaders say they’re completely satisfied with their website and feel it doesn’t need improvements — dropping to 29% for those using custom-built sites. The message: technical debt is no longer a background annoyance — it’s a strategic blocker.
The Path Forward: AI-Native Platforms for Modern Teams
After laying out the problems, the report doesn’t just leave leaders with anxiety; it sketches a clear direction of travel for organisations that want their websites to keep up with — and even capitalise on — the AI wave. The core idea is that tinkering with tools at the edges is no longer enough; the real leverage comes from changing the platform that everything else sits on.
The report points to 2026 as an inflection point, driven by three converging trends:
- AI reaching enterprise maturity
- Technical debt hitting critical mass
- Collaboration issues reaching a tipping point
To break the cycle, organisations need to invest in AI-native website platforms that:
- Are built around AI from the ground up (not bolted on)
- Create a shared language between design, marketing, and development
- Support safe, governed, and measurable AI use across the website lifecycle
Both marketing and technical leaders already have clear priorities for the next 12 months, including:
- Improving website security
- Optimizing for AI-driven search and summaries
- Improving adoption of new and existing tools
- Hitting lead generation and revenue targets
- Improving overall site health
From these priorities, the report distils three “truths” about today’s web:
- AI-native platforms are table stakes
- If you don’t adopt and optimize for AI at the platform layer, you’ll lose visibility, relevance, and market share as AI-driven discovery becomes the norm.
- Cross-functional collaboration is a competitive requirement
- To meet rising expectations, marketing and technical teams must work in lockstep on performance, security, and optimization — not fight over ownership.
- Your website is a revenue engine — if you can move fast
- Achieving modern growth targets requires platforms that empower everyone (not just developers) to execute quickly and safely.
The report is unapologetic about one thing: traditional DXPs, headless or legacy CMSs, drag-and-drop builders, and many custom builds are creating unsustainable technical debt and misalignment. They make it hard to adopt new AI technologies and push teams into siloed workflows where no one truly owns outcomes.
In contrast, an AI-native website experience platform is framed as the foundation for:
- True cross-functional collaboration
- Flexibility and speed, without sacrificing security
- Reduced technical debt and organisational friction
- Websites that become a durable competitive advantage
What This Means for Web Leaders in 2026
Taken together, the report doesn’t just offer a snapshot of the current landscape — it functions as a pretty blunt roadmap for anyone responsible for a modern website. It shows that the challenges leaders are feeling day to day (slow delivery, mounting requests, AI confusion, cross-team friction) aren’t random; they’re symptoms of deeper structural issues in how websites are powered and governed.
Stepping back, the 2026 State of the Website paints a very consistent picture:
- AI is non-optional for modern web strategy, but adoption is bottlenecked by legacy platforms, risk concerns, and a lack of clear frameworks.
- Collaboration breakdowns between marketing and engineering are wasting talent, slowing execution, and fuelling burnout.
- Technical debt is eroding confidence, increasing security risks, and dragging both teams away from innovation.
- AI-native platforms — designed for speed, collaboration, and answer engines — are emerging as the differentiator between organisations that merely survive the shift and those that turn it into a growth advantage.
If you’re leading a marketing, product, or engineering team, the report’s implicit call to action is:
- Audit your stack and technical debt — where is your CMS/platform actively blocking AI, not just “failing to help”?
- Clarify ownership and governance — who owns which parts of the website, how AI can be used, and how decisions get made.
- Invest at the platform layer, not just the tool layer — scattered AI tools won’t fix a non-AI-ready foundation.
- Optimize for AEO now — treat AI assistants and LLMs as a primary discovery surface, not a future nice-to-have.
The future of the web is not just more pages, more campaigns, or more integrations — it’s faster, AI-powered, cross-functional website operations on platforms that were built for this moment. If you’re preparing a business case or aligning stakeholders for 2026, this is exactly what we cover in an strategy session, book a strategy call to discover how you can maximise your site.
