Ai can turn website maintenance from a backlog into an ongoing, continuous process, but external suppliers must be transparent about costs.
A lot of website maintenance is not especially glamorous. Fixing missing image alt text. Tidying title tags. Finding broken links. Making sure old pages still point people somewhere useful.
Much of this is repetitive, and seems trivial. So much so that we never get around to it. And that is exactly where Ai agents start to become interesting.
Ai automation can be given a goal, a set of rules and controlled access to a website. Its task might be rewriting weak meta descriptions using agreed brand guidelines or checking whether important service pages have the right structured data. It is not hard to imagine uses. (Struggling to think of them? Ask Ai!)
The real limit is not the technology. Many website hosts now offer these tools as standard. I’ve done some amazing things already on some hobby websites which, in the past, I’ve never had the time to maintain the way I would want to. The real limit is imagination.
This has an awkward implication for businesses whose websites are managed by external agencies. If an agency is still doing genuinely expert work, then it should be paid properly. No argument there.
But if work that used to take two days now takes two hours because Ai automation is doing the heavy lifting, the pricing model should reflect that. We should not be paying historic manual rates for automated maintenance. It may be time to reassess what’s being offered for the money.