I worked at web agencies for a lot of my career, and I'm thinking about the kinds of projects we would get: build a website, build a simple app, build internal tools, maintain a WordPress site, build a website theme, etc...
It feels like a lot of that is being taken over by LLMs and tools like Claude Code? Are agencies feeling cooked right now?
If you're at an agency, what's happening in your world?
In fact, I recently started a one-man-show business I'm doing as a bit of an experiment in my city.
Every single web agency here builds WordPress sites. Really old, mostly ugly, WordPress sites.
So I've built out a next.js-powered CRM that's faster, more secure, easier to use, etc.
Now I'm in the starting stages of rebuilding local sites for free just to grab the case studies.
I'm doing this 1.) as a bit of an experiment and 2.) because it feels like the web agencies here are ripe for disruption (and no one else seems to even mention or touch AI)
With Claude + Codex (and a 15-year background in WordPress) I've jumped from taking around a month to build out a custom site to less than a day.
The interesting/tougher part will be product/market fit and building those first few paying clients.
So to answer your question? It definitely looks like it. I'm sure there are plenty out there who are adapting but they seem to be the exception in what I've seen.
Using AI powered prototypes to sell clients on new features has gone really well for us. Many of our clients have presold themselves on adding AI features of some kind, which is nice because it generally means they will need support for these features going forwards.
What's trickier to replace is the accumulation of client context over time. Why the checkout flow is the way it is (there was a lawsuit in 2019). Why they won't touch the header layout (CEO personally designed it). The social graph of who needs to approve what. That institutional knowledge doesn't live in any document and takes months to build.
The agencies I've seen adapt are the ones repositioning from "we build things" to "we make sure what you build works." Audits, performance optimization, conversion analysis — work where the output is insight rather than deliverables. AI makes auditing faster, not obsolete; if anything, it lets a two-person agency do the throughput of a ten-person one.
The agencies building WordPress sites for $3K without a clear differentiation story — those are cooked. The ones who use AI to 10x their analysis and charge for what they know rather than what they type — those might be fine.
Why? Because I don't know the basis, I can't decide what AI generated suggestion is good and what bad, what will work, and what won't work. Sometimes AI suggests things that are just not ethical. If I had a good basis, like in software development, I would have better results.
Yes, for sure, work will drop and it will affect some people, but web agencies will stay. I will give you another example. I have all the tools at home to make my own desk, but at the end of the day, I go to IKEA and buy a new from there ;) . I believe that the number of people needed to do a job will decrease, and the demanded quality will increase, because manual labor is more expensive. Because it is more expensive, it make sense clients to demand more for what they pay.
Time will show :)
I suppose it wasn't quite a "web agency" as they also took on some more complex projects, but demand really started to dry up in the back half of last year.
My understanding was that it was less AI competing, but that there was just far fewer companies with the budget or interest to spend. I live in the UK though and our economy is horrendous which I'm sure is 80% of it.
I think you're right though... Web agencies are probably more or less cooked. Not because there will be no demand for someone to build a website, but because increased competition and efficiency will make it a much less profitable business to run. If you can do in a day what used to take a week you won't be able to charge the same for the same project, so you either find 5x more clients or make far less money.