Squarespace is laying off about 300 people, 19% of its staff, and describes the cuts as a restructuring to simplify how it works. It has not tied them to AI. But the company's customers now have a way to get what it sells without learning what it taught them, and that is worth understanding whatever the reason inside the company.
The page is no longer the hard part
AI building a website is not new. Wix launched a tool in 2016 that asked a few questions and put a site together. What it produced was still a page, with a layout, some text and a contact form.
What the newer tools produce is a program. In June 2025, Wix paid $80 million for Base44, a tool that turns a typed description into a working app. That matters because a template is a fixed set of choices someone designed in advance, and a typed request has no such limit. Once the request can be anything, the template catalogue stops being the product.
What a florist could ask for
Take a florist with a simple site and a bad habit: she finds out she is out of roses when a customer has already paid for them. A few years ago, fixing that meant a developer's quote, or a monthly subscription to a stock app that did far more than she needed. With a builder that works from typed requests, she could write: keep a count of each flower, take away what each order uses, message me when roses fall below 20, and stop showing them on the shop page at zero.
That is about an afternoon of her time, against several days of a freelancer's. That is the real change for small businesses. The cost of a custom tool falls so far that owners will ask for dozens of small ones (a delivery cut-off time, a repeat-order reminder, a wedding enquiry form that works out a price) instead of one website.
Where the money moves
If anyone can describe a tool, what does a company like Squarespace still sell? Mostly the parts a typed app cannot give itself: a place for it to run, a login for customers, a way to take payment, and someone to call when it breaks. That is the logic of Forma, which is open only through a waitlist, with no price or release date announced. The builders that do well will look more like a reliable shop floor than a catalogue of page designs.
The same shift reaches the people who build sites for small businesses. Choosing fonts and arranging a layout is the work a prompt now covers. What it does not cover is sitting with a florist and noticing that her real problem is the stock count, or checking that the alerts go to the right person. Designers and agencies who sell that understanding will have more to do, and those who sell only pages will compete with a text box.
For the owner, the check matters as much as the request. A stock alert that miscounts is worse than no alert, because she will trust it. When building costs almost nothing, the scarce work is knowing what to ask for and testing that it does what you meant.