AI-generated images are acceptable for decoration and abstraction on a business site. They become a problem the moment they depict something a customer would reasonably take to be real: your team, your premises or your finished work.
Short answer
Generated images are fine as illustration and unwise as evidence. Using one to show your team, your building or work you have done misrepresents the business, whatever the caption says. Rights, model terms and alt text all need settling before publishing, and real photographs of real work outperform generated images anyway.
There are two jobs an image does on a business site. It decorates a page, or it evidences a claim. Generated images are reasonable for the first and misleading for the second, and most disputes come from confusing them.
An abstract header image, a diagram, a background texture or an icon set is decoration. Nobody reading the page believes it depicts a specific real thing, so nothing is being asserted by its presence.
A photograph of a finished kitchen, a team standing outside a building, or a van with your name on it is evidence. A reader takes it as a record of something that happened, and a generated version of that is a false statement.
Advertising rules apply to images as well as words. An image that creates a false impression about a business, its work or its premises can be deceptive regardless of whether the text around it is accurate.
Generated people are the sharpest case. A page showing warm, competent staff who do not exist implies a scale and a team that the business does not have. Our page on honest claims covers the principle. Nothing here is legal advice.
Before and after photographs carry the highest risk of all. Our page on before and after photos covers the rules, and none of them survive the picture being generated rather than taken.
Ownership of generated output varies by tool and by the terms you agreed to. Some allow commercial use freely, some restrict it by plan, and some retain rights you may not expect. Read the terms for the tool you actually use.
Protection is a separate question from permission. In several jurisdictions purely machine-generated work may not attract copyright protection, which means you may be free to use an image and unable to stop anybody else using it.
Keep a record of which tool produced which image and under what terms. Our page on images and copyright covers why that record matters when somebody eventually asks.
The rules below are what we would give any small business. They are short because the distinction is simple once stated, and most of the difficulty in practice is holding to it when a real photograph is inconvenient.
Alt text describes what an image shows for somebody who cannot see it. How the image was produced is irrelevant to that person, so the origin does not belong in the description.
Decorative images need no description at all and should be marked so screen readers skip them. Our page on alt text covers the distinction and the common mistakes.
What matters to a reader, and to an answer engine, is that the text matches the picture. A generated image described with generic alt text is doubly useless, because neither the image nor the description conveys anything specific to anyone.
Customers can tell. Generated imagery has a recognizable quality, and a page full of it reads as a business that either has nothing to show or chose not to show it. Both readings hurt.
Real work also carries detail that persuades. The particular kitchen, the awkward site, the finished job in weather that was clearly unpleasant. None of that can be generated because none of it happened.
A phone camera and ten minutes at the end of a job produces better material than any tool, and it accumulates. Businesses that make it a habit end up with an asset no competitor can copy.
Generated images tend to arrive large and uncompressed, and dropping them straight onto a page is a common cause of slow loading. Resize to the dimensions actually used and compress before uploading.
Give every file a descriptive name rather than the string the tool produced. Our page on image names covers why, and it applies identically whatever produced the picture.
Set width and height so the layout does not shift as images load. That single habit fixes most of the layout instability our page on layout shift describes.
For decoration, diagrams and abstract illustration, yes. Not for anything a reader would take as a record of something real, such as your team, your premises or work you claim to have completed. Nothing here is legal advice.
It depends on the tool and the terms you accepted. Some grant commercial use, some restrict it by plan. Separately, purely machine-generated work may not attract copyright protection in some jurisdictions, so others may be free to use it too.
No. Alt text describes what the image shows for somebody who cannot see it, and the production method is not part of that. If disclosure matters for your audience, put it in a visible caption instead.
No. Those images function as evidence of work performed, and generating them misrepresents the business. Use photographs of real jobs, with permission where the property or person is identifiable. Nothing here is legal advice.
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