AI has given marketers something they’ve wanted for years: speed. Landing pages that used to take weeks now take minutes, and product content scales without headcount.
That’s genuinely good news, but speed has a side effect that most marketing teams haven’t fully reckoned with yet. The experiences being built at this pace aren’t automatically accessible to everyone. And for brands focused on reach and conversion, that’s a problem hiding in plain sight.
The customers marketers aren’t thinking about
Before accessibility becomes a legal conversation, it’s a customer experience one. People with disabilities don’t stop needing products and services. They stop buying from brands whose sites make it impossible to complete a purchase.
Think about what that actually looks like in practice. A shopper who relies on a keyboard to navigate can’t complete checkout if a site wasn’t built with that in mind. A customer using a screen reader can’t tell what they’re ordering if product images lack alt text.
More than 1.3 billion people globally live with a disability, including roughly 1 in 4 U.S. adults, according to the World Health Organization. That’s a significant share of the audience that campaigns are working to reach, and accessibility barriers are turning them away before they ever convert.
The brands getting this right have realized that accessibility isn’t a compliance checkbox sitting outside the marketing function. It’s a conversion problem, a retention problem and, increasingly, a legal problem.
The web is growing faster than accessibility can keep up
AI-powered coding and building tools have made it possible for smaller teams to build more, launch faster and compete at a scale that wasn’t feasible five years ago.
The challenge is that speed without built-in accessibility checking compounds existing gaps quickly. According to AudioEye’s Digital Accessibility Index, which analyzed more than 15,000 websites, the average web page still contains 297 accessibility issues, even among organizations actively investing in compliance. As the web grows, so does the surface area of those gaps.
Digital accessibility lawsuits have also increased by 102% since 2020, according to AudioEye research, and 77% of cases are now filed in state courts, where penalties vary widely and can stack quickly. One data point that should give every marketing and legal team pause: 38.5% of businesses sued in 2025 already had an accessibility solution in place. A widget or overlay is not the same as actual compliance, and plaintiffs’ attorneys know how to demonstrate the difference
Good intentions aren’t enough, and AI is widening the gap
Earlier this year, AudioEye surveyed more than 400 business leaders about how they were approaching, prioritizing and viewing accessibility. The findings pointed to a structural problem, rather than a lack of care. More than half say they actively champion accessibility, yet 58% report their budgets are too low to act on it.
Nearly half manage accessibility entirely in-house, yet most of those organizations admit they lack the internal expertise to do it well.
That gap was already real before AI accelerated the pace of building. Now, teams that couldn’t keep up with manual accessibility review are publishing more pages, faster, with the same constraints. Accessibility becomes the thing that happens after the launch, after the campaign, after the complaint.
The answer is smarter systems, not slower delivery
It’s not necessary to pump the brakes on AI. AI tools are only as good as what they’re optimized for, and right now, most aren’t optimized for accessibility. That’s not a criticism of the technology; it’s just a gap that marketers need to account for. The response is about treating accessibility with the same operational rigor that marketing teams already apply to SEO, performance and brand safety.
That means moving beyond one-time audits and toward 24/7 monitoring. It means pairing automation with human expertise, because even the best automated tools can only detect about two-thirds of accessibility barriers, and the issues most likely to trigger legal action often require a human to catch. And it means embedding accessibility into the workflows teams are already using, rather than treating it as a separate workstream.
The organizations making real progress have stopped thinking about accessibility as a cost of compliance and started thinking about it as a driver of reach. According to AudioEye, 61% of organizations that invest seriously in accessibility say it gives their brand a competitive edge, and 42% report increased website traffic as a result. Accessible experiences are faster, structurally cleaner and easier to use for every customer, not just customers with disabilities.
Build for everyone
AI is one of the most powerful tools marketers have ever had. However, this doesn’t mean the online experiences that AI helps build work for everyone who discovers them.
The brands that get this right won’t just stay out of court; they’ll reach more customers, earn more trust and build digital experiences that hold up as the web keeps growing.
Partner insights from AudioEye
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