There are tools now that write, design and publish a whole website from a few sentences. Some designers use them to sell sites for under $1,000, and the result can look polished on a laptop. Looking polished and working are two different things, so we ran a real one through our free website check: an AI-built site for a small business that sells web design and AI search optimization itself.
We aren't naming it. The problems below aren't about one business; they're what we find on AI-built sites again and again. What matters is that you can check for every one of them yourself.
ChatGPT got 8 words
People see a full page of about 2,000 words. So do Google and Perplexity, because the builder hands those two a finished copy. But when ChatGPT's crawler and Claude's crawler asked for the same page, they got an empty shell: 8 words. The blog posts were the same story.
That matters more every month. People now ask ChatGPT and Claude who to hire, and an AI assistant can't recommend, quote or describe a page it can't read. A site sold on being found in AI search was invisible to two of the biggest ones.
Reviews in the code that weren't on the page
Websites can describe themselves to Google in hidden code called structured data. This site's code told Google it had a 5.0 rating from five reviews and named the five reviewers. Four of the five names appear nowhere on the page.
Google's rules say reviews in structured data have to be visible to visitors, and it doesn't show stars for reviews a business publishes about itself. At best the stars never show. At worst it draws a penalty. Either way, a customer comparing the code to the page would have questions.
The AI's notes were still in it
Inside the page's code were the AI tool's own working notes, such as “PERFORMANCE: Critical inline CSS. Covers above-the-fold layout…”. They don't show on screen, but anyone who opens the page source sees them, and so does every crawler. It's the website version of leaving the sticky notes on a finished report: a sign that nobody read through what the tool produced.
Copy that sounds like everyone else's
The home page had 22 em dashes in about 2,000 words, plus “seamlessly”, “leverage”, “empowering” and “digital landscape”. None of that is wrong on its own. Together it's the voice AI writing tools default to, and customers have learned to hear it. When your site sounds like every other AI-written site, the one thing it can't do is sound like you.
What a $1,000 site leaves out
A site under $1,000 isn't cheap because someone found a trick. It's cheap because the expensive parts are skipped: checking what Google and AI tools actually receive, writing copy around what your customers search for, making sure the reviews on the site are real and visible, moving you off the old site without breaking a single link, and a person who answers when something breaks.
Then there's the part that doesn't show on the invoice. A site generated by a builder usually lives on that builder and is billed by it every month, and you should ask before you buy whether you can take the code with you if you leave. When the site has to be rebuilt in a year or two because it can't grow, can't be found or can't be moved, the $900 site turns out to be the expensive one.
We price differently on purpose. Business websites from us start at $5,000, quoted in writing before anything begins, and you own what you pay for. The pricing page shows what moves that number, and the website cost guide compares every option honestly, the cheap ones included.
Check any website in two minutes
- Run it through our free checkType the address into the website check. It asks for the page the way ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google do, and flags reviews in the code that aren't on the page, leftover AI notes and AI-builder fingerprints.
- Look at the page sourceOn a computer, right-click the page and choose View Page Source, then search for the builder's name or for words like “placeholder” and “TODO”.
- Compare the reviewsDo the reviews on the site match the ones on the business's Google profile? Can you find the reviewers anywhere?
- Ask who owns itWho owns the domain, the code and the content? Can you take the site with you if you leave? Get it in writing.
- Ask for three live sites and a client you can callReal sites you can open on your phone, and a real owner who'll pick up. Anyone can show a screenshot.
Is AI always the problem?
No. Good tools, AI included, are part of how any modern studio works, ours too. The problem is a site nobody checked: what it shows to Google and AI tools, whether its reviews are real, whether anything was left behind, whether the words sound like the business. That's the difference between a tool and a person accountable for what the tool made.
Every site we've built passes the same check, and you can run our live work through it yourself.
Written by Nikita Huttenlocher, founder and lead engineer at Huttenlocher Technologies, a web design and software company in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.