Before you launch an AI-built website: the checks people skip

A website that would have taken weeks can now be generated in an afternoon. The building got faster; the checking did not. Most problems with AI-built sites are not bugs in the code. They are things nobody asked for: a missing description, a form that sends nowhere, a hero image that takes eight seconds to load on a phone.

Technical SEO: the quiet basics

Search engines need a few signals to understand a site, and AI tools often skip them unless asked. A short pass covers most of it:

• A unique title and meta description for every page.
• One H1 per page, with headings that follow in order.
• A sitemap, a robots.txt that allows indexing, and canonical links to avoid duplicates.
• Descriptive alt text on images that carry meaning.
• Structured data for people, organisations, articles or products where it fits.
• Internal links between related pages, and no broken ones.

Creators share long SEO prompts for AI tools that include exactly these items. They are useful as a reminder, as long as someone checks the result rather than trusting it.

Speed on the device people actually use

Most visitors arrive on a phone, often on mobile data. Check pages there, not only on a fast laptop. Large images are the usual culprit: resize them, use modern formats such as WebP, and load images below the fold lazily. Google’s Core Web Vitals give a simple read on loading, responsiveness and layout stability.

Does everything work?

Submit every form and confirm the message arrives. Click every link. Visit an address that does not exist and see what the 404 page says. If the site replaces an old one, set redirects from the old addresses so existing links and search rankings carry over. Check that analytics records visits and that the cookie banner behaves as the law requires where your visitors live.

Automated testing, with a person in charge

Automated tests can now run while you sleep. One builder described an overnight run across three phones that produced around 500 tests, a third of them failing, and revealed that the documentation he had been feeding his AI agents was wrong. The lesson is not that automation replaces checking. It is that automation finds problems quickly, and a person still has to decide which ones matter and why they happened.

How it looks when shared

Paste the link into a messaging app before launch. Open Graph tags control the image, title and description people see. A missing image or a generic title makes a good site look unfinished.

Make it a habit

Write the checks above into one list and use it for every launch. The list will grow with each mistake you catch, and launches will get calmer each time.