AI sites look great, then flop

A generated site typically looks its best on the day it is finished. It has a clean layout, confident headlines and pleasant stock photography. Then it goes live, and three things become apparent.

It sounds like everyone else

Generated copy is competent and generic by construction: it is an average of everything written about your industry. 'Your trusted partner for quality solutions' is not wrong, it is invisible. Meanwhile the one thing that would actually win the enquiry (that you answer the phone on Saturdays, or that you have done four hundred of these in this canton) is nowhere on the page, because the model does not know it. Nobody told it.

It has no structure to rank with

Ask for a website and you generally get one long, handsome page. As covered in our piece on why SME sites do not rank, that is one page competing for every search you care about. Search visibility comes from deliberate structure: a page per service, titles written for what people actually type, internal links, an address search engines can read, structured data. That is a plan, and a plan is the thing you cannot prompt for: you have to know your customers to make it.

The last ten percent is where sites break

The demo ends when the page looks right. The work does not. What we spend our time on after that first draft is almost always the same list:

• The form actually delivering mail, reliably, with spam handled and a confirmation the visitor believes.
• Real behaviour on real devices: small phones, older browsers, long German compound words that break a layout designed around English placeholder text.
• Images that are not four megabytes each, so the page loads on mobile data.
• Accessibility and legal basics: contrast, keyboard use, imprint, privacy policy, cookie handling that fits Swiss and EU rules.
• Someone to call when it breaks in November.

So where do these tools help?

Enormously, in the middle of the process. We use them for research, for structuring an offer, for first drafts of copy, for exploring layout options quickly. They compress the slow parts of the work. What they do not replace is the judgement at either end: deciding what the site must achieve and for whom, and the unglamorous finishing that decides whether it works in the wild.

The bottleneck was never producing a page. It was knowing what the page should say and making sure it holds up on a five-year-old phone.

If you are building your own site with these tools, our honest advice: keep going, and spend your effort on the two things the tool cannot do for you. Write down what makes you the obvious choice in your town, in your words. Then test the finished thing on a phone, on mobile data, and send yourself an enquiry through your own form.