AI can build your website by dinner. Who checks whether it works?
AI made building a website fast and cheap, but checking whether it holds up still takes a person with expertise.
August 5, 2026Last updated October 14, 2026
You can have a website by dinner now. I mean real pages with working forms, live on the internet. So can your intern, and so can your competitor down the street.
I should say up front that this site was built that way. I wrote the arguments and made the decisions, and an AI bot wrote most of the code. That’s why I have opinions about where this is going.
What matters isn’t that building got fast. One part of the job got fast, and another part didn’t move at all.
Here’s what’s inside:
- What changed. The part of the work that got cheaper and the part that didn’t.
- What building this site actually took. The decisions and technical checks an AI bot couldn’t handle on its own.
- What it means for site builders. Why I’m moving clients toward sites they own outright.
- What to check before you launch. Five checks you can run yourself.
The checking didn’t get any cheaper
Producing a page is close to free now. Deciding what the page should do and whether it’s correct didn’t get cheaper. Neither did knowing whether it will still work in six months. If anything that got harder, because there’s more to check and all of it arrives looking finished.
The decisions an AI bot can’t make for you
An AI bot wrote most of this site’s code. The parts that decide whether a site brings in work came from people.
Who you’re talking to. When I started this site, every page spoke to nonprofits and foundations. Then we started working with businesses, and every headline and example had to change. An AI bot will write smooth copy for any audience you name, but it didn’t sit in on your sales calls or your funding pitches. It doesn’t know which talking points land with your people or which words earn their trust. Only you know that, and most of the time even you can’t put it into words until you talk it through with someone who helps you find it.
Honor Prep is a good example. They know that families who come to their school tours feel welcome and appreciated, and leave comfortable with the idea of their child going there. That feeling is what decides enrollment, so it had to show up on their website too.
What matters to them. A prospect told me she almost didn’t book a call because she couldn’t tell whether it would cost money. It doesn’t. Now the booking section on every page says the call is free. No tool would have caught that. A real person had to say it out loud.
The path to a lead. Every page should lead somewhere. On this site that meant deciding where people book a call and where their questions get answered. We moved the questions about cost and timelines to the contact page, because that’s where people decide whether to reach out.
Your voice. AI bots write in recognizable patterns, and readers notice. Getting this site to sound like Monarch took many rounds of back and forth. Drafts came back polished and generic, and each round we cut the lines that could have belonged to anyone. What you’re reading now is the result of that work.
The technical checks that don’t show on screen
None of these show up when you look at a page and decide it looks done. Each one needed someone to go looking.
- Is it secure? This site has no database or login for anyone to break into. The code that handles forms runs on the server, where visitors can’t see the keys it uses.
- Is it protected from spam? After launch, bots started signing up for our email list with throwaway addresses. We added checks that drop any request that doesn’t come from our own pages, plus a Cloudflare check that runs when someone submits.
- Is it accessible? Several client logos on our homepage had no text description, so screen readers and AI bots couldn’t tell whose work they were looking at. We also check that every piece of text has enough contrast to read.
- Does it work on a phone? The spam check we added pushed the sign-up form off the edge of the screen on phones. It looked fine on a laptop. We only caught it by checking on a phone-sized screen.
- Is it fast? Every photo on this site is compressed and sized for the screen it appears on. Oversized images are one of the most common reasons small sites load slowly. Extra third-party scripts, like chat widgets and trackers, are another.
What this means for site builders
The easy take is that platforms like Squarespace and Webflow are finished, since an AI bot will write the code for free. I don’t think it’s that simple. Those platforms sell hosting that stays up and an editor you can hand to someone who isn’t technical. That is worth something the day after launch.
What’s changing is the monthly bill. When an AI bot can do most of the building, a lot of clients won’t want to rent their website from a platform forever. I’ve started building sites that clients own outright, with no monthly platform fee. This site is one of them, and I expect a lot of our clients to want the same within a year.
The same goes for small updates. Many clients won’t see the value in paying a developer or a Webflow expert to add a page or change a few lines of text. They can connect an AI agent to their website and get those changes done faster and for less.
The part that’s most exposed is the middle: template marketplaces, and agencies whose value was assembling a template faster than you could. If a studio’s pitch is “we can build it and you can’t,” that pitch is running out.
Your own site can look finished and still be broken
This is the change that will cause the most trouble. Before AI, a site you made yourself looked rough, and the gap between that and professional work was obvious. Now a first attempt looks credible. The gap is still there. You just can’t see it anymore.
So the reason to hire someone has changed. It’s no longer that you can’t make a website. It’s that you can’t easily tell whether the one you made is any good.
An AI bot won’t tell you either. It gives a confident answer at the same speed whether it’s right or wrong, and it has no idea what it costs you to be wrong in front of a customer or a board. Someone still has to check what came back and take responsibility for it.
What to check before you launch
- Walk through it as your customer. Pick the person you most want to reach and try to do what they would do. Can they find the information they came for in a click or two? Would they know why to contact you instead of a competitor? Is the next step obvious from every page, and does the form at the end actually reach you?
- Look at every page on a real phone. Use your own phone, not a desktop browser made narrow. The sign-up problem I described above was obvious on a phone within seconds.
- Read every page out loud. AI-written copy tends to sound fine and say very little. If you can’t tell what a page is offering after reading it aloud, your customers can’t either.
- Check who can update it. Make sure the person who will edit the site next year can change a page without breaking it. Find out before launch, while the builder is still around.
- Ask an AI bot what your new site says about you. Your site is one of the sources it reads. I wrote up the method in What does ChatGPT say when someone asks about your business?
These checks will catch a lot. They won’t tell you whether the site works as a whole, because that takes someone who does this every day.
That’s the work we do at Monarch. We look at your site the way your customers do, and we check whether the path from their first visit to their first message actually works. We judge the design and the flow against what your audience cares about. We also check the technical side visitors never see, including AI visibility, security, spam protection, speed and accessibility. Then we tell you what to fix first.
If you’re about to launch, or you’re not sure the site you have is working, book a free 30-minute call. I’ll go through it with you.
