What AI website builders are bad at

Ask an AI website builder for a bakery site and it hands you something in a minute: a hero, an about section, three service cards, a contact form. Most of it looks fine. Some of it is wrong in ways you cannot spot by looking.

I am building one of these tools, so read this as a maker's list of what it cannot do for you. Not a reason to avoid generators: a reason to spend an hour on the bits that need a human.

It cannot know the facts only you have

Opening hours. Prices. Which streets you cover. Whether you are insured. Whether the door has a step. A generator knows none of this, so it either writes a placeholder you forget to replace, or fills the gap with something that sounds true.

Plausible is the dangerous part. A line reading "open daily, 7am to 6pm" reads perfectly and is wrong every Monday. Before you trust any sentence with a number in it, check it against what you actually do.

Its default voice is everybody's voice

Left alone, generated copy reaches for "passionate about quality" and "your one-stop shop". Ask a hundred generated pages what they sell and you cannot tell them apart.

Write the opening sentence yourself, in the words you would use on the phone: "Fresh bread and celebration cakes, north side of town, order by Thursday." Then let the tool build structure around your sentence instead of asking it to invent your voice.

A form has nowhere to send anything by itself

This is the piece of how the web works that matters most. An HTML form is only a way of packaging what someone typed into a request to a server, and the place it points at has to be something that receives and stores that data. On a site that is just files, there is nothing on the other end.

So a form can look finished, accept typing, show no error, and deliver nothing. Nobody tells you: from the visitor's side it worked.

The fix is small, but do it deliberately. Point the form at a service that keeps the submissions, then send one real test message through the live page and find it where it lands. If you cannot find your own test message, your visitors' messages are not arriving either. Never launch assuming a form works because it looks right.

Anything that has to remember a visitor is not a generated page

A booking calendar, a members area, a shop that keeps a basket between visits. Each needs somewhere to store data and something that checks it. A builder can draw the screen, and the screen is the small half of the job. An off-the-shelf service is often the cheaper way to get the working part.

Broken markup is invisible until it is not

You will not notice a form field with no label, an image with no written description, grey text on slightly lighter grey, or buttons you cannot reach with the keyboard, because none of those change how the page looks to you. They change the page for someone using a screen reader, someone squinting at a phone in sunlight, someone who cannot use a mouse.

Tab through your own page once, from the top, using only the keyboard, and you will find the problems in about ninety seconds.

Publishing is not the same as being found

Putting a page online does not put it in front of anyone. No stranger searches for "quality bakery" and finds you. They search for a name they already heard, or for "birthday cakes north side", and land on whichever page answers that.

Let each thing you sell have its own page, name it the way customers say it out loud, and expect nothing to be instant.

What generators are genuinely good at

Structure, ordering, first drafts, spacing, the ungrateful layout problem of fitting seven sections onto one page so it still reads well on a phone. That is real work, and it is now cheap. Spend the time you save on the facts and the one sentence only you can write.

The one-hour pass

• One sentence, in your words, saying what you sell, to whom and where.
• Every number checked: hours, prices, order cut-off, areas covered.
• Nothing on the page offering a service you cannot deliver this week.
• One form, pointed at somewhere that stores submissions, tested with a real submission you then find.
• Nothing that has to remember a visitor between visits.
• A full keyboard tab through the page, and your own image descriptions read back.
• Names, credentials and reviews only where they exist.

The list takes less time than choosing a colour scheme. It is also the difference between a site that looks like your business and one that actually is.

Sitewright is still being built, so none of this is a pitch for something you can use today. The waitlist on the home page is the only thing that is open, and it is where you will hear when there is something to try. If early access sounds useful, you can join the waitlist.