11/09/2026
AI IS NOT THE PATHWAY TO MARKETING SUCCESS. Rant follows.
We audited a website built entirely by an AI site builder. It looks OK. Clean design, works on a phone, copy that reads pretty well.
Nine of its images still had alt text with the word "placeholder" in it. On a live site, on real photographs of real rooms. Nobody read the output before it shipped.
That isn't the worst part.
The worst part is that the business sells three separate products and all three sit on one page as anchor links.
An anchor is not a page. It cannot hold its own title tag, description, H1, keyword focus or schema. So three products fight over one set of signals and none win. Nothing targets what its customers actually search for. One page, one doorway, one shot.
More to note:
Two live domains serving identical content, neither set as canonical, so every signal the business earns gets split in half.
Image indexing switched off site wide by a directive nobody chose, on a business that sells photographs of rooms.
The same unoptimised title tag on every page, containing the brand name and nothing else. No service, no location, for a business people find by searching a location.
Twenty one defects in total. Six actively suppress search visibility. Three are not SEO problems at all. They are legal ones.
A form collecting names, emails and phone numbers, with no privacy notice. No trading identity, no address, no cancellation terms, on a business selling to consumers at a distance.
The builder does not carry any of that. The owner does. The ICO does not take "the website generated itself" as a defence. Neither does Trading Standards.
The code is fine. The design is fine. The copy is OK.
Nobody asked what the website was for.
That is the gap. These tools are very good at production. They cannot do strategy, because strategy means understanding the margins, the channels, the competitors and the regulator. You cannot generate that. Someone has to ask.
And yes, not every business needs an SEO campaign from day one. Fair enough.
But on-page fundamentals are not an SEO campaign. They are part of building the thing properly.
A page per product. A sensible heading structure. One canonical domain. Title tags that say what you do and where. Alt text. Schema on content you have already written. A few hours during a build, by someone already in the code.
Skip it and you haven't saved money, you've deferred it. Come back in two years with rankings attached to the wrong structure and you're not tweaking a website. You are migrating one, at several times the cost.
An AI builder will give you something that looks like a website in an hour.
Whether it brings in work is a different question, and nobody involved in building it asked that one.
Findings written up in full. Comment or message me and I will send it over.
