With AI, a website goes up in an evening, and it looks finished. Here is what is behind the facade.
You describe your business in three sentences, you click, and an AI delivers a complete website: a big headline, three columns, photos, a contact form. On screen, it is a house.
The problem does not show from the street. It shows when someone tries to come in, when it rains, or on the day you have to prove the house is yours.
Eight places where a house put up in a weekend gives way, and what each one stands for on a website.
An AI writes a homepage, not your legal notice or your privacy policy. Cookie consent, rights to images and fonts, data protection law: nobody has checked them, and it is your name on the website.
The website lives on the platform that generated it. The day you want to leave, switch providers or just take your texts with you, you find out the land is not yours.
Without a readable address, nobody finds you. No structured data, content loaded by JavaScript, generic headings: Google ranks you poorly, and ChatGPT or Claude have nothing to say about you.
The form shows up and says “thank you”. But the message goes to an inbox nobody reads, or lands in spam. You will never know: the client simply won’t call back.
An AI writes with confidence, including what is false: services you do not offer, approximate opening hours, client reviews that do not exist. An invented review is not a detail: unfair competition law forbids it.
The generated code works, but nobody has read it. A form with no protection against bots, access keys left in the page, no backups: it holds, until the day it doesn’t.
A website wears out: a link breaks, a subscription changes price, the domain expires. With an AI, there is nobody to call when it rains.
Same request, same template, same result: your competitor’s homepage. The visitor has already seen your website ten times under other names, and feels nothing.
I won’t tell you AI is the problem. I build with it every day: it writes code, suggests variants, proofreads my texts, and it is partly thanks to AI that I can deliver in two to six weeks.
An AI puts up the walls. It doesn’t hold the plan.
It knows neither your trade, nor your clients, nor the law that applies to you, and it signs nothing. The difference between a house and a stage set is someone who knows where the wires run, has checked them, and answers when it rains.
Of 9,970 Swiss small-business websites drawn at random from the commercial register, 54% give AI no structured data at all: it knows neither what the business does nor where it is (see the study). The free test shows you in a few seconds what ChatGPT, Claude and Google can read on yours.