Your AI-built website works but is it finished?

An AI tool gets a website to the working stage quickly. You see your headline, your colours and your pages on your own laptop, everything you click responds, and it is reasonable to conclude the job is done. What is usually left is a list of dull details: a menu that does not open on a phone, a footer link that leads nowhere, a browser tab with no icon, a form that sends and says nothing afterwards.

Visitors do not sort these into small problems and large ones. Someone who has never heard of you has only the website to go on, and a dead link or a line of filler text reads to them as a statement about how carefully you run the business behind it.

Most of these details take the AI a single request to fix. They get missed because nobody asks. The tool built what you described, you described the parts you were thinking about, and nobody thinks about a wrong-address page while imagining a home page. The rest of this guide is the list of things to ask about, grouped by where a visitor meets them.

Use the table as a first pass. Each row is one detail, the conclusion a stranger tends to draw when it is wrong, and a check you can run without reading any code. The sections after it go through each group more slowly.

AI tools often draw a link before there is anywhere for it to go. The footer is where this collects: a column of links to pages for privacy, terms, careers or a blog, added because footers usually have them, with nothing behind several of them. Social icons are another regular case. They appear in the design and point at the social network's front page, or at nothing.

People also expect a few things from habit. Tapping the logo should take them to the home page. A phone number on a phone should open the dialer with the number filled in, and an email address should open their mail app with your address in the To line. When the number is plain text, a visitor has to memorise it or copy it by hand, and some will not bother.

While the tool was building, it filled gaps with stand-ins: filler paragraphs, a sample name under a quote, a stock address, a made-up phone number. Most were replaced when you gave it your real content. The ones that survive sit in places you stopped looking at, such as the third card in a row, the text under an image, or a page you asked for early and never reopened. Read every page from top to bottom, word by word, the way you would proofread a letter.

Pay particular attention to anything that looks like a customer quote, a number or a logo of a company you work with. If the tool invented it as a stand-in and it is still on the page, you are publishing a claim that is untrue. Remove it or replace it with something real.

Two more leftovers are quick to find. Menu items that go nowhere should either get a page or be taken out of the menu, since an honest short menu serves a visitor better than a long one with gaps. And check the copyright line in the footer. If it shows last year's date, ask for it to be set from the current year so it never needs changing again.

Some of the site is read by software before a person ever sees it. Each page has a title, which appears on the browser tab and is commonly used as the headline of a search result, and a meta description, a sentence or two that search engines may show underneath. AI-built sites often ship with the same title on every page, or with the name of the tool's starter project still in place. Every page needs its own title and its own description, written to say what that page is for.

The favicon is the small icon on the browser tab and in bookmarks. A missing one shows as a blank or generic symbol, which is easy to spot beside other open tabs. Images are the other common gap. A photo straight from a camera or a design file can be many times larger than the space it fills on the page, and the visitor's phone downloads all of it before showing anything. Ask for images to be compressed and sized for where they appear. You should see no difference in quality and a clear difference in how fast the page arrives on a mobile connection.

Requests work best one at a time, with the page named and the expected result described. After each one, look at the page again before sending the next, and keep a saved version from before you started so a change that goes wrong can be undone. The wording below is ours and is meant as a starting point. Change the details to match your site.

Everything above makes a site look finished to the people who reach it. It does not by itself bring anyone to the site. A website with every detail in order can still sit unvisited, because being found depends on other work: what you offer, who you tell, where the site is listed, and whether the pages answer what people are searching for. If your site is already tidy and the trouble is that nobody comes or nobody enquires, that is a separate problem with its own page.

Most founders can clear this whole list with their AI tool in an afternoon or two of patient requests. Get help when a fix keeps undoing an earlier one, when the form shows a success message and the email never arrives, when the site does more than show pages (accounts, payments, bookings) and you are unsure what a change might break, or when you have been round the list twice and it still feels unsteady. We start with a free consultation. If the site needs more than a few repairs, our Diagnostic is a fixed-price written plan that lists what is unfinished and the order to fix it in, with the fee credited to the build if you go ahead with us. Your repo and accounts stay yours throughout.