What to check before you choose an AI website builder

Judge an AI website builder on five things you can test on the site it generates: whether you control what search engines see, how fast the published pages are, whether they are accessible, how the site is edited afterwards, and who owns the content.

Every builder can produce an attractive first draft. The checks below are about the quality of that draft underneath its appearance. You can run all of them on one generated site in under an hour, with free tools.

The short version

• Read the fields you cannot see. Titles, descriptions and alt text are generated too, and searchers see them first.
• Measure, do not trust. Speed and accessibility can be tested on a generated page with free tools.
• Edit something by hand. If the manual editor frustrates you now, it will frustrate you for as long as you keep the site.
• Keep a master copy. Ownership on paper is only useful if you hold the files.

1. Search fields

A generator fills in the fields that search engines read. What you are checking is whether they are right, and whether you can change each of them, page by page:

• Page title and meta description
• The address of each page
• Heading levels (one main heading, sensible subheadings)
• Image alt text
• A sitemap, and redirects when you rename a page
• A way to keep a page out of search results
• Structured data, if your business type benefits from it

Then read what was generated. Google asks site owners to review AI output “for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing”, and adds that the review “also applies to metadata” such as titles, descriptions and alt text (Google Search Central).

Generated titles have a typical fault: every page gets the business name plus a generic word. Google’s guidance on title links says to “avoid repeated or boilerplate text” and to avoid “vague descriptors like ‘Home’ for your home page”. Open three generated pages side by side. If the titles differ by one word, rewrite them.

The same Google page on generative AI warns that producing many pages “without adding value for users” may violate its spam policy on scaled content abuse. Remember that when a builder offers to write blog posts for you automatically.

2. Page speed and Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are Google’s three measures of how a page feels to a real visitor. The thresholds for “good”, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads, are published on web.dev:

Metric	What it measures	Good
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)	How quickly the main content appears	Within 2.5 seconds
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)	How quickly the page responds to a tap or click	200 milliseconds or less
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)	How much the layout jumps while loading	0.1 or less

How to test. Run a published address through PageSpeed Insights. It reports two kinds of data: lab data from a simulated load, and field data from real Chrome users over the previous 28 days (about PageSpeed Insights). A brand-new generated page will only have lab data. For field data, test a few established sites built on the same builder; vendors usually show customer examples.

Test the mobile result, and test a page with images and a form, not an empty one. Heavy hero images, autoplaying video and third-party widgets are the usual causes of a poor score, and a generator adds them freely.

3. Accessibility

The standard is the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. WCAG 2.2 was published on 5 October 2023 and defines three conformance levels: A, AA and AAA. Level AA is the level most often named in accessibility policies and contracts.

No builder can promise conformance, because it depends on your content. What you can check on a generated page, using the W3C’s own Easy Checks:

• Alt text. Is it present, and does it describe the picture that is actually there? Generated alt text for a swapped image is often left describing the old one. The W3C’s alt decision tree says what to write in each case, including an empty alt attribute for a purely decorative image.
• Colour contrast. Generated palettes can put pale text on pale backgrounds. The AA requirement is a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text.
• Headings. Do they form an outline, or were they chosen for size?
• Keyboard. Can you reach the menu, the form and the buttons with the Tab key, and see where you are?
• Form labels. Does each field have a visible label?

Some builders now include a checker. Framer says its agent can identify “contrast issues, typos, missing alt text, SEO gaps, and inconsistent styles” (Framer). A built-in check is a useful start and not a substitute for trying the page yourself.

4. Editing after generation

You will generate the site once and edit it hundreds of times. On the generated site, do these five things by hand:

1. Change a headline and a paragraph.
2. Replace a generated image with your own photo.
3. Move a section up the page, then delete another.
4. Add a new page and put it in the menu.
5. Check the result on a phone.

Then repeat one of them through the AI chat, and watch three things.

• Scope. Did the chat change only what you asked for? A model that rewrites the whole page to change one sentence will undo your earlier corrections.
• Undo. Is there a version history, or at least a way to step back from an edit you did not want?
• Cost per edit. Every chat edit is a call to a language model, which is why builders meter them. An edit made by clicking and typing is ordinary software and is not metered.

A site that can only be changed through the chat is harder to keep accurate than one with a plain editor beside it.

5. Content ownership, in principle

Two separate questions hide in the word “ownership”.

Who has the rights? Read the vendor’s terms for three kinds of material: what you upload, the text the model writes, and the images it generates or pulls from a stock library. You normally keep the rights to what you supply. For generated and stock material, the terms set out the licence, and it may not extend to using an image outside the builder.

Who holds the files? Rights are of little use if the only copy sits inside a product. A site assembled from a vendor’s own components is stored as data in the vendor’s system, while a site produced as source code exists as files that can be copied. Types of AI website builders explains which kind of product works which way.

What to do: keep the master copy of your text and images in your own documents, save the generated copy once you have corrected it, and register your domain in an account you control.

Score the generated site

Build the same small site in two or three candidates and fill this in. It takes an afternoon and replaces a lot of guessing.

Check	Builder A	Builder B
Titles and descriptions that needed rewriting, out of all pages
Can you edit every search field per page?
PageSpeed Insights, mobile, on a published page
Easy Checks passed out of five
Manual edits that were awkward, out of five
Did a chat edit change only what you asked?
Do you hold a copy of all the content?

For what is happening behind each of these stages, see How AI website builders work. For unfamiliar terms, use the glossary.

Frequently asked questions

What should I look for in an AI website builder?

Look at five things the demo does not show, all of which you can test on a generated site. Whether you control the search fields on every page, how fast the published pages load, whether the output is accessible, how easy the site is to edit by hand after generation, and what the terms say about who owns the content.

How do I check the search fields an AI builder wrote?

Open each generated page's settings and read the title and meta description as a searcher would. Each should describe that specific page, be different from every other page, and contain no invented facts. Then check that you can edit them, along with the page address, the heading levels and the alt text of every image.

How do I test the speed of an AI-built website?

Publish a trial page, or find a live site made with the builder, and run its address through Google's PageSpeed Insights. Compare the result with the Core Web Vitals thresholds: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less.

Are AI-generated websites accessible?

Not automatically. A builder's components can provide sound structure, but generated colour choices can fail contrast checks and generated alt text can be wrong or missing. Test a trial page against the W3C's Easy Checks, and make sure the editor lets you fix headings, alt text and link text yourself.

Who owns the text and images an AI website builder generates?

It depends on the vendor's terms, so read them. As a rule you keep the rights to the text and photos you supply. For generated text and generated images, the terms say what licence you receive and whether you may use the material elsewhere. Whatever the terms say, keep your own master copy of everything you would need to rebuild the site.