Why Websites Built With AI Are Fu*king Up Your SEO

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"AI can build your whole website in 10 minutes," they said.

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"Save a fortune," they said.

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And now you're wondering why nobody can find you on Google, so yeah, about that.

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This is SEO Fucking What?

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I'm Nikki, 30 years in SEO from way back

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when we were stuffing keywords into white text on white backgrounds and calling it a strategy.

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I help small business owners and marketing directors like you get found on Google

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and make money and bring in business from their websites.

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Today, I'm starting a three-part series on AI-built websites.

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In this episode, why people are doing it, why I completely get it,

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and why I still think it's a fucking bad idea,

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at least if you don't understand what you're getting yourself into.

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Let me start with the hustle bros. You know the ones.

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LinkedIn is absolutely full of them. Every other post is,

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"I built a full website in 47 minutes using AI, and it's generating six figures passively,"

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accompanied by a screenshot, a smug face, and 17 fucking hashtags.

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These are the same people who last year were telling you to post on LinkedIn seven times a day,

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and the year before that, they were selling NFTs.

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They are not your friends.

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They're selling you a feeling, and that feeling is you're behind,

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you're doing it wrong, and you need to buy this to catch up.

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And the thing is — and this is what pisses me off — they're not entirely wrong about the tool.

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That's what makes it so insidious.

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AI really can produce a website, and a fairly decent-looking one. That's real.

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But they leave out the part where the website doesn't do what a website is actually supposed to do —

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which is get found by the people you want to find you.

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That bit gets conveniently omitted from the LinkedIn post.

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So why are people turning to AI to build their websites?

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Let me count the ways. Cost, obviously.

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A professionally designed and built website from an actual human who knows what they're doing

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costs money. Proper money.

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We're talking anywhere from a few thousand pounds to tens of thousands, depending on the complexity.

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For a small business owner who's already stretched, that's a significant chunk of budget.

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AI tools promise to cut that down to almost nothing, and of course that's appealing.

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I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand it, and I'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered it.

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And then there's speed.

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A human web designer has a process: discovery, wireframes, design, revisions, build, testing, launch.

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That takes weeks, sometimes months.

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AI can spit out something that looks finished in a fraction of the time.

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And when you're a solo founder or a small team trying to get something live before your competitor does,

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that matters.

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And then there's the technical stuff.

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Tools like Claude Code or frameworks like Astro are genuinely impressive at what they do.

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A developer using AI assistance can build faster, catch errors quicker,

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and iterate more efficiently than without it, and that's a real benefit.

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And if you're a developer using AI as a tool within a process you understand, that's awesome. Crack on.

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But where it goes wrong is that most people using AI to build their websites, they're not developers.

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They're not using AI as part of a process they understand.

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They're business owners. They're smart, capable people,

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but they're using a tool that they don't fully understand

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to produce something in a domain they don't fully understand either.

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And that combination is where everything falls apart.

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Think about it this way.

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Would you use AI to do your tax return if you'd never done bookkeeping in your life

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and didn't know what a balance sheet was?

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Would you use AI to write your legal contracts if you'd never read a contract properly

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and didn't know what made one enforceable?

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Most people would say no.

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But it's not because AI is useless for those things.

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It's because if you don't have the baseline knowledge to recognise when it's got something wrong,

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you're completely at the mercy of whatever it produces.

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You can't sanity check it. You can't spot the gaps. You don't know what you don't know.

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And websites are exactly the same.

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AI can produce something that looks right. It feels professional. It passes a casual inspection.

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But the things it gets wrong are invisible to someone who doesn't know where to look.

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The heading structure that's sending search engines the wrong signals,

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the robots.txt file that's configured incorrectly,

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the schema markup that's broken in a way that means your pages are ineligible for rich results.

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None of that shows up on screen.

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None of it affects how the site looks to a visitor.

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It just quietly sits there undermining your ability to get found

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while you carry on assuming that the AI handled it.

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I audited five AI-built websites recently.

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Proper good audits, the same process I use for my paying clients.

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And across all five, I found the same gaps in roughly the same places.

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The foundations were there. The sites, on a first glance, looked good.

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But the layer between the site existing and the site being set up to rank had not been touched.

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And it wasn't because AI tried and just failed.

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It was because AI finished building and then just stopped.

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It doesn't know how to audit its own output. It doesn't flag what it hasn't done.

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It delivers something that looks complete, and the person receiving it has no reason to think anything's missing.

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And that's the real problem with that hustle bro pitch.

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They're not lying when they say AI can build you a website fast and cheap.

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They're just not telling you that what you get is a starting product, not a finished product.

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And if you treat it like a finished product, if you launch it, leave it,

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and wonder why Google isn't sending you traffic, you've just wasted

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however long you had that site live without it doing the job you needed it to do.

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So before we get into what AI actually gets right and where it goes spectacularly fucking wrong —

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and I'll cover those in the next two episodes, because I'm not interested in just slagging AI off.

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There are things it does genuinely well.

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I want you to sit with this question.

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Do you have enough knowledge about SEO to recognise when your website has a problem?

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Not to fix it, but just to know there's a problem.

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If the answer is no, then using AI to build your site without any SEO input is a gamble.

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And it's a gamble where the downside isn't immediately visible, which makes it worse, not better.

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So we've established why everyone's doing it,

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and why I think you need to be a lot more cautious than the LinkedIn crowd would have you believe.

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After the break, just wanna give you a little tip that might help.

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Here's what I want you to do this week.

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Go and look at your website, whether it was AI-built or not, and find your H1 tag on your homepage.

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Right-click on your homepage, hit View Source, and search for H1.

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Whatever is in that tag, is it something a potential customer would type into Google?

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Not your tagline, not your brand name,

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not a clever line you came up with at midnight,

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not something that makes your copywriter chums think you're amazing.

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Is it something that someone would search for?

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If it's not, that's your first problem to fix, and that's a free check.

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It takes about 30 seconds. Go and do it now.

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And once you've done it, do the same thing for every other page of your website,

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because every page of your website has the ability to be found in Google,

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and you need to make sure that it's being found for the right things.

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30 seconds per page. Five minutes. You've got five minutes, right?

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In the next episode, we're gonna talk about what AI-built websites get right,

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because there are things, and they're worth knowing about.

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And in the episode after that, we're getting into the detail of what goes wrong and why,

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based on five real audits that I ran in April 2026.

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If this episode has made you think about your website in a slightly uncomfortable way, good.

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That was the point.

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Make sure you're following SEO Fucking What wherever you're listening so you don't miss the next two parts.

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And if you want me to look at your site, whether it's AI generated or not,

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and tell you exactly what state it's in, come and find me.

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Links are in the show notes.

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Until next time, get found, make money, know AI's limitations.