"AI can build your whole website in 10 minutes," they said. "Save a fortune," they said. And now you're wondering why nobody can find you on Google. Yeah. About that.

Hi, I'm Nikki Pilkington. My site is https://nikki-pilkington.com/ and in this episode of "SEO Fking What", I'm kicking off a three-part series on AI-built websites — why people are doing it, why I completely get it, and why I still think it's a fking bad idea if you don't understand what you're getting yourself into.

I also give you a quick homework task — a 30-second H1 check you can do right now that might reveal the single biggest SEO problem on your website.

This is part one of three. If you know someone about to launch an AI-built site without a second thought, send them this first. It might save them months of invisible damage.

Get found. Make money. Know AI's limitations.

Links mentioned: Non-Wanky SEO Courses: https://nonwankyseo.com

Follow Nikki:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkipilkington/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikkipilkington/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/nikkipilkington.bsky.social

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

"Save a fortune," they said.

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

This is SEO Fucking What?

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

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

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

and make money and bring in business from their websites.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the year before that, they were selling NFTs.

They are not your friends.

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

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

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

That's what makes it so insidious.

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

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

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

That bit gets conveniently omitted from the LinkedIn post.

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

Let me count the ways. Cost, obviously.

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

costs money. Proper money.

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

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

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

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.

And then there's speed.

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

That takes weeks, sometimes months.

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

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

that matters.

And then there's the technical stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that combination is where everything falls apart.

Think about it this way.

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

and didn't know what a balance sheet was?

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

and didn't know what made one enforceable?

Most people would say no.

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

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

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

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

And websites are exactly the same.

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

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

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

the robots.txt file that's configured incorrectly,

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

None of that shows up on screen.

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

It just quietly sits there undermining your ability to get found

while you carry on assuming that the AI handled it.

I audited five AI-built websites recently.

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

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

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

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

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

It was because AI finished building and then just stopped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are things it does genuinely well.

I want you to sit with this question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not your tagline, not your brand name,

not a clever line you came up with at midnight,

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

Is it something that someone would search for?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the point.

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

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

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

Links are in the show notes.

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