Your Website Looks Finished. Google Disagrees.

I see this all the time. A potential client looks at the price of a custom website and decides to have an AI builder make one instead.

I get it. The economy is weird right now, and businesses are cutting costs wherever they can. But your website is a risky place to cut corners.

Here's the problem: a site can look polished to you and still be close to invisible to Google. And if nobody can find your shiny new site, it isn't doing much for your business.

Why This Happens

Many AI builders make sites where the page content is loaded by JavaScript after the page opens. You, sitting in your browser, see a finished site. A search engine crawler may first see a nearly empty page, and many AI tools that crawl the web don't run JavaScript at all, so they may never see your content.

In other words, the site is finished for humans. It isn't finished for the machines that decide who gets found. Unless you don't care about potential clients finding you online, that's worth ten minutes of your time to check.

Four Checks You Can Do in Ten Minutes

1. Do a site: search. Type site:yourdomain.com into Google. Compare the number of results to the number of pages your site actually has. Zero, or far fewer than you expected, means Google hasn't indexed you properly.
2. View your page source. On a desktop, right-click your homepage and choose "View page source" (Ctrl+U on Windows, Cmd+Option+U on a Mac). Search that code for a sentence from your homepage. If your words aren't there, and you mostly see code and an empty container, your content depends on JavaScript to show up. This is the one that surprises people most.
3. Search your own business name. Look at what comes up. Is the title your business name, or something generic left over from a template? Is the description under it something you wrote, or random text Google grabbed? Does your site show up at all, or does a directory listing or a different business outrank you?
4. Check Google Search Console. If you've never set it up, that's your answer: you have no way to see how Google views your site. If you have, use the URL Inspection tool on your homepage to see whether it's indexed and what Google found when it crawled it.

What If You Failed One?

Don't panic. Some of these are easy fixes with a little elbow grease and know-how, like rewriting your page titles and descriptions or setting up Search Console.

Others take more work. The JavaScript problem from check #2 can mean asking your builder whether it offers server-side rendering, or honestly, rebuilding on a different platform.

A Cheap Site That Nobody Finds Isn't Cheap

Saving money upfront is appealing. But a site that just sits there and doesn't bring in business costs you more in the long run than doing it right the first time.

So run the four checks and hit reply to tell me what you found. And if you'd rather have someone dig into it for you, I do this for a living. Just ask. 😁🤘🏻

-- Seth Goldstein

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Well this is terrifying!

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Rand is the Godfather of SEO. This is a must watch.

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Interesting take.

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Another great take from an SEO/AEO great!

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That's It For This Week! Keep Rocking It!

-Seth + Brian

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