What This Lab Teaches
Most “build a website with AI” advice stops at “ask ChatGPT to make a homepage.” This lab goes the whole distance: using AI to research your market, plan a complete site, design reusable components, write SEO-ready pages, and launch them — in a repeatable, fill-in-the-blanks way.
You don’t need to be a developer. You answer questions about your business, paste prepared prompts into ChatGPT or Claude, and the AI generates the plan, the design, and the actual code. The downloadable workbook contains every prompt and worksheet; this page is the map of where it takes you.
A quick proof point: the site you’re reading right now was built with AI. The approach in this lab is the same approach we use — which is exactly why we know where it shines and where it needs a human.
What You’ll Need
- Access to ChatGPT (Plus/Pro) or Claude (Pro) with web search enabled
- Your current website URL, if you have one
- A list of your services, locations, and target industries
- The names and URLs of 3–5 competitors
- A web hosting account (Netlify, Vercel, or any host with free SSL works well)
- Any logos, photos, brand colors, or content you want to reuse
One tip that makes a big difference: start each major phase by telling the AI to research first, then plan, then build. ChatGPT’s Deep Research and Claude’s Extended Thinking modes let it analyze competitors and the web before it writes a single line — and the output is dramatically better for it.
The Six Phases
The lab follows a six-phase arc, from a blank page to a live site. Here’s the shape of it.
1. Discovery — Know Your Business
You capture the raw material the AI needs: what you do, what makes you different, every service grouped by category, your locations and service areas, the industries you target, and your competitors. This is the most important step — everything you write here gets pasted into the prompts later, so detail pays off directly in quality.
2. AI Research — The Master Prompt
You hand the AI one big, structured prompt (provided in full in the workbook) that tells it to analyze your current site, study your competitors, research the best keywords for your industry, and come back with a Website Redesign Project Plan: a complete sitemap, a keyword map for every page, recommended meta titles and descriptions, design direction, schema recommendations, and an internal-linking strategy. You save that output — it’s your blueprint for everything that follows.
3. Site Structure & Planning
You turn the AI’s research into a build-ready plan: a master page list with URL slugs, target keywords, and priorities. Pages get sorted into tiers — Tier 1 is launch-critical (homepage, core services, primary locations), Tier 2 is high-value (service detail and industry pages), and Tier 3 is complete coverage (location-plus-service pages, blog, case studies). You also lock in brand colors and design style here.
4. Component Library
Modern sites are assembled from reusable building blocks. You have the AI design a standard set — header and navigation, footer, hero section, service cards, testimonial slider, FAQ accordion (which doubles as FAQ schema), CTA banners, location cards, a trust bar, and blog cards — all responsive and mobile-first, in your brand colors. Build them once, reuse them everywhere.
5. SEO Implementation
This is where an AI-built site either ranks or doesn’t. Every page gets the fundamentals baked in from the start: a unique H1 with the primary keyword, clean H2/H3 hierarchy, a meta title and description, Open Graph tags, a canonical URL, at least a few internal links, descriptive image alt text, fast mobile-friendly loading, and JSON-LD schema matched to the page type — Organization and LocalBusiness on the homepage, Service and FAQPage on service pages, LocalBusiness and GeoCoordinates on location pages, and so on. The workbook includes the full per-page checklist and a schema-by-page-type table.
6. Build, Test & Launch
Now the AI generates the actual production-ready code, page by page, starting with your Tier 1 pages. You upload to a staging URL and work the testing checklist — links, mobile layout, forms, schema validation (Google Rich Results Test), page speed (PageSpeed Insights), 301 redirects, analytics. Then you go live carefully: configure redirects from old URLs, update DNS, submit your new sitemap to Google Search Console, and update your business and social profiles.
One rule the lab is firm about: keep your old site running on a backup URL for at least 30 days after launch. It’s your instant rollback and your safety net against anything that slipped through migration.
Realistic Expectations
AI will genuinely take you most of the way. You can go from a blank page to a complete, good-looking, SEO-structured site without writing code — and for a lot of small businesses, that’s a real win.
Here’s the honest part. A production website that’s fast, secure, accessible, and actually ranking against real competitors is more than a stack of AI-generated HTML files. It needs performance tuning, correct redirects so you don’t lose your existing Google rankings, careful schema, accessibility, security headers, and — most of all — the ongoing SEO work that no single prompt can do: publishing, earning backlinks, fixing crawl errors, and refining over months.
That judgment is what we add. The lab gets you a strong draft; engineering and SEO experience turn it into a site that performs. Plenty of people run the lab to get a head start, then hand the result to us to finish and optimize — and we’re happy to take it from anywhere.
Keep Going
- Building an app instead of a site? Try the companion lab: Build Apps With AI.
- Not sure which AI to use for this? See Copilot vs ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini vs Grok.
Want a second set of eyes — or someone to build and optimize it for you? Book a free discovery call and tell us what you’re trying to launch.