A client prospect recently has been trying to get a new website approved at his company for almost two years. The business case is obvious to anyone who looks at the current site. It’s outdated, hard to update, and doesn’t reflect what the company actually does anymore. He knows what’s needed. It’s his job to know.

A few months ago the topic came up in a meeting, and before he could make his case, someone else in the room jumped in. “I can build you one in 10 minutes,” he said, and pulled up a demo.

It looked clean enough. Probably generated with one of the new AI site builders that can produce something resembling a professional website in roughly the time it takes to make a coffee. No real personality, no content strategy, no thought about how the marketing team would actually update it day to day. But it looked like a website, and the decision-maker in the room was impressed.

He also had a price in mind for a “full” build that, for what would almost certainly be more of the same, would buy a lot of new problems alongside the old ones.

I’ve been thinking about why this kind of thing happens, and I don’t think it’s really about AI. AI is just the current tool that makes it easy to appear more capable than you are in a narrow context. The underlying dynamic is older than that. Someone the decision-maker trusted made a confident claim in an area where they had no real basis to evaluate it. The person who actually understood what the business needed got bypassed.

The website that gets built in this scenario might look fine at launch. But six months later, when the marketing director needs to update the service pages, add a new team member, or run a campaign that requires a landing page, he’s going to hit a wall.

There’s no CMS to speak of, or any form of content architecture.

There’s just a generated template and a dependency on whoever built it (and their tools), assuming they’re even still around.

This is the part that experienced web professionals see coming and can rarely say out loud without sounding defensive. A website is infrastructure someone has to live in long-term, and not simply a deliverable you hand over and walk away from.

The people making the buying decision often don’t know the right questions to ask until they’re already stuck… and by then the budget is spent and the goodwill is gone.

The right questions aren’t complicated, and are extremely important. Who on your team will be updating this, and what do they need to be able to do? What happens when something needs to change and the person who built it isn’t available? Does the platform give your team actual ownership, or does it just look like it does?

Those questions are worth asking before the demo, not after.