It cannot know your business
Everything that makes you different lives inside your head, your records and your customers' experience. None of it is on the web, so none of it is available to any tool until you supply it.
Given nothing, a tool produces the average of your trade. That average is what every competitor also produces from the same starting point, which is why generic sites all read alike.
Our page on describing your business covers what to supply. An hour of real detail changes the output more than any other decision in the project.
It cannot verify anything
A tool has no way to confirm that a credential is current, a figure is accurate, a testimonial is real or a photograph shows your work. It can only produce something that fits the pattern of a true statement.
That is why review is structural rather than optional. Our page on human review sets out what has to be checked, and it is the part of the process that cannot be delegated.
The risk is not that errors are obvious. It is that they are plausible, specific and confidently phrased, which is exactly the shape a fact has when somebody reads it quickly.
It cannot decide what matters
Which pages deserve to exist, which service to lead with, which customers to aim at, and what to stop offering. Those are business decisions, and a tool asked for pages will always produce more pages.
It also cannot tell you which subjects turn into paying work. That lives in your experience of customer conversations, which is why our page on site planning puts that judgment with you.
The failure here is quiet. A site can end up covering forty subjects nobody asked about while the three pages that would earn money stay thin, and nothing in the tooling notices.
The full list of limits
None of the items below is a criticism of any particular product. They are structural, they apply to every tool in the category, and planning around them is what makes the rest of it work.
- Knowing anything about your business you have not said
- Verifying that a claim or a credential is true
- Taking photographs of your actual work
- Deciding your positioning and your priorities
- Making a site compliant with any law
- Making customers find you or contact you
- Keeping the site true after something changes
It cannot make a site compliant
Compliance with a law is a legal outcome about a whole business, not a property a tool can confer on a page. Any product claiming otherwise is making a claim about something it cannot control.
What a tool can do is check against technical criteria and fix what it finds. That is a real and describable service, and it is the honest version of the same offer.
Our page on who is responsible covers where the obligation actually sits, which is with the business rather than with any vendor. Nothing here is legal advice.
It cannot bring you customers
A website is a place people arrive at. Publishing pages does not cause arrivals, and nothing about generation changes how search, referral and reputation actually work.
What good pages do is convert the arrivals you get and make you findable, in search and in an answer engine, for questions nobody else answered. That is real, and it is slower and less dramatic than any product claim suggests.
Anyone promising a ranking, a traffic figure or a result in a fixed period is describing something outside their control. Our page on honest claims covers why that language is a warning sign.
What it does do well
Structure, consistency and speed. A complete site with correct headings, titles, descriptions and internal links, produced in an afternoon instead of over a postponed year.
Mechanical correctness at scale is the strongest part. The same rules applied to every page is something a person cannot sustain by hand once a site passes a handful of pages.
And getting a business from nothing to something reviewable. That is a smaller claim than the category usually makes and it is the one that survives contact with reality.