After launching a website, the six things to do in order are: connect a custom domain, submit your site to Google Search Console, check how your site looks on mobile, write your first real page of content, check if AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and more can find and understand your site, and run a free audit to see what to fix first.
Most of these take under 20 minutes each and cost nothing.
Why the order matters
Steps one through three are foundational. Google cannot credit content on a domain it does not trust yet, cannot index pages it cannot crawl properly, and ranks the mobile version of your site first regardless of how your desktop version looks. Skip any of these and step four, the actual content, has nothing solid to stand on.
Steps five and six are about reach beyond a traditional Google search. AI tools now answer questions directly, and a site that is readable and well structured has a real shot at being the source they cite, even for visitors who never click through. Doing this out of order, writing content before your site is indexed, or worrying about AI visibility before you have a working domain, is the most common reason new sites stall.
- Step 1: Connect a custom domain
Time: 10 minutes. Cost: $10 to $20 a year.
A site on a free subdomain, like yoursite.lovable.app or yoursite.webflow.io, looks unfinished to visitors and to Google. Buy your own domain and connect it. Every no-code builder, including Lovable, Webflow, Wix Studio, Canva Sites, Framer, and Durable, has a “custom domain” setting in the project dashboard. It is almost always a DNS record change, not a rebuild.
Common mistake: connecting the domain but forgetting to update the site’s canonical URL or sitemap reference, so search engines keep indexing the old subdomain alongside the new one.
How to check it worked: open your custom domain in an incognito window. If it loads your site directly, without redirecting through the old subdomain first, you are done. - Step 2: Submit your site to Google Search Console
Time: 15 minutes. Cost: free.
Google does not automatically know your site exists. Search Console is how you tell it. Verify ownership, submit your sitemap, and request indexing for your homepage. Without this step, a new site can sit unindexed for weeks.
Common mistake: submitting the sitemap once and never checking back. The Coverage report will flag excluded or duplicate pages, and it is worth a look every few weeks while your site is new.
How to check it worked: the Sitemaps report should show your sitemap as “Success” with a page count that roughly matches your number of live pages. - Step 3: Check your site on a phone
Time: 5 minutes. Cost: free.
Most builder templates look great on a laptop and break on a phone. Open your own site on your phone. Check that buttons are tappable, text is not cut off, and nothing needs pinch to zoom. Over half of search traffic is mobile, so this is not optional polish.
Common mistake: checking only the homepage. Interior pages with forms, tables, or image galleries break on mobile far more often.
How to check it worked: run Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test for a faster gut-check than eyeballing your own screen. - Step 4: Write one real page of content
Time: 30 to 60 minutes. Cost: free.
A homepage full of generic template text has nothing for Google or AI search tools to cite. Write one page, an about page, a service page, or a first blog post, that says something specific about what you do and who it is for. Specific beats polished.
Common mistake: writing the page for yourself instead of for the reader. If every sentence starts with “we” instead of addressing what the reader came to find out, rewrite it. Our content guide covers this in more depth.
How to check it worked: count how many sentences would be true of any competitor in your space unchanged. If it is most of them, it needs another pass. - Step 5: Check if AI tools can find your site
Time: 5 minutes. Cost: free.
Search is no longer only Google. People now ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and more directly, and those tools need to be able to crawl and understand your site to mention it. Check your robots.txt file for blocked AI crawlers, and check that your page content is readable, not just a JavaScript shell with no text a crawler can read.
Common mistake: assuming a page that looks fine in a browser looks fine to a crawler. View your page source and search for a sentence from your homepage. If you cannot find it there, a text-based crawler may not either.
How to check it worked: our AI search visibility guides walk through platform-specific checks for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. - Step 6: Run a free audit
Time: 2 minutes. Cost: free.
Once the five steps above are done, run a proper check to see exactly what is holding your site back and what to fix next, sorted from easiest to hardest. INDEXED. checks page titles, mobile-friendliness, indexing status, AI search structure, and internal links, then tells you what to fix first instead of handing you a wall of scores with no next step.
What not to do first
Don’t chase backlinks before your site is indexed. A backlink to a page Google hasn’t crawled yet does nothing.
Don’t install a dozen SEO plugins or third-party scripts before you have a working custom domain and a clean Search Console setup. Extra scripts you don’t understand yet are a common source of the mobile and speed problems that show up in step three.
Don’t wait for “perfect” content before publishing. One specific, genuinely useful page beats an unfinished draft sitting in an editor for weeks while nothing on your site is indexable yet.
FAQs
Usually one to four weeks after submitting a sitemap through Search Console. Sites that skip Search Console can take much longer, or never get indexed at all.
No. Builders like Lovable, Webflow, Wix Studio, and Canva Sites handle SEO settings, like page titles and meta descriptions, inside their own dashboards. No code editing is required.
Yes, if the tool can crawl your site and your content clearly answers a specific question. Sites blocked by robots.txt, or sites with no readable text content, cannot be cited by AI tools even if they rank well on Google.
SEO is about ranking in Google’s list of links. AI search visibility, sometimes called GEO or AEO, is about whether tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and more can read, understand, and cite your site directly in an answer. A site can do well at one and poorly at the other.
Go back to step four. One page of real content is a starting point, not a finish line. Sites that grow consistently publish new pages or posts on a regular schedule, not just once at launch. Twice a month is a workable floor for most small sites.
Start with Search Console’s Coverage report. It will usually show a specific reason, blocked by robots.txt, marked noindex, a server error, or a canonical pointing somewhere else entirely. That report tells you more in thirty seconds than guessing ever will.