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.
- 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, and more, has a “custom domain” setting in the project dashboard. It is almost always a DNS record change, not a rebuild. - 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Step 6: Run a free audit
Time: 2 minutes. Cost: free.Once the basics above are done, run a proper check to see exactly what is holding your site back and what to fix first, sorted from easiest to hardest.
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.