AI made websites fast and cheap to build, and there are a lot of offers out there now. Some are fine. Some leave you with a page nobody can find and a domain you don't control. These are the questions we'd ask before paying anyone for a website, including us.
1. Who owns the domain?
You should. The domain is your web address, and it should be registered in your name, on your account, so you can take it anywhere. If the seller registers it under their account, ask in writing how you get it back if you leave. Losing a domain you've printed on your trucks is far more expensive than any website.
2. What happens after launch day?
This is the most important question. Does anyone ever touch the site again? Will it get new pages, new content, updates when you add a service or start working in a new town? If the answer is no, that's fine for a business card, but it won't grow, and a site that never changes stops picking up new searches.
3. How many pages do I get?
One page can only rank for a few searches. If you serve several towns and offer several services, ask whether you'll get a page for each, and whether those pages will be genuinely different. Twenty copies of the same page with the town name swapped can be treated as doorway pages by Google, so ask how they make each one real.
4. Where do form leads go, and how will I know one came in?
Ask where submissions are sent: your email, your phone, a dashboard you'll never log into. Then test it yourself on launch day. Fill out your own form and make sure it reaches you within a minute. A website that collects leads nobody sees is worse than no website.
5. Can Google and AI assistants actually read it?
More people now ask ChatGPT or Google's AI for a contractor instead of scrolling results. Ask whether your services, towns, hours and prices are written as real text on the page, not baked into images, and whether the site uses structured data so search engines know what each page is about. Ask how fast it loads on a phone. These details decide whether you show up in an AI answer or get skipped.
6. Who makes changes, and what do they cost?
Your prices change, your hours change, you add a service. Ask whether you'll be editing it yourself in a builder, paying per change, or just asking someone to do it. Cheap sites often get expensive here, either in money or in your own evenings.
7. What does it cost per year, all in?
Add up the build fee, hosting, the domain renewal and any edits you expect to need. A "one-time" few-hundred-dollar site with hosting and paid edits can cost more over two years than a monthly service that includes all of it. Compare total cost against what you're getting each year, not just the sticker price.
8. What happens if I stop paying?
Every subscription should answer this clearly before you sign. Do you keep the domain? Does the site disappear, or do you keep something? Get the answer in writing.
How does Atlas answer these?
Since we're asking you to grill other sellers, here are our answers. Your domain stays yours. After launch, your site gets new or updated content every two weeks: town and service pages, posts that answer customer questions, and the quick answers and structured data that help Google and AI search read it. You get a page for each service and each town you want work in, written to be genuinely local. Leads go straight to your email. Changes are included, you just ask. It's $99 a month, month to month, with nothing extra for hosting. If you leave, you keep your domain and a free one-page site so your web address never goes dead. The town pages, service pages and posts come down, because that ongoing work is what the subscription covers. For the side-by-side, see a cheap AI landing page vs an Atlas website.
