15 Things to Have AI Do Before You Launch Your Website (Part 1)

Summary

Set upWhat you need

• Admin access to your website platform (Shopify, WordPress, Webflow, or your own code)

• An AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT to draft policies, meta tags, alt text and schema

• A free Google Search Console account for your domain

• Your business details: legal name, contact email, what data you collect, and your refund and shipping terms

• About 3 hours for a first pass

Do thisStep by step

1. 1

   Legal: privacy policy and terms

   Items 1 and 2: have AI draft your privacy policy and terms and conditions from your real business details (what data you collect, which tools process it, how users contact you). Reel Playbooks addition: AI drafts are not legal advice; have a lawyer or a reputable policy generator review them, especially if you sell to the EU or California.

2. 2

   Legal: cookie consent, refund and shipping

   Items 3 and 4: add a cookie consent banner and write your refund and shipping policies. Reel Playbooks addition: make sure the banner actually blocks non-essential tracking scripts until the visitor accepts; a banner that only displays text does not do the job. Link all policies in your footer and at checkout.

3. 3

   Security: HTTPS and secrets

   Items 5 and 6: force HTTPS across the whole site and scrub API keys and secrets from your front-end code. Reel Playbooks addition: ask your AI to search the codebase for keys, tokens and passwords in client-side files; move them to server-side environment variables and rotate any key that was ever exposed. Most hosts (Shopify, Vercel, Netlify) include free SSL; turn on automatic HTTP to HTTPS redirects.

4. 4

   Security: forms and admin logins

   Items 7 and 8: add spam protection to every form and turn on two-factor authentication for all admin logins. Reel Playbooks addition: use a CAPTCHA or honeypot field, and test each form end to end so real submissions still arrive. If you want every form lead captured and followed up automatically from day one, connect your forms to a CRM such as Onedery.

5. 5

   SEO: meta tags and social previews

   Items 9 and 10: write meta titles and descriptions for every page and generate a social preview image. Reel Playbooks addition: keep titles near 60 characters and descriptions near 155, unique per page, and set the image with og:image tags following the Open Graph protocol (1200 by 630 pixels is a common size).

6. 6

   SEO: sitemap, robots.txt and Search Console

   Items 11 to 13: create your sitemap and robots.txt, submit the sitemap to Google Search Console, and double check robots.txt is not blocking Google. Reel Playbooks addition: a leftover Disallow: / from a staging site is one of the most common launch mistakes. See Google's guides to building a sitemap and robots.txt, and also check for noindex tags on live pages.

7. 7

   SEO: alt text and schema

   Items 14 and 15: write alt text for every image and add schema markup for rich results. Reel Playbooks addition: alt text should describe the image for screen reader users, not stuff keywords. Have AI generate JSON-LD (for example Organization, Product or LocalBusiness), then validate it with Google's free Rich Results Test. Rich results are never guaranteed, even with valid markup.

Heads upCommon mistakes & tips

• Run it before launch, not after. Fixing SEO and security on a live site is slower and riskier.

• Reel Playbooks addition: give the AI your actual site details and code; generic prompts produce generic policies and wrong schema.

• Reel Playbooks addition: the reel says skipping these can get you "sued or hacked"; the real legal risk depends on your location and audience, and we have not verified any specific legal claim.

• Reel Playbooks addition: the creator's "exact prompts" checklist is only sent to people who comment on the reel, so it is not included here; the steps above stand on their own.

• Part 2 of the creator's series covers the issues that "actually break launches"; watch for it on @drizzymade.ai.

MeasureHow to know it worked

ProvenanceSource & adaptation notes

AttributionCredit