3 things Claude Code will never understand about websites

As we all know now, Claude can write perfect code in seconds and it can pretty much copy any design that you want to throw at it. But there are three things it will never understand about business websites and I believe they are the only things that really matter when it comes to building your website. So I've spent the last couple of months using Claude code extensively and I'll be honest, I am very, very impressed and it's pretty much going to change the entire Genius Division agency over time and it's probably going to completely change how my job works and looks in a couple of years time. I even gave it a static PNG of a design that I'd made in Figma and it pretty much made it completely pixel perfect. I was unbelievably impressed by what it did.

It made pretty much clean code, pretty much spot on layout and everything just worked and I asked it to build it on WordPress as well. It wasn't an easy job for it and that got me thinking for a moment, Jesus Christ, maybe this AI will actually kill my job and maybe I will become a within months. But then I stopped for a second and started realize what it hadn't done. It didn't ask me about calls to action. It didn't ask me about business strategy.

It didn't ask me how this website was supposed to make money and it didn't ask me who was going to visit it or what they needed to do when they got on the website. Ultimately, it wasn't thinking strategically in any single way. I had prompted Claude code to build me a website based on a design and it did a very good job at that. Beyond that, it didn't do a good job at anything. But that's when it kind of hit me really.

Everybody thinks that getting a website online is the hard part and actually in 2026, it's really not the hard part. With Claude code, with ChatGPT, with many other AI tools out there, that's actually the easy bit now. The hard part after you've got the website online is everything else. Here's what I'm seeing happen over and over and over. You launch your shiny new AI well, I can't say that word.

AI, that's the word I'm trying to say. AI website, you're going to launch your new shiny AI website, be it built on Cloud Code or ChatGPT or whatever. You're going to feel brilliant for about 5 minutes or something like that. Then you check your analytics and then you realize your website is getting zero traffic. Nobody's visiting it.

Nobody's looking at it. Nobody even knows that it exists. And you go, well, Even though it only took me 5 minutes, I've wasted all that time on building a website because nothing's happening. I'm not making any money. Nobody cares about me.

Nobody's even finding the website. And no matter how many times I post it on social media, nobody really cares. And whether a website is made with AI or not, this is the mistake I see the majority of business owners making. You now need to get traffic to that website. It's all well and good making the website.

That's only the first step. You now need SEO. You now need ads. You now need to understand your customers and what they want to see on your website. Ideally, you should have done this before the website launched, but you used AI.

And you need to figure out how to turn those visitors into actual paying customers as well. What I'm getting at is the website is just step one. And that's the bit that AI is completely missing out of the agenda. And that's what we're going to talk about. The first thing that Cloud is never going to understand is conversion.

And what conversion ultimately means is you're looking to convert somebody who has never heard of you as visit your website for the first time into a paying customer or an email address or whatever your conversion looks like on your website. Your website isn't just a digital sales brochure that just sits there looking pretty. What most people don't realize when it comes to a business website is that your online presence, your website is your best sales tool because it's on 24/7, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And yes, I didn't say 365 days then, did I? I said days or something similar.

What I mean is it's on all the time. Your website doesn't get tired or angry, it doesn't take holidays, it's your best salesperson that you have access to. If you do the site right. When Claude designed built the website I was talking about, it looked exactly like the PNG that I'd asked it to build, but what it didn't do is put in any single strategic call to action. It didn't put any get started buttons on there and put them in the right place where people are going to actually make decisions.

It didn't stick a contact form in the place where it would have been correct to stick the contact form. It just dumped it where I told it to. It didn't put any urgency into the site. It didn't put any social proof into the site. It didn't use any of these marketing terms that we're all familiar with to improve the website to convert somebody who's visiting the site into a paying customer.

Claude Code considered none of that. And that's all for very good reason really, because Claude Code doesn't know what you're trying to sell. It doesn't know who you're selling it to. It doesn't know what objections that they might have. It doesn't understand little intricacies like this detail, for example, that contact forms generally work better higher up on the page on service business websites, but lower down the page on product websites where you have to show social proof first.

A good website, and it's not the website that Claude Code is going to build you, knows exactly what action you want people to take at every single stage. And Claude Code can't help you with any of that conversion information, and because you didn't prompt it to. A good website is going to guide people step-by-step towards getting in touch with you. It's going to anticipate their questions. It's going to address their concerns.

And it's going to make it, more importantly than anything, ridiculously easy for them to say yes to something. AI is just going to make you look professional, But, professional isn't going to pay your bills. The second thing that AI just won't understand is story. Now, let me explain this with a little bit of a story, so you understand what I mean. We recently redesigned and rebuilt the Rucklidge Law website.

They have a very big personality inside their business, and the existing website that was online wasn't getting that personality over at all. It was full of stock photos. It was a plain white background, and it just existed. It didn't look good. Inside the company, inside the law firm, Rucklidge Law are funny, warm, nice, friendly people who don't talk with jargon.

And that's what I wanted to get across on the new website. So, we took warm photos in a warm environment, not in a stale office. And I actually warmed up the photos when they appeared on the website, too. The text is all warm, kind of friendly text that doesn't use much jargon, because that was the story and the personality that we wanted to get across on the website. Every business has a personality, and it's one of the biggest things that most businesses don't realize when they're actually designing and building a website.

The reason people choose your business over another one is the story that you tell, which ultimately reveals the personality that you are. It's the way that you make customers feel that nobody else could possibly replicate. That's what we're looking to get across on a website. AI websites all look the same, because AI doesn't understand what makes you and ultimately your business different to anybody else's business. It'll give you clean layouts, and it'll give you stock photos of people pointing at laptops, but it won't figure out your personality, and it won't capture why somebody should choose you over your competition, because it can't possibly understand your intricacies, how you are, how you laugh, what you look like, what you're interested in, and what you want to get across.

Ultimately, are you the kind of accountant who wears a three-piece suit to work every day and talks about tax efficiency, boring but exists, or are you the kind of accountant who wears trainers to work every day and explains everything in plain English over a cup of tea? A more interesting, friendly, and approachable accountant. Both of those scales of the spectrum exist, but AI and Claude Code isn't going to help you pivot towards one of those because it won't understand you as a person. Both of those methods, friendly and approachable versus professional and stiff, they're both brilliant for different times because they're targeted at different types of clients. Your website should make that particular point, who you are and what you do it for and how you treat people, crystal clear from the moment that somebody lands on your website.

The colors, the words, the images, the tone of voice, everything that you've chosen to put on your website feeds into the story that we're telling, this is who I am, and if I resonate with you, you're in the right place and book a meeting. Or, this is who I am, and if I'm not your kind of person, go away and find somebody else because that's important to do, too. Claude can't possibly know unless you tell it whether you're trying to attract corporate clients versus small business owners. It doesn't know if your customers want reassurance or excitement. It doesn't know what keeps your ideal client awake at night, and it won't know what makes them jump out of their chairs and reach for their wallet.

But, your website absolutely should know and display all of that and show it and reflect it in every single pixel of the website. The third thing, and this is the big one and AI doesn't even reflect into this because human builders of websites get this wrong, too, is this. AI cannot build you a business. It can build you a website. It can even build you a very pretty website, but pretty doesn't pay the mortgage or your staff or your office rent.

AI doesn't know if you make money from one-off sales or monthly subscriptions. It doesn't know if you want people to book discovery calls or buy products directly. And it definitely won't understand your pricing strategy or your sales process or how your customers generally buy from you through a customer journey. Is your website supposed to generate leads for your sales team or sell products automatically or book appointments or collect email addresses or showcase your portfolio or all of those things? Claude doesn't know to ask those questions and doesn't display any of those ones in your website.

So, you have to deal with it after the site has gone live. If your website isn't making you money or generating leads which turn into money, your website doesn't work and it may as well not exist. It isn't just sitting there on the internet to look professional. It's connected to everything else that you do and especially the bank account. It should be connected to your CRM system if you have one, your email marketing, your booking calendar, your payment processing, and your customer support.

It should be the center of your universe when it comes to marketing because whenever you want to advertise or promote something, you're going to direct them back to your website and you better be sure it says your personality in the correct way and allows people to take a clear next step to the next thing that they want to do. It is ultimately the engine of your business and not just the showroom. And beyond all that, here's the thing that really gets me with AI. You could, in theory, put everything aside I've said in this video and get Claude code to make you the most perfectly optimized, personality driven, conversion focused website in the world. But if nobody knows it exists, it may as well not because it's still making you zero pounds.

Don't get me wrong in this video though. I'm not anti-AI at all. I use Claude code and ChatGPT every single day of my life now. The entire agency does. It's genuinely changing my web industry and it's genuinely changing a lot of other industries out there, and it is revolutionizing positive and negative a lot of industries.

But, I do think right now, if you're a small business owner or a marketing manager, and you're thinking you can just prompt Claude code to make you a new website to online success, that's not how any of this works. Yes, definitely, you can get Claude to build you a website, as I proved already, and you can get Claude to do a lot of the heavy lifting. But, ultimately, the website, the bit that you think is the most difficult part, is actually the easy part now, and it's the bit that doesn't matter. It's everything else. It's the strategy, the marketing, the optimization, the customer journey, business integration, blah blah blah blah blah, that's the massive chunk underneath the website that actually keeps you afloat, and that you need to get right.

Getting online, getting a website online, is just step one. Making it work for your business, well, that's where the real work needs to begin. So, if you've already used AI to build your website, here's what I want you to do next. I want you to go over to my website, Genius Division.com, link's in the description, and I want you to click "Do I need a new website?" After you've clicked that, I'll get an email, and I'll take a proper look at what you've done and what you haven't done, and tell you honestly whether this AI website that you've got is actually working for your business. And in my head, that's where you separate the pretty websites from the profitable ones.

And no amount of perfect code can make a website profitable. If you found that video useful, I suggest you go check out this Rockledge case study video I did, where I talk about the five things that I think that website does well that your business website probably isn't doing right now. Go on.