What it costs to fix a website AI built

Somebody built you a site with AI, it is not working, and you want a number. The honest answer is that it depends on one thing only — whether the foundation can be kept — and you can work out which case you are in before anyone quotes you. This is how we decide it, including the cases where we tell people not to spend anything.

What does it cost to fix an AI-built website?

Three cases. Surface fixes — labels, contrast, images, structured data — sit near the bottom of our $999 bracket. A rebuild on the same content is the $2,400 bracket for most small sites. If the content has to be rewritten too, it is the $4,900 bracket. The decision is about the foundation, not the page count.

Case one: the foundation is fine, the finish is not

This case is far more common than the internet suggests, and finding yourself in it is good news. The markup is reasonable, the pages have sensible URLs, and the thing is a normal editable website. It simply shipped with the entire invisible half of the job left undone.

What that job actually contains: labelling every form field, giving every image alternative text, fixing contrast on anything carrying a price or a phone number, compressing images that went up at camera resolution, and adding the structured data that tells Google what the business is and where.

It is a day or two of unglamorous work. It is also, measured per dollar, the highest-return work available on a small business website, because every item on that list sits directly between a visitor and an enquiry.

Case two: the foundation cannot be edited safely

The tell here is never ugliness, and a site in this case often looks perfectly smart. It is that a small change in one place quietly breaks something in another, or that the same small change has to be made in five separate places to take effect everywhere.

GitClear, analysing 623 million code changes from 2023 to 2026, measured duplicated lines up 81% to the highest in their record, refactored code down from 21% of changes in 2022 to 3.8%, and copy-paste up from 9.4% to 15.7%. A codebase with that profile does not have bugs so much as it has repetition, and every future change is priced against the repetition rather than against the change.

When we find that, rebuilding on the same content is genuinely cheaper than maintaining it — not as a sales position, but because the second and third change you ask for will each cost more than they should, indefinitely. That is the $2,400 bracket for a typical small multi-page site.

Case three: the content has to go too

If the pages were written by a model as well as built by one, there is usually nothing to keep. Generated marketing copy has a signature: fluent, confident, and free of any checkable fact. It does not rank because it says nothing, and it does not convert for the same reason.

There is a second reason to take it seriously. Google’s Search spam policies name scaled content abuse directly — using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users — and state that such sites may rank lower or not appear in results at all. If a builder generated forty near-identical location pages, that is the shape the policy is describing, and the fix is removal rather than editing.

Rebuild plus written content is the $4,900 bracket.

The three cases side by side

Three cases, three brackets, and one question that decides which one you are in: can the foundation be kept? The page count barely moves the number. What moves it is whether a second developer can safely change the code, and whether the words on the pages are worth keeping at all.

Those are the same four brackets on our public price list. Nothing about a site being AI-built carries a surcharge — the work is the work.

If you are pricing a new site from scratch instead, what a website costs in Canada sets these brackets beside freelancer and agency prices. And if the site was built in Lovable and the problem is that search engines see an empty page, that is a narrower job: fixing SEO on a Lovable site.

The security question, priced honestly

People ask whether an AI-built site needs a security audit charged on top of everything else. Usually not as a separate line item, because in cases two and three the rebuild replaces the very code that would have been audited. Paying twice to examine something you are about to delete is not thrift.

It matters for case one, where you are keeping the foundation. Veracode’s 2026 GenAI Code Security Report found roughly 44% of AI code generation tasks introduced a risky security vulnerability, and that models passed cross-site scripting tasks only 15% of the time — the lowest class in their results. Anywhere a visitor types something that is later displayed back is the place to look, and on a small business site that is the contact form and the search box. Checking two inputs is minutes, not a project.

When we tell people to spend nothing

Three situations come up often enough to be worth writing down, and in all three the right answer is to keep your money. We would rather say so now than take a project that should not exist, because the version of this business that lasts is the one people send their friends to.

If the site is under about three months old and enquiries are arriving, leave it. Let it run, fix the labels and the images, and revisit in six months with real numbers instead of a hunch.

If you are still testing whether the business works at all, a generated site is the correct tool and we would be a waste of your money. Come back when the phone rings because of it.

And if the only actual problem is that enquiries are not reaching your inbox, that is a form fix, not a website. It costs almost nothing and we will tell you so.

How to find out which case you are in

Run the free nine-point audit on your own URL. It reports in public, names what it found, and does not require you to talk to anyone. If it comes back clean you have case one at worst, and you can hand the report to whoever built the site.

If you want it looked at properly, we reply within 48 hours with which case we think you are in and why, and if the answer is “do nothing yet” that is what we send. The seven tells will get you most of the way there on your own first.