A few months ago, a therapist reached out about a new website. I wrote back the next day and tried to find a time to talk it through. Didn't hear anything after that. I waited a couple of weeks and sent a short, low-pressure follow-up, the kind that just says life gets busy and things get lost in inboxes, no worries, happy to pick this back up whenever it's useful. Still nothing. So I let it go. That's most of what doesn't turn into a project, and it's fine, it's the job.
Months later I found out, secondhand, that this same therapist had gone and built a site themselves. A post announcing it, with the link, had gone around, and someone who knows them asked if I'd built it. I hadn't. I'd never heard back after that second email.
So I did what I do
Given what I do for a living, I went and looked. I searched their name first, out of plain curiosity more than anything. Nothing came back, no site, no bio, no directory listing, nothing that tied an actual practice to that name anywhere on the first page, AI Mode included. So I asked for the link directly and tried again, typing the domain into Google verbatim this time.
Still nothing. No blue link for the exact domain I'd just typed in. AI Mode didn't surface it either. What it did find was a handful of other therapists who happen to share the same first name, correctly, helpfully, and unhelpfully not the person whose site I was actually trying to find.
The platform wasn't really the problem
The site was on Squarespace, and I want to be honest that the platform itself isn't really what this post is about. Squarespace can be made to work fine. What I think actually happened is a lot more common than any one platform: real time went into picking colors, arranging sections, getting the words right, all the visible parts, and none went into the parts a search engine or an AI answer engine actually reads to decide a site exists and matches a query. No structured data telling anything what kind of business this is or where. No meta description, so search engines guess at a snippet from whatever text happens to sit near the top. Nothing like an llms.txt giving an AI crawler a plain summary instead of making it infer one. A site can look completely finished and still be functionally invisible to the systems deciding who gets found, and there's no visual cue that tells you that's happening. It just quietly doesn't show up.
What I actually want for people who build it themselves
I mean this straightforwardly: if someone wants to build their own site, that's genuinely fine by me, plenty of people should. But visuals are maybe half the job, and I'd guess most people don't know that going in. If the semantics and the technical plumbing underneath aren't there, it doesn't matter how much care went into the palette. The site doesn't lose to a competitor's site in search results. It just doesn't compete at all.
The math I keep coming back to
Say that build took fifteen or twenty hours, which feels conservative for a first attempt at a page builder most people have never touched. If a session runs $150 to $200, that's somewhere between ten and twenty-five sessions' worth of billable time, hours that could have gone to clients, or genuinely to rest, spent instead learning a block editor. And the result is a site the internet, human or AI, currently can't find at all. That math doesn't work in either direction. It costs more than the sticker price suggests, and it returns less than it should.
A beautiful site nobody can find isn't a website. It's a brochure sitting in a drawer.
None of this is said to gloat, it doesn't sit well with me either, it's a genuinely good clinician who's now harder to find than before they built anything. If you're weighing doing it yourself against having it built right the first time, run the same search on your own name before you decide, not after. And if you want a second opinion on what's actually going on under the hood of a site you already built yourself, send me the link, I'll actually go look.