Glossary

Most AI builders don't charge per page — they charge per action, and credits are the currency. A plan might give you 100 credits a month, and a single homepage generation can eat 10 or 20 of them. The catch is that redoing work costs the same as doing it, so a fussy afternoon of tweaks can drain a month's allowance. Always check how many credits your plan includes, and what a typical edit costs, before you commit.

AI slop is what you get when a tool optimises for “done” over “good” — pages that look plausible at a glance but feel hollow on a read. For a small business it's actively harmful: visitors can smell the sameness, and it makes you look like everyone else instead of the specific, trustworthy option. Beating slop means adding the real details only you know — your actual process, prices and proof — rather than shipping the generated first draft.

Your homepage decides whether a visitor stays, and an AI-generated one is a strong start but a weak finish. The layout arrives in seconds, yet the copy tends toward the same reassuring-but-empty lines every business gets, and the AI can't know your real proof — the results and prices that convert. It's an AI-generated website narrowed to your single most important page — and the one we grade with the Conversion Score.

An AI-generated website is one where the first full draft — structure, words, images — comes from a model rather than a person. It collapses days of work into minutes and removes the need for design skills, which is the appeal. The catch is that “generated” isn't “finished”: the output leans generic, can invent details, and needs your judgement to become accurate. It's the artifact — the thing that comes out — however you got there, whether from a single prompt (prompt-to-website) or loose back-and-forth (vibe coding).

Brand drift is the failure mode that makes AI sites feel subtly “off.” Each page is generated in its own moment, and as the project outgrows the AI's memory, the rules you set at the start fade — a heading font changes, the blue shifts, the confident voice turns generic. No single page looks broken, but together they don't feel like one business. A well-kept brand kit is the fix: catch drift by reviewing the whole site as a set, and reset your brand rules whenever the AI wanders.

A brand kit is the single source of truth for how your business looks and sounds: your logo files, your two or three brand colours, your heading and body fonts, and a note on your tone. Set it once and every new page, post or email can pull from it instead of you guessing each time. With an AI builder it matters twice over — a tool that reads your brand kit stays consistent, while one that ignores it is where brand drift begins.

The context window is the AI's short-term memory: the amount of text — your instructions, your existing pages — it can consider in one go. Once a project outgrows it, the oldest details fall out of view, so the tone and style you set early quietly slip. That's the usual reason a long build ends up inconsistent. Restating your key brand rules as you go, rather than assuming the AI still remembers them, keeps things on track.

Conversion rate is visitors who act divided by total visitors, as a percentage. It's the most honest measure of whether your website earns its keep: 1,000 visitors at 1% is ten enquiries, and lifting that to 2% doubles your leads without a single extra visitor. Small businesses often chase more traffic when improving the rate is cheaper and faster. It's the parent idea behind the Conversion Score, which grades the specific things on a page that move this number.

The Conversion Score rates a site on the things that actually move a visitor to act, not on how pretty it is. A page can look polished and still score poorly if the offer is vague, the call-to-action is buried, or there's nothing to build trust. Scoring it turns a fuzzy “my site isn't working” into a specific list of fixes — and it's especially useful against AI-built sites, which often look the part but miss the fundamentals of persuasion.

Rollover decides what happens to credits you don't use before your billing date. A few builders let them stack up, so a quiet month can fund a busy one; most reset to zero, meaning any unused allowance is money you've paid for and lost. If your workload is uneven — a burst of building, then months of small tweaks — rollover matters a lot. Check the policy, and any cap on how many credits are allowed to roll over.

Editability is the difference between a site you own and one you're stuck with. Some AI builders hand you clean, directly-editable pages; others treat the generated result as a black box, where changing one line means asking the AI to redo the block — spending credits and risking fresh drift. For a real business that updates prices, hours and offers constantly, editability matters more than a flashy first generation. Test it by trying to change one small thing.

Export lock-in is the exit cost baked into a platform. Ask the real question before you commit: if I leave, what do I keep? Some builders let you export your content, code and domain cleanly; others hold your site on their hosting with no usable export, so switching means starting over. For a small business, that turns a tool choice into a long-term dependency. Check the leaving process before you invest months of work.

Flat-rate means you pay the same amount regardless of how many pages you generate or edits you make. For a small business that values a predictable bill, it's usually the safer choice — no surprise overage, no rationing your own edits to conserve credits. The trade-off is that if you barely touch the tool, you pay for capacity you never use — quietly subsidising the heavy builders on the same plan.

A free tier is free indefinitely, unlike a free trial that expires. It's how builders let you test the water at no cost — but the limits are the whole point: often a subdomain instead of your own address, the builder's badge on your pages, and only a handful of credits a month. It's fine for a first experiment. Just be clear which limits would embarrass a real business before you send customers to a free-tier site.

A free trial lets you use the paid features for a set window so you can judge the tool properly before committing. Two things are worth watching: whether it asks for card details that auto-charge the moment the trial ends, and what happens to the site you built if you don't convert. Set a reminder for the day before it expires, and confirm you can export or keep your work if you decide to walk away.

Hallucination is AI stating invented information as if it were real. On a website that's not a quirk, it's a liability: a made-up “24/7 support” line or a fabricated qualification can mislead customers and land you in trouble. AI fills gaps with plausible-sounding guesses, so anything it wrote about your actual business — services, prices, hours, credentials — needs checking against reality before you publish. Never assume the details are ones you actually gave it.

A landing page is a focused, standalone page with one goal and one call to action — no navigation to wander off into, no competing links. You send paid or email traffic straight to it because a page about one offer converts far better than dropping people on a busy homepage. For a small business running a promotion or a single service, a tight landing page is often the difference between an ad that pays for itself and one that doesn't.

Overage is what you're charged after you've used everything your plan includes. Some tools stop and ask you to upgrade; others keep going and add each extra action to your bill, sometimes at a higher rate than your plan's. That's the classic surprise invoice. Look for a spending cap or an alert you can set, so a busy week of edits doesn't turn into a bill you never agreed to.

Prompt-to-website is the headline trick of modern AI builders: type a description, get a finished-looking site back. It's fast for a first draft and great for beating the blank page, but the result is only as clear as your prompt and still needs editing to become truly yours. Where the neighbours differ: this is the method (the describing), an AI-generated website is the artifact it produces, and vibe coding is doing it loosely by feel.

A rate limit protects the builder's servers by capping how many requests you can fire off in a given period. It's separate from your credit allowance: you can have plenty of credits and still be told to slow down. For most small businesses it rarely bites, but it can interrupt a big build day or a launch-eve scramble. If you plan to do a lot at once, check the limit before you start.

Regeneration cost is the quiet drain in usage-based pricing: every “try again” spends credits or tokens afresh, whether the new version is better or not. AI rarely nails your brand on the first go, so real projects involve a lot of redoing — and each redo bills. The fix is to be specific up front, change one thing at a time, and stop when it's good enough, instead of chasing perfect while your allowance evaporates.

A template is a pre-built design you adapt: swap in your copy, photos and colours, and you have a site. It's the established alternative to AI generation — instead of describing what you want and hoping, you start from a layout that already works. The trade-off is choice versus effort: a template gives you a reliable, proven structure with less novelty, while AI generation offers a bespoke-feeling first draft that then needs more fixing before you can trust it.

A token is the smallest chunk of text an AI reads or writes — roughly three-quarters of a word. When you type an instruction and the AI writes back, both halves are counted, so think of tokens as the meter on its work: a common word might be one token, a rare one three. Verbose prompts and long pages both add up, so if your builder shows a token count, keep your instructions tight to stretch your plan further.

Instead of one flat price, a usage-based builder charges for what you actually do: per credit, per token, or per generation. A slow month costs little; a heavy build month can cost several times more. The risk is a bill you can't predict, which makes budgeting hard for a small business. Before you pick a plan, sketch out a normal month of use and price it — the sticker figure is rarely what you'll actually pay.

Vibe coding is the loose, conversational way of building with AI: you react to what you see and nudge it — “bigger,” “calmer,” “more like a boutique” — while the AI handles the underlying code. It's the practice and culture, not a specific tool: the same describe-don't-build approach as prompt-to-website, but looser and more improvisational. Liberating for quick experiments; the weakness is control, since you're not touching the specifics, so results can be inconsistent and hard to fix precisely.