Every AI website builder opens with some version of the same question: what is the business? The answers tend to fall into two shapes, and neither works well.
A two-word answer — "a bakery" — gives the generator very little to work from, and the result is correspondingly generic. Several paragraphs of history and philosophy give it a great deal of material of one kind, and the result reads like a company profile.
A useful answer sits between the two and has a particular shape. This post covers that shape: which details change what gets built, which ones make little difference, and which one is most often left out.
Name the trade, not the category
"A restaurant" is a category. "A barbecue place doing brisket and ribs" is a trade, and the two produce different sites.
A category mostly determines which stock photography is used. The trade affects the photography, whether the menu is organised by course or by cut, the tone of the copy, and often the colour and the typeface, because a smokehouse and a tasting-menu restaurant are different businesses rather than the same one under two names.
The most useful single step is to say what is actually sold, in the words that would be used talking to a neighbour rather than the words that would go on a form.
What the difference looks like
Each pair below describes the same business twice. The second version gives the generator more to work with.
- "A salon" and "a two-chair barber shop doing fades, beard work and hot towel shaves".
- "A contractor" and "a family electrician doing panel upgrades, rewires and EV charger installs".
- "A consultant" and "an AI consulting practice building custom copilots for mid-size companies".
- "A shop" and "an independent bookshop with an events programme".
Say what visitors need to be able to do
This is the part most descriptions leave out, and it affects what gets built rather than how it looks.
"Let people book a slot." "Show the menu." "Let people ask about catering." "People should be able to order for collection." Each of those becomes a section with something behind it: a form that writes to a collection, a list held as data rather than text, a booking that holds a slot against a capacity.
Where it is not stated, the generator works from the common case for the trade. That is a reasonable default and it is not always the right one for a particular business.
Give the two or three things the business is known for
Walk-ins welcome. Anxious dogs a speciality. Emergency callouts, day or night. Pasta made daily. Gas Safe registered. Open Sundays. We come to you.
These are the details customers decide on, and they cannot be inferred from the trade. Knowing that a business is a grooming salon does not produce "anxious dogs a speciality"; that has to be supplied.
Three is usually enough. They tend to end up in the short-facts section near the top of the page, which carries a lot of information per word.
Say how it should feel, where there is a view
"Serious and calm, nothing flashy" produces a different site from "bright and family-friendly": different colours, typefaces, amounts of movement and photography.
This is worth a short clause where there is an opinion to state. Where there is not, it is better left out — an unstated default is easier to change later than a guess that has been acted on.
Comparative phrasing carries more information than absolute phrasing. "Calmer than most law firm sites" or "more like a neighbourhood place than a chain" is more specific than "modern" or "professional".
Why "modern and professional" adds little
Most businesses describe themselves as modern and professional, which is why those words carry little signal. A description that would be equally true of another business in the same street is not narrowing anything down.
A quick check: could the phrase be moved to a competitor's description unchanged? "Warm and a bit scruffy, in a good way" could not, which is what makes it useful here.
What tends not to help
Four things absorb effort in these descriptions without improving the result, and one of them makes it worse.
- Writing the copy. That is the part being delegated, and pre-written copy usually comes back rearranged rather than improved.
- Listing every service ever performed. Six or eight carry more weight than forty, and a list of forty is one most visitors scroll past.
- The founding story, unless it is genuinely part of the sale. It tends to displace the practical information visitors arrive for.
- Specifying layout. "Put the gallery on the left" is easier to decide once the page exists and the section can be moved.
What happens to details that were not given
This is worth understanding because it changes how the first draft should be read. Any AI builder has to fill the gaps: a page carrying "[your opening hours here]" is not a finished site, and a page with nothing in that place is less useful still.
So plausible details get generated — hours, a founding year, a line about where produce comes from. That keeps the draft complete, and it is also a risk, because a plausible invention can survive a quick read and reach the published site.
The question worth asking of any tool is whether it says which details it generated. A builder that marks them as drafts produces a checklist; one that does not leaves the page to be checked line by line.
A worked example
Here is a description covering the points above, in three sentences:
"A two-chair barber shop doing fades, beard work and hot towel shaves. Walk-ins welcome, but people need to be able to book a chair online, and the prices should be on the page. Plain and a bit old-fashioned — dark rather than bright."
That gives the trade, what visitors need to be able to do, two specifics that affect who gets in touch, and one clause about feel. It takes about a minute to write and carries more usable information than several paragraphs of history.
Then correct rather than specify
A common next step is trying to get the description exactly right before generating anything. It is usually not necessary.
Looking at a finished page and saying "the services section should be more direct" is a simpler task than specifying that in advance, and it is more accurate, because the judgement is being made against something concrete.
So: three sentences, look at the result, and do the rest by correction. That is the workflow these tools are built around, and treating the first description as a specification adds work at the least informed moment.
The bottom line
Three sentences: what is sold, in a customer's words; what visitors need to be able to do; and two or three things the business is known for. A clause about how it should feel is worth adding where there is a real preference.
The second of those is the one most often left out, and it is the one that determines whether the result is a brochure or a site with a booking and a form behind it.
After that, the first result is a draft to correct rather than a specification to get right.
Frequently asked questions
- How long should the description be?
- Two to four sentences works well. A single word leaves the generator to fill in almost everything; several paragraphs of history displace the practical detail and tend to come back as a company profile.
- What if I don't know what I want it to look like?
- Leave it out. A default that has not been specified is easier to change later than a preference that has been acted on, and every part of the look can be edited once it is visible on the page.
- Will it make things up about my business?
- It has to fill the gaps, or the page arrives full of placeholders. The useful question is whether the tool says which details it generated — Sitemo marks generated details as drafts, which turns the check into a list rather than a line-by-line read.
- Should I list all my services?
- Six or eight tend to carry more weight than forty, and long lists are mostly scrolled past. More can be added once the structure exists.
- Can I change it afterwards if the description was wrong?
- Yes, and that is the intended workflow. Correcting a real page — by clicking the text, or by asking in chat for a section to be reworked — is more accurate than specifying it in advance.
- Does mentioning my town help?
- Where the business serves a specific area, yes. It ends up in the copy — the neighbourhood in a subtitle, the coverage area stated plainly — and coverage is one of the first things a visitor uses to rule a business in or out.