# “Getting a website made” is the wrong question > Why “getting a website made” misses the point — and which three questions really count when your site has to serve people and AI agents. “Getting a website made” is the wrong question because it describes a deliverable and not a job: this many pages, a design, a launch date. The question that actually affects your business sounds different: which questions should my business be able to answer around the clock — for people and for machines — and who makes sure those answers are right? ## Why the old question no longer holds The old question comes from a time when a website was above all a place you visited: someone types something in, lands on you, reads, calls. In that world, “getting a website made” really was the right order to place. Today a growing share of the decision happens before anyone even sees your site — inside a summarised answer an AI assembles from various sources. Your website has picked up a second audience, meant every bit as seriously as the first: machines that read your facts and pass them on. The place has turned into an interface — a digital knowledge and service interface for people and AI agents. How that shift developed over the years is something Florian traced in the post [Four phases every website is going through right now](https://btlabs.dev/en/posts/four-phases-website) on this blog. That is why plenty of businesses today go looking for a “web agency” and realise mid-conversation that the term no longer covers what is needed. Not because design has stopped mattering. But because what decides success sits underneath the design. ## The better question has three parts **First: which questions?** Write down the ten to fifteen questions your business genuinely answers every week. When are you open. Do you do this for private customers too. Do you come out to the far end of the valley. How fast can I get an appointment. Roughly what does something like this cost. That list is worth more than any wish-list layout — it is the actual brief. **Second: for whom?** Every one of those answers needs two forms: one a human enjoys reading, and one a machine understands unambiguously. That is not duplicate text, it is the same content with a machine-readable structure underneath. Without that structure an AI has to guess — and when it guesses, it sometimes guesses wrong and sounds confident doing it. **Third: who keeps them current?** This is the part that shows up in almost no enquiry and matters most in daily practice. Answers go stale: opening hours change, services get added, a number changes. If nobody owns it, the interface goes stale — and with it the picture an AI paints of you. ## Why the wrong question gets expensive The wrong question gets expensive because it shapes a project that ends at launch — exactly where the benefit starts. A deliverable is finished at some point. An interface is never finished; it is either looked after or it is not. On top of that comes a second cost driver almost nobody budgets for: when the same facts have to be maintained in five places, sooner or later three of them are out of date. What that does in daily practice is something we worked through in the post [Every program knows only its piece](https://btlabs.dev/en/posts/every-program-knows-only-its-piece) with the actual numbers. ## Five questions to ask instead Whoever you are talking to, these five questions separate an offer with substance from a merely pretty one: - Where do my content and facts live, and do they belong to me? - Are they stored machine-readably, or only styled? - What can I change myself after launch, without commissioning anyone? - Are my language versions standalone — or is there just a translator laid over them? - What happens in the first year after launch, and who is my contact then? With us the answer to the last question is the shortest one: the same person you spoke to before. A freelance collective has no layer standing between you and the person who actually builds. ## What this explicitly does not mean Not that design is irrelevant — no machine-readable format in the world saves a page that puts people off. Not that you have to rebuild everything — very often it is enough to add structure and maintainability to a foundation that already exists. And certainly not that you need “something with AI”. You need correct answers in one place, in a form both audiences can read. ## Where to start in practice Start with the list. Ten questions your business answers constantly, in one document. Anyone holding that list runs every supplier conversation differently — no longer about page counts and layouts, but about what the business should be able to do. If you would like to go through that list together before you ask anyone for a project budget: [get in touch](https://btlabs.dev/en/contact). That is exactly what the first conversation is for. --- Source: https://btlabs.dev/en/posts/getting-a-website-made-wrong-question Last-Modified: 2026-08-27T07:00:01.018Z Languages: [de](https://btlabs.dev/llms/de/posts/website-erstellen-lassen-falsche-frage) · [it](https://btlabs.dev/llms/it/posts/farsi-fare-un-sito-web-domanda-sbagliata) See also: [llms.txt](https://btlabs.dev/llms.txt) · [ai.txt (Policy)](https://btlabs.dev/ai.txt) · [identity.json](https://btlabs.dev/identity.json)