Did AI break my website?

Updated 2026-10-17

Short answer: possibly, and it's worth checking before you blame yourself. When a site starts misbehaving after AI changes, the cause is often something the AI added or removed without mentioning it. The way to know is to look at what changed right before the problem started.

It happened to us. An AI coding tool added a logo to this site that was far larger than it needed to be. The site looked fine, the AI said nothing, and the site stayed slow for six months. We only found out when a Preventionlabs report listed the largest files on the page.

How to check it yourself

  1. Write down when the problem started.
  2. Look at what the AI changed around that time: your code history, deploy history, or the chat itself.
  3. Undo the most recent change on a copy of the site and see whether the problem goes away.
  4. Check the live site for the common AI mistakes listed below.

Why AI-built sites hide problems

An AI coding tool checks that the code runs, not what the live site actually serves to visitors. It can't see a huge image's download time on a phone, a page that only breaks on the live server, or a file it left in a public folder. And it usually reports the job as done, so there's no reason to look.

What AI tools commonly get wrong

  • Images added at full size instead of resized and compressed.
  • Files left in public folders, like .env, backups or the .git folder.
  • Pages that work on the developer's machine but fail on the live server.
  • Links and addresses that still point at a local or preview version of the site.
  • Missing basics nobody asked for: email records, security headers, a sitemap, redirects from http to https.

What Preventionlabs shows

One click checks the live site from the outside, with up to 25 checks: whether it loads on every version of its address, up to 50 pages from your sitemap, JavaScript errors in a real browser, page size and the largest images and scripts, HTTPS and redirects, email records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), files that should never be public, domain expiry and DNS. Each report lists problems first, each with the evidence and what to do, and shows what changed since the last report. With a read-only Cloudflare token connected, the report also lines up the errors visitors got with the deploys, DNS changes and account changes just before them.

Price

First report free, no card needed. Then A$50 a month, up to 10 domains.

Run your first report free

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