Key Takeaways
- HighLevel's AI Studio now builds sites with server-side rendering, which helps page speed and how Google reads the site.
- The build that works is a sequence of about 20 prompts, run one at a time, with a client questionnaire filled out before the first one.
- A page for every service and a page for every city you serve is where the local SEO lives.
- The fastest website audit is free: fill out the contact form, see if anything comes back, and run the site through PageSpeed Insights on mobile.
- Forms have to come off the site while your A2P texting registration is reviewed. AI Studio's version history puts them back.
Most local business websites look fine. The trouble shows up when a customer actually tries to use one. The form goes nowhere, the page crawls on a phone, and there's no page for the service or the town they searched. In HighLevel's two-day live workshop, Build and Sell AI Websites, Dominic Baptist and host Paulson Thomas walk through how they build a site in AI Studio and how they find the businesses that need one. We're On Point Tech Solutions, a Go High Level San Jose shop based in Los Gatos, and this is the part that matters if you own one of those businesses, or if you build sites for them.
What Changed in AI Studio
Dominic has built a lot of sites in HighLevel, and he walked through how the method evolved. Early on you typed one line, like "build me a landscaping website." Then it was one giant prompt. Then 15 to 30 prompts in a row. The latest AI Studio update added full stack builds and server-side rendering. His analogy: the old version was a Ferrari with no engine, and server-side rendering is the engine. You don't need to understand how it works. It's built in, and it's a big part of why these sites load fast and read cleanly to Google.
His demo was a pool company site built from scratch in a few hours. It had a page for every service, a page for every service area, an FAQ, and a custom estimate form asking for project type, budget range, and timeline. He put the AI cost at under $14 for the whole build.
The Build: A Questionnaire, Then 20 Prompts
The first step isn't a prompt at all. It's a client questionnaire: business name and address, every service they offer (plus the most profitable ones and the ones they don't do), every city they serve, brand colors as hex codes, logo, calls to action, form fields, social profiles, licenses, FAQs, and the domain. Dominic's line is that once you have this, you're 95% of the way there.
Then the prompts go in order, one at a time:
- Rules first. A set of operating rules goes in before prompt one, so the AI doesn't break things halfway through a long build. Nothing visible changes. That's expected.
- Groundwork. The first few prompts write a fact brief, confirm the rendering setup, and plan the build. The site still looks blank. Don't panic.
- Brand and structure. Business data, logo, colors, fonts, header, footer, navigation.
- The big build. One prompt fills in the pages. Then one prompt per service and one per city, each with its own slug, like pool-restoration or scottsdale-arizona.
- Conversion and media. Contact and estimate forms, reviews, social links, and optimized images. Raw photos uploaded straight off a phone were making earlier sites slow.
- QA. SEO cleanup, accessibility checks, a functional test of every button, and a final checklist pass.
Why not one mega prompt? In his words, "if you put them all in one go, it's going to break." Twenty prompts still takes about an hour and a half, against roughly a week by hand.
The A2P Step Everyone Trips On
If you want the site to send texts, your number needs A2P 10DLC approval. Forms on the site can hold that up. The workaround from the workshop: run a prompt that pulls every form off the site and leaves only the approved chat widget, plus the privacy policy and terms. Register, wait for approval, then open AI Studio's version history and roll the site back so the forms return. After that, connect a real custom domain. A preview link won't rank.
The Five-Minute Website Audit
Day 2 was about selling, and the most useful part for owners is Dominic's audit. Anyone can run it on their own site today:
- Time how long it takes to find the contact form.
- Fill it out. Do you get a text or email back? If not, that lead is gone. "If I filled out your form and got nothing, I'm going to the next landscaper in town."
- Look for a text consent checkbox on the form. No box usually means no text follow-up exists.
- Check for separate service pages and service area pages.
- Run the site through Google's PageSpeed Insights on mobile. He aims for 80 to 95. One site he showed scored 46 with a 9.5 second load.
He pastes those results into ChatGPT to write a plain-English summary with the top five fixes, no jargon. And he's firm on one point: never promise anyone the number one spot on Google. Promise better ranking and a site that answers every lead.
On price, Dominic quoted $1,000 to $3,000 one time for a build, with monthly plans starting at $97 for the site, form, and text follow-up, and $297 for added automations, pipelines, calendars, and payments. His advice to anyone selling this: pick one or two offers and get good at them.
Why This Matters for Bay Area and San Jose Businesses
People here search the way Dominic describes: the service plus the town. "Roof repair Campbell." "Pool service Saratoga." If your site has one Services page and a line that says "serving the Bay Area," you're asking Google to guess. A page per service and a page per city answers the search directly. And in a market this busy, a form that doesn't reply in minutes is a customer handed to your competitor. If you want to see what an AI rebuild gets right and wrong, we wrote up a San Jose contractor site we rebuilt into 71 pages.
Practical Steps
- Run the five-point audit above on your own site this week.
- Write down every service you sell and every city you serve. That list is your page map.
- Rebuild in AI Studio with the questionnaire first and the prompts one at a time.
- Pull forms during A2P review, then restore them from version history once you're approved.
- Publish on your own domain, retest on a phone, and fill out your own form again.
Watch the Full Workshop
Day 1 covers the build:
Day 2 covers the audit, outreach, and pricing:
Final Thoughts
A good local website loads fast on a phone, has a page for what you do and where you do it, and answers every form. Credit to Dominic Baptist and Paulson Thomas for a clear two-day walkthrough. If you want a Go High Level San Jose website built this way, On Point Tech Solutions is a Go High Level consultant in Los Gatos serving San Jose and the whole Bay Area. You own everything we build, and we build every site to WCAG 2.2 AA. We can build it for you, or teach your team with an SOP so you can run it yourself. Start at optechsol.llc.