Can I move to a custom domain later?

Yes. Connect your organization’s own Firebase Hosting integration, choose it as the site’s hosting target and connect the domain there. At the next publication, the preferred domain becomes the site’s canonical address.

Will AI assistants find my pages automatically?

By default, the site provides llms.txt and robots.txt allowing AI crawlers, and an assistant in a visitor’s browser can read published pages and complete forms. Whether an assistant actually mentions you is up to that assistant.

A website built with AI or by yourself: what do you gain?

What the agent route does provide

The gains from an AI-built site lie in components that are always the same and remain tedious and error-prone by hand. Every Gen8 site publication automatically includes these, with nothing to configure:

a sitemap.xml and a robots.txt allowing AI crawlers;
an llms.txt and an RSS feed;
canonical links and language alternatives (hreflang);
structured data for each page, marking articles as BlogPosting, documentation as TechArticle and other pages as Article.

The structure itself is also in the platform: collections with their own index pages, category and tag archives, pagination and page templates. New pages inherit that structure instead of rebuilding it.

What you give up

Some things are deliberately fixed, which you only notice when you want to change them:

Supported languages are fixed when the site is created. You cannot add a language to an existing site with a setting; you can translate individual pages into a language already supported.
There is no scheduled publication. A page with “published” status goes into the next publication regardless of its date. To release something on a certain day, keep it as a draft and publish that day.
A custom domain requires your own hosting environment. The site then publishes to your organization's Firebase Hosting, where the domain is connected. Without that step, the site keeps its Gen8 address.
Building does not mean unlimited design freedom. You work with blocks and theme tokens. That brings consistency while ruling out the completely free layout of a hand-built page.

What you must keep doing yourself

This is the honest boundary. Being discoverable is not the same as ranking well. Sitemaps, structured data and a clean technical foundation allow you to be found; they guarantee no position. What does influence that remains human work: knowing your customer, having something specific to say and earning links from sites that already matter.

In practice: expect the AI route to save time on structure and maintenance, and reserve the time freed for content. Without investing that time in content, you mainly get an empty site faster.

When building it yourself is better

Building it yourself — or commissioning an agency — remains better when the site itself is the product: an application with login and its own data, a visual concept requiring custom work, or an integration beyond what blocks support. That is rarely the case for a business site explaining what you do, showing evidence and generating conversations.

What to do with this

List the pages your site needs and write who will create the content for each. If that column stays empty, no building approach solves your problem — content is the project. The agent route itself is described under websites by agents; the technical side of discoverability is in technical SEO in an AI workflow.

About this source