You built something with ChatGPT, Claude, Lovable, Bolt or v0 and it looks the part. Here is every step between that and a working site customers can find, in the order you need to do them, with the traps marked.
Buy a domain, buy hosting, upload the files, point the domain at the host, install a certificate, connect the form to something that actually sends mail, then tell Google the site exists. Seven jobs. Most people manage the first three and stop, which is why so many AI built sites are technically live and completely invisible.
Below is each step in detail. None of it needs coding, but several have a trap in them that costs you money or enquiries if you get it wrong. The steps are the same whichever tool you used; a ChatGPT website online is no different to a Claude one, and the only real fork comes at step three.
First, work out what you actually have. If your AI gave you an HTML file, or a page you can right click and save, this is all straightforward. If you built in Lovable, Bolt, v0 or Replit, you have a JavaScript application rather than a web page, and steps three and four work differently. Check for a folder called src or a file called package.json. If either exists, you are in the second camp.
Register it yourself rather than letting anyone else do it for you, and use your own email address on the registration. A .co.nz costs around twenty to forty dollars a year and .nz domains are administered by the Domain Name Commission, so ownership is properly recorded and you can prove it.
The trap here is having a web person register it on their account. It happens constantly and it means the domain is not really yours. If you ever fall out, you lose the address, the email and every bit of search history attached to it.
Hosting is the computer your site actually lives on. For a New Zealand business, host in New Zealand. Local hosting means faster loading for local visitors and it also happens to help slightly with local search.
Free hosting on GitHub Pages, Netlify or Vercel will serve a static page perfectly well, and there is nothing wrong with it technically. The catch is that there is nobody to ring, no email on your domain, and no backups you did not set up yourself. That is a fine trade at the hobby stage and a poor one for a business.
For a plain HTML site this is a file upload. Log into the hosting control panel, open the file manager, find the folder named public_html, and put your files in it. The main page must be called index.html or nothing will load. Images go in a subfolder and the paths in your HTML have to match exactly, including capital letters, because the server cares about case even though your laptop does not.
For a JavaScript app you cannot upload the source. You have to run a build first, which produces a folder of plain files, and upload that instead. If that sentence means nothing to you, this is the point at which most people stop and ask for help.
Your domain and your hosting are two separate purchases that know nothing about each other until you connect them. In your domain registrar's control panel, change the nameservers to the ones your host gave you. Then wait. Changes propagate across the internet over anything from ten minutes to a full day, and refreshing the page repeatedly will not speed it up.
Once it has propagated, install the SSL certificate. Most hosts do this in one click. Then load every page and check for a padlock. If a page shows a warning, something on it is still loading over an insecure address, usually an image linked from somewhere else.
This is the single most important step on the page and the one AI built sites fail most often. Test it yourself before you tell anyone the site is live.
There are three common failures. The form posts to an endpoint that does not exist, so nothing happens at all. The form uses a mailto link, which tries to open the visitor's email program and works for almost nobody. Or the form sends, but your domain has no mail authentication set up, so the message goes to spam or gets rejected outright.
Fixing the third one means adding SPF, DKIM and DMARC records to your domain. Your host can usually do it. Without them, mail sent from your website is treated as suspicious by Gmail and Outlook, which is most of your customers.
Log the enquiries as well as emailing them. If a form only sends an email and the email fails, the enquiry is gone and you will never know it existed. Storing submissions on the site as well means you can go back and find them.
Google will not find you on its own within any useful timeframe. You need to do three things: create a sitemap listing every page, add a robots.txt file that does not accidentally block everything, and verify the site in Google Search Console and submit the sitemap there.
While you are at it, fix the page titles. AI built sites almost always give every page the same title, usually just the business name. Each page needs its own, describing what is on that page, because the title is both what Google reads and what a person clicks in the results.
Then claim your Google Business Profile. For a local business it often brings in more calls than the website does, and it is free.
Before you send anyone to the site, read it as a stranger. AI writes confidently about things nobody told it. Look specifically for testimonials attributed to people you have never met, statistics like a ninety eight percent satisfaction rate that nobody measured, memberships or certifications you do not hold, and any claim about years in business that is not accurate.
In New Zealand, misleading claims on your own website are your liability under the Fair Trading Act regardless of what generated them. Also check for leftover placeholder text, because "insert your phone number here" sitting on a live contact page is more common than you would think.
If your form collects names and email addresses, you need a privacy policy saying what you do with them. That is a Privacy Act 2020 requirement, not an optional extra.
Steps one, two and seven are doable in an afternoon. Steps four, five and six are where people give up, because the failures are silent. A broken form does not report itself, and an unindexed site looks exactly the same as an indexed one with no visitors. You cannot tell which problem you have without checking.
Getting a ChatGPT website online properly is the job we do for a flat $324, which is our normal yearly hosting figure. We take the site you built, rebuild it properly on our New Zealand servers, fix the enquiry side, do all the search setup, and hand it back with an editor so you can keep changing it yourself. The appraisal beforehand is free and you get it whether you go ahead or not.
Either way, work through the seven steps. A site that is genuinely online is worth a great deal more than one that merely exists.