Before you ship your AI-built app: a 6-point preflight
AI will hand you a working-looking app in minutes. But across 594 freshly-shipped, mostly AI-built apps we scanned — all logged-out, in a real browser — the same basics were missing over and over. Here is a five-minute preflight before you hit deploy, roughly in the order things break.
1. Add a meta description and a viewport tag
96% of the apps we scanned shipped with no meta description, and 92% had no viewport tag at all — so they look squashed on phones and turn up as a blank in search results. This is two lines in your page <head>. Check it: view source and search for 'viewport' and 'description'. If they are not there, your template generator would have added them; the AI just forgot.
2. Look at your color contrast
64% failed an automated color-contrast check — the pale-grey-on-white text that looks sleek in the design tool and vanishes for anyone reading in sunlight or with less-than-perfect eyes. Drop a page into any contrast checker, or just pull it up outdoors. If you have to squint, so will your users.
3. Actually submit your forms
We flagged 204 forms across the corpus that existed but looked untested. AI cheerfully generates a contact or signup form and wires the submit button to nothing. Fill yours in and send it. Did anything happen? Did the email arrive? A form that silently eats submissions is worse than no form at all.
4. Click every link and button once
101 of these fresh apps were already serving dead resources — 404s, plus 401s and 403s on assets that were supposed to be public. Walk your own navigation end to end. A link that 404s on launch day is the fastest way to look unfinished, and it is the easiest thing on this list to catch.
5. Open the browser console
A surprising number of apps shipped with JavaScript errors quietly logging on load — invisible to you, but often a broken feature for someone. Press F12, reload, and watch for red. One uncaught exception can take down a whole page on a device or browser you never tested.
6. Try it the way a stranger would
Most of these only surface when you visit your own app cold: a fresh browser, no login, a phone-sized screen. That is exactly the view your first real user gets — and almost never the one you build in.
None of this needs test code or credentials. It is just a real browser visiting a URL — which is also all Siteglass needs: point it at your app and it runs this preflight, and a good deal more, automatically and logged-out in minutes. But even by hand, five minutes here keeps you out of the 97% club.
See it on your own site
siteglass crawls your live site, writes end-to-end tests, runs them in a real browser, and hands you the video and a full DOM replay. First scan free, no install.