A REAL CHECKLIST, NOT A SALES PITCH
AI can build the front end
in an afternoon.
The back end is a different job.
Every "AI builds you a business" video shows the fun 20%: a prompt, a preview, a deploy button. Nobody shows the other 80%, the part where your site actually needs to make money, get found, and not silently break. This is that part, laid out step by step.
See the full checklist ↓What the "just use AI" crowd doesn't tell you
Generating a working front end is genuinely easy now, and that part isn't hype. But a front end isn't a business. Between "it looks done" and "it makes money," there's a specific, learnable set of steps that most tutorials skip entirely because they're not flashy: getting an ad network to actually approve your site instead of rejecting it, wiring up analytics correctly, getting Google to notice you exist, and catching the kind of silent bugs that make a site look fine while quietly serving broken files to every visitor.
None of that is exotic. It's just never shown, because "click deploy and you're done" gets more views than "here's why your canonical tag points at a redirect."
The write ups below are not general advice. Each one is a specific failure that happened on a live network of small sites, with the symptom it presented, the command that identified it, and the fix. Several of them took days to find and about a minute to correct once understood, which is the most frustrating category of problem there is and the least written about.
The Real Checklist
Seven phases, idea to real traffic. Check items off as you go. Your progress saves automatically, no account needed.
Failure Write Ups
Specific problems from a live site network. Symptom, cause, command, fix.
Your AdSense site says "Requires review" and nothing is happening
Adding a site does not submit it. The second step is easy to miss and the site sits idle indefinitely.
MONETIZATIONAdSense says ads.txt is missing, but you can see the file
Two different causes, same status message. One fixes itself, the other is a serious bug.
DEPLOYMENTYour missing pages return 200 OK, and it is breaking things you have not noticed
A catch-all serving your homepage for unknown paths breaks tools silently while every check looks green.
DEPLOYMENTA deploy deleted files you did not touch
Pages deploys replace the whole site. A partial folder silently deletes everything else.
DEPLOYMENTYour apex domain works and www does not
Attaching a custom domain does not create DNS. Two steps are required and only one is obvious.
DISCOVERYYour canonical tag points at a URL that redirects
A canonical ending in .html when the real URL is extensionless quietly undermines indexing.
DISCOVERYVerifying a Search Console domain property without handing Google your DNS
The one click Cloudflare option grants Google write access to all your DNS. The TXT route does not.
DISCOVERYYour site is deployed and Google does not know it exists
Deploying tells nobody. Without Search Console there is no indexing path and waiting will not create one.
ANALYTICSThe GA4 AdSense link picker is empty and gives no reason
An empty picker with no error usually means AdSense and Analytics sit under different Google accounts.
MONETIZATIONWhy AdSense Rejects Sites (And How to Actually Get Approved)
The real approval checklist, plus the silent bugs that tank it without you knowing.
ANALYTICSGA4, Search Console and Bing: The Setup Nobody Explains Clearly
Property IDs vs measurement IDs, verification, and why Google may not know you exist.
Why these and not "10 tips for getting approved"
Search for almost any launch problem and you will find the same article rewritten a hundred times, by people who read the other ninety nine. Those articles are not wrong so much as useless: they describe the category of problem without ever naming the specific thing that is happening to you.
Everything here is the opposite. It is narrow on purpose. If your ad network says a file is missing when you can plainly see the file, there is a page for exactly that, and it tells you the one command that distinguishes the harmless cause from the serious one. That is the level of specificity that actually ends a debugging session.