How to Choose a Website Designer in 2026 (and What AI Search Changes)

Hire the website designer who will show you live sites they built, put in writing who owns the domain and the code on launch day, quote one set price for a defined scope, and explain in plain words how Google and AI assistants will read your site. Everything else is taste, and taste is easy to judge once those four are settled.

I am Sarah Scarano. I design and build websites, voice agents and AI products at Modern Mustard Seed in Kalispell, Montana, for businesses across the country. Here is the checklist I would use if I were hiring someone like me.

1. Open live sites, not a gallery of screenshots

A screenshot proves a designer can make a picture. A live site proves they can ship one. Ask for three addresses you can open on your phone right now, then use them like a customer would.

• Load the homepage on your phone. Does it open fast, and can you read it without zooming?
• Find the phone number and the main call to action in five seconds or less.
• Fill out the contact form. Does anything confirm it went through?
• Ask the designer what changed for that business after launch, and whether the owner will take a call from you.

Our own work is open the same way. Built Right in Montana, a custom home builder's site, is live and you can click through every page.

2. Get ownership in writing

Ask one question before anything else: on launch day, whose name is on the domain, the hosting account and the code?

The answer should be yours. If the designer holds the domain or builds on a platform only they can log into, leaving them later means rebuilding from zero. In the Small Business AI Readiness Index, our study of 2,000 US small business websites published October 12, 2026, 47% of the rated websites were hard or locked to move.

At Modern Mustard Seed the client owns the code, the deployment, the domain and every account outright. Most of our clients still have us run it for them, managed end to end: we host, monitor, update and improve what we built. Ownership means they never have to.

3. One set price, one defined scope

Ask for a set package price for a written scope, agreed before work starts. Then ask two follow-ups:

1. What exactly is included: pages, copy, photography, booking, forms, analytics, hosting?
2. What happens when I want something changed after launch?

A clear answer to the second question tells you how the relationship will feel in month six. Ours is short: changes to what we built are included.

4. What AI search changes

People now ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews who to hire, and those answers cite websites. That changes what a designer has to deliver, though less than the acronyms suggest.

Google's guidance for AI features, read October 18, 2026, says the best practices for SEO remain relevant and there are no additional technical requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. OpenAI's crawler documentation says a site allows OAI-SearchBot in order to appear in ChatGPT search results. So the work is foundations, done properly:

• Words on the page as text. A headline baked into an image is invisible to a machine that reads text.
• One identity everywhere. The same business name, phone number and city on the site, the Google Business Profile and every directory. Two spellings split you into two businesses.
• Structured data that matches the page. Organization or LocalBusiness, Service and FAQ markup that repeats what a visitor can read. In the Readiness Index, only 24.7% of the 2,000 sites carried valid LocalBusiness markup.
• Service pages that answer first. One page per service, opening with the answer to the question a buyer would ask, then the proof.
• Crawlers let in. robots.txt that allows Googlebot, Bingbot and OAI-SearchBot, and no firewall rule quietly blocking them.
• A named person behind the work. An about page and author names on articles, so an answer engine knows who stands behind the claims.

A good designer builds all six in from the first page. An honest one will also tell you what they cannot do: no designer can promise that an AI assistant will recommend you. What we can do is build a site so AI search can find and cite you, then measure it. This site scored 100 for SEO, 100 for accessibility and 100 for best practices in Google Lighthouse in September 2026, and every client site is built to the same standard.

5. Questions for the first call

Bring these and listen for specific answers.

1. Can I open three sites you built, live, today?
2. Who owns the domain, the hosting and the code on launch day?
3. What is the set price for this scope, and is it in writing?
4. What happens when I want something changed after launch?
5. Who designs it, and who builds it? Will I talk to that person?
6. How will Google and AI assistants read my site? Show me on a site you already built.
7. What happens to my site if you stop working with me?
8. How will we know it is working three months after launch?

Red flags

• The portfolio is screenshots only, with no live addresses.
• The domain gets registered in the designer's name "to keep it simple."
• The quote has no written scope, or the scope is vague enough to grow.
• Someone promises first place on Google or a guaranteed ChatGPT recommendation.
• The whole site is images of text.

How I work

I am a website designer and AI product designer, and I lead design and engineering at Modern Mustard Seed. My husband, Anthony Scarano, runs sales and marketing. You talk to the person who designs your site and the person who builds it, and that is the same person: me.

Every site is managed for you, end to end, and you own all of it. It is designed from scratch for your business, built on Next.js and hosted on Vercel, with structured data, answer-first service pages and crawler access in place from launch day. If you want a voice agent that answers the phone too, it plugs into the same set of business facts.

If you want to see where your current site stands first, the free presence audit grades your website, Google profile and reviews. If you are comparing your options, our buyer's guide for Montana small businesses lists every route at equal depth, and freelancer vs studio lays out when a freelancer is the better call. When you are ready, see the websites we build or book a conversation with me.