What your builder actually lets you control

Search advice for website builders has a folklore problem. Somebody notices a platform doing something unusual, the observation gets repeated until it loses its date, and five years later people are still avoiding a builder for a rendering flaw it fixed in 2019 — or adding markup for a rich result Google withdrew in 2023. None of it is malicious. It is just that nobody goes back and checks.

This desk goes back and checks. Every capability claim on this site is either taken from the vendor's own documentation or corroborated by two independent sources, and the ones that are neither are labelled as such in the copy rather than quietly rounded up. Where the honest answer is that nobody outside Google knows, the page says so.

What gets audited here

The question behind every page is the same one: which controls has the platform left where you can reach them? Meta titles and descriptions. URL slugs and the path prefixes you are not allowed to remove. Redirect managers and whether they take a CSV. Whether robots.txt is yours to edit. Whether a canonical tag can be overridden. Whether custom JSON-LD goes in without touching a theme file.

That list is deliberately narrow. It is the part of search that is a property of the product you bought, that can be verified in an afternoon, and that stays true regardless of what any algorithm does next.

What does not get audited here

No load-time benchmarks of other people's sites. No crawl experiments dressed up as findings. No ranking predictions, no "this builder ranks better", and no invented case studies with tidy percentages attached — the whole category is full of them and not one is reproducible.

The line this desk holds is simple: a capability is a fact, an outcome is a forecast, and the two get written differently. The control audit of seven builders scores platforms on capability and says so in the same breath.

Where to start

If you are choosing a platform, start with the audit of seven builders. If you have already chosen and want to know what you are working with, the platform pages go deeper on Wix and Squarespace.

And if you have inherited a site and a nagging suspicion that the builder is the reason it is not ranking, read whether Google treats builder sites differently before you plan a migration. It is the piece that saves the most wasted work.

Some links here go to builders through partner programmes, marked as such, and a commission from those pays for the checking. The affiliate disclosure sets out exactly how that works and which vendors are deliberately left unlinked.