Someone copied your website, reviews and all

A husband and wife have run a roofing firm near St. Louis for twenty years. This summer they decided their website needed a refresh, so they asked an AI assistant for ideas.

It came back with something they hadn’t asked for. There was another website, the assistant told them, and it was using their customer testimonials.

It was. When they looked, they found a roofing company they’d never heard of with a website that, by their account, closely followed their layout and their wording. It made their claims: twenty years in business, their project count, their drone inspections, their top rating with a consumer watchdog and their accreditation with a big roofing manufacturer. Further down were three customer reviews, the same three that appeared on the owners’ own site, from their customers.

The story was reported by a local TV station in late August. A national roofing trade association picked it up days later, because it shows how cheap it has become to steal a small business’s reputation.

What the copy was for

Nobody was buying roofs from it. According to the reporting, the copy existed to collect enquiries.

A security researcher who looked at both sites said the copy appeared to be built to gather leads from people who needed roofing work. A homeowner fills in the form thinking they’ve found a well-reviewed, established local firm, and their details go somewhere else.

Look closely and the copy fell apart:

• The address didn’t exist. It was a made-up street address in the city.
• There was no record of the business with the state’s register of companies or with the consumer watchdog whose top rating it claimed.
• The manufacturer had never heard of it. A local representative of the roofing manufacturer whose accreditation it displayed didn’t know the company.
• The inspector wasn’t a roofer. A neighbour of the owners booked an inspection through the site. When the man who turned up was asked about it, he said: “I’m not a roofer.”

A reporter reached someone on the phone number listed on the copy. He said a colleague had built the site using AI, that they hadn’t meant to take anything from another business, that they had no paying customers, and that they planned to shut it down. The owners complained to the company hosting the copy, and it was taken offline.

Why this is a story about AI

People have copied websites for as long as there have been websites. What has changed is the effort it takes.

A convincing copy used to mean hours of work: taking the text, rebuilding the layout, swapping the details. Now a tool can read a page and produce a lookalike in minutes. A small, established local firm is the obvious target, because the valuable part of its website isn’t the design. It’s the trust: the years in business, the accreditations, and the reviews from real neighbours.

Large brands have teams and services watching for copies of their sites. A roofer, a plumber or a dog groomer usually has nobody, and finds out the way these owners did, by accident.

There’s a twist worth noticing too. An AI assistant helped the owners find the copy. The tools that make copying cheap also read the web constantly, and they can sometimes tell you what’s out there with your words on it if you ask.

You can’t stop copying. You can make a copy easy to spot.

Anything you put on a public website can be copied, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. In the US, lawyers point out that what you publish on your website is automatically protected by copyright. That gives you grounds to complain, but it doesn’t stop someone making the copy.

What you can do is make a copy fail the checks a careful customer would make. Look at what gave this one away: an address that didn’t exist, a missing company registration and an accreditation the manufacturer couldn’t confirm. A copier can take your words, but they can’t take the facts behind them. The more of those facts your website shows, and the easier you make them to check, the faster a copy falls apart.

The fair question

devkoi builds websites with AI, the same kind of technology used to make this copy. So it’s fair to ask whose side it’s on.

The answer is that the technology isn’t the problem. The problem is using it to claim someone else’s reputation. devkoi builds a website from what you tell it about your business. It asks for real photos of real things you could photograph rather than making them up.

To be clear about the limits: devkoi doesn’t watch the internet for copies of your website, can’t take anyone else’s website down, and can’t stop someone copying a public page. What it can do is help you put the checkable facts about your business on your site, change them quickly by sending a message, and keep every version of your site, so you have a record of what it said and when.

What to do this week

1. Search for your own sentences. Pick two or three sentences from your website that nobody else would write, such as a line from your About page or a customer review. Put each one in quotation marks and search for it. If a website that isn’t yours comes up, you’ve found a copy.

2. Ask an AI assistant about yourself. That’s how these owners found theirs. Ask it what websites belong to your business, and whether any other site uses your name, your reviews or your wording. Check anything it tells you before you act on it.

3. Add a “How to know it’s really us” section. List your one web address, your phone number, your real address, and any registration or licence numbers a customer can look up on an official register. Then say plainly what you will never do.

“Add a short section to the Contact page called ‘How to know it’s really us’, with our address, phone number and company registration number, and the line ‘We only ever use this phone number and this website. If anyone else says they’re us, please call us.’”

4. Make your reviews checkable. A review that says where it came from is harder to borrow. Add the customer’s first name, their area and the job you did, with their permission, and link to the place the review was left if it’s public.

“Under each review on the homepage, add the customer’s first name, their area and the job, for example ‘Sam, east side, new roof, June 2026’.”

5. Show the people who will turn up. Add your team, with names and photos. A customer who knows who to expect will know when someone else knocks on the door.

“Add a ‘Who you’ll meet’ section to the About page with these photos and names.”

6. If you find a copy, keep a record before you complain. Take screenshots with the date showing and note its web address. Then complain to the company that hosts it. A free “who hosts this website” lookup will usually tell you which one. Report it to search engines too, and put a short warning on your own site so customers who find the copy can check with you.

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These owners were lucky. They found the copy within weeks, and the person behind it said it had no paying customers and was shutting down. Most businesses that get copied won’t find out until a customer asks why the roofer who turned up didn’t seem to know anything about roofs.

Your reputation took years to build and can now be copied in an afternoon. The answer isn’t to hide your best reviews. It’s to make the real facts so easy to check that a copy can’t survive a customer checking them.