10 Fully Automated Websites, Run by Claude - by Alex Willen

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10 Fully Automated Websites, Run by Claude<br>Testing whether Claude can manage a simple business without my involvement.

Alex Willen<br>Aug 13, 2026

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About a month ago, I wrote about using several different models to launch The Waterline, a site that uses government data to keep an up-to-date record of water conditions in the western US, including reservoir levels, drought conditions, snowpack and more, then sends weekly email updates.<br>I have neither expertise nor a particular interest in water conditions (except that as a native Californian, I say the obligatory “well, you know we really need it” any time someone complains about rain). Rather, this was a test to see how much of the work of getting the site up and running Claude could handle on its own.<br>The answer was: a lot! Thanks to Cloudflare’s agent-friendly tools, Claude had everything needed to buy the domain and get the website live. From a technical perspective, it had almost all of the tools it needed (though yours truly still had to grab an API key to get government data and set up a Buttondown account to send emails).<br>But since this was a first go, I was still fairly hands-on with the editorial side of the project, with plenty of big-picture feedback about site structure and little nits about design. The next step was to try this while truly cutting myself out of the process except when my involvement was absolutely unavoidable.<br>More Sites!

With The Waterline complete, I had a solid template for how to create this kind of site. Because I started this project by having ChatGPT generate a list of 50 topics, I also had other options ready to go, so I told Claude to take the other nine of the top 10 and spin up agents to build all of those in parallel. After that promptly froze my computer, I told it to cut that back to three at a time.<br>The process was, roughly:<br>Take the first unused idea from the initial 50-topic report

Search for and evaluate relevant information on the topic that can be used on the site, particularly freely available government data, and have ChatGPT do the same in parallel using Claude in Chrome

Review both outputs, and build a plan for the site’s content, including:<br>What sources of information will be used and when they’re updated

The structure of the site — how the data will be grouped and presented

Any relevant evergreen articles on the topic that should be included

Build the site

Find relevant domains that are available for purchase and present them to me

Once I pick a domain, purchase it and launch the site

Create GA4 and GSC properties for the site and set them up

Have ChatGPT review the site, checking for:<br>Discrepancies in the data or other factual issues

Whether the tone and language of the site are appropriate given the audience (particularly with regard to appropriate use of industry terms)

Any other issues with content, layout or structure

Review ChatGPT’s feedback and make updates as appropriate

Configure the Buttondown account and newsletter template

Set up recurring jobs to pull fresh data from the sources, update the site and send out a newsletter the day after new data are released

This went well! The ChatGPT feedback step was really critical to the whole endeavor — Claude would frequently end up with inconsistent math across different pages in the same site or would miss clear opportunities for content. In any case, we now have:<br>The Ration

The Scramble

The Run

Stumpage

The Fill Line

Know Your Onions

Monday Diesel

The Dwell

The Russet Report

The only places I had to step in were logo creation, Buttondown account creation and domain approval. In the future, I’d just instruct Claude in Chrome to have ChatGPT generate the logo. I’d also switch from Buttondown to something like Amazon SES, where I can sign up for an account once and let Claude build out an email system that doesn’t require a new account for each site. Domain approval will have to stay on my plate until they come up with a model that has better taste.<br>I spend a few hours a week writing The Automated Operator instead of doing more profitable things because I hope it’s helpful in understanding AI. My only compensation is the dopamine from a new subscriber email, so enter yours to give me a hit.

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At this point the plan was to let them sit for a while and see if they started ranking on Google. To that end, I had Claude set up a weekly email report giving me numbers on traffic and appearance in search for each site.

Started getting a trickle of traffic right away; pretty neat! I looked through some of the queries, checked the relevant pages on the sites, and found some opportunities to both build new pages and expand the ones we had. Claude dutifully ran with my suggestions, and our rank for those queries was up the next time I checked.<br>But of course the goal here is for Claude to run this...