Rebuilding a Photo Booth Website in React for AI Search Visibility

By Will Melton · September 27, 2026 · 1:53:23 read

Category: Business & Economy

Show: Live Vibe Coding With Will Melton

Her customers love Sapphire Booths. AI search engines have never heard of it. We rebuild her Richmond photo booth website live to change that. Sapphire Booths (sapphirebooths.com) is a real client wit

Her customers love Sapphire Booths. AI search engines have never heard of it. We rebuild her Richmond photo booth website live to change that.

Sapphire Booths (sapphirebooths.com) is a real client with a WordPress site she's genuinely happy with. Her customers book her, her reviews are good, her business is solid. The problem is invisible until you go looking for it: when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews where to find a photo booth in Richmond, she never gets mentioned. Not because her service is weak, but because her website was never structured to be read, understood, and cited by AI in the first place.

This is the gap most small business owners don't know they have. Ranking on page one of Google used to be the whole game. Now a growing share of buying decisions start with a question typed into an AI assistant, and if your site isn't feeding that assistant clean, current, well-structured information, you don't just rank lower, you disappear from the conversation entirely.

Today, on Live Vibe Coding, we close that gap for Sapphire Booths, live, on camera, using our real process. Yesterday we built the CMS foundation this migration runs on. Today we replace her aging WordPress site with a modern React build and go after every problem that makes a site unreadable to AI: dated pricing and service info, broken links, missing pages, thin content, and a structure that search crawlers and language models can't parse. We rebuild the content itself so it actually answers the questions her customers are asking, and we ship a site that's fast, clean, and built for how people search now, not how they searched in 2015.

Once the rebuild is live, we run the site through CARL Intelligence, Xponent21's AI visibility tracking platform. CARL doesn't just check rankings, it tracks how AI models respond to, cite, and rank a business across the real search terms customers use, so we can watch Sapphire Booths go from invisible to tracked and improvable in near real time.

This is a live client build, not a staged demo. You'll see the full process: the content and technical audit, the WordPress-to-React migration, the fixes to what was broken or missing, and the AI visibility setup that turns "AI has no idea she exists" into a number we can move.

If you run a small business and have ever wondered why AI tools never mention you when they clearly know your competitors, this build is the blueprint. This is exactly the kind of AI search visibility work Xponent21 does for clients, and you're watching it happen start to finish.

The stack: Lovable for the build, Supabase for the backend and data, and the Claude API doing a lot of the heavy lifting under the hood. If you want to build something like this yourself, grab 10 free Lovable credits here: https://lovable.dev/invite/S8XSI99

This is part of the 52 Apps in 52 Weeks build-in-public challenge, where I build and ship a new app or client project every single week, in the open, no edits. New builds go live every Saturday at 1 PM EST and Sunday at 10 AM EST at studio.willmelton.com. Pull up a chair and watch a real small business go from invisible to AI-search-ready in one sitting.

Links:

studio.willmelton.com

https://lovable.dev/invite/S8XSI99 (10 free credits)

channelrva.com

onscreengames.com

xponent21.com

willmelton.com