When people hear "website cloner," many picture a download button that saves a page. A real cloning tool does something different: it rebuilds a page as clean, editable code you can actually work with. This post explains the pipeline, where an AI model genuinely helps, and where it cannot help at all. I am writing from building Kloner, an AI website cloner at https://kloner.app , and everything below describes the general technique, not a secret sauce.
Step 1: render, do not just download
A static HTML download misses most of the modern web. Content loaded by JavaScript, lazy loaded images, and layout shifts after load all mean the raw HTML file is not the page the visitor sees. The reliable approach is to render the page in a headless browser, wait for the network to settle, and capture the final DOM. That rendered DOM is the source of truth for everything that follows.…