Symptoms
The Vercel deploy is Ready. Text and layout look fine. Images are broken. DevTools Network shows 404 on URLs that start with /__l5e/assets-v1/ or another Lovable preview prefix. The same images worked on the Lovable preview URL.
Why AI-built apps hit this
Lovable hosts uploads on its own CDN and writes those preview paths into src. Exporting to GitHub and pointing Vercel at the repo does not copy that CDN. Vercel only serves what is in the repo (usually public/ after the Vite/Next build). The HTML still asks for a path that only existed on Lovable, so every image 404s.
The actual fix
1. Open the live site, DevTools, Network, Img. Copy one 404 URL. If it contains __l5e or a Lovable host, this is the bug, not a cache problem.
2. Download the original files from the Lovable preview or from your machine. Put them in the repo’s public/ folder (Vite) or public/ / static/ (Next). Names should be boring: public/hero.jpg.
3. Change every src from the preview path to a root path: /hero.jpg, not /__l5e/assets-v1/hero.jpg and not a full https://lovable.app/... URL.
4. Commit, push, redeploy. Then hard-refresh. A Service Worker or CDN cache can keep the old 404s for a few minutes.
5. If you added a public/ folder and nothing changed, the src in the component never moved. Search the repo for __l5e and for the Lovable host; those strings should be gone.
src at a signed Lovable URL you copied from preview. That link expires. The file has to live in the repo Vercel builds.Related export traps
Vite base still set to a Lovable/Bolt preview path, so JS/CSS under /assets/ 404 and the page is raw HTML. Output Directory not dist. Both look like “it deployed” and both are export settings, not DNS.