AI search visibility
Laying out a page so software can pull an answer out of it
A person reads your page top to bottom and puts it together. Software grabs a chunk out of the middle. So the question is whether any single chunk of your page still makes sense on its own.
Picture the usual contractor page. The big claim sits in the banner at the top. The customer quote backing it up is two thirds of the way down. The detail that qualifies it is in small print at the bottom.
A visitor assembles all that without noticing. Software pulling one section out gets a claim with nothing supporting it, and drops it. Fixing that is mostly moving things around rather than writing anything new, which makes it one of the cheaper improvements available.
The rules that do the most work
Answer the question in the first sentence under the heading that asks it. The build-up can come after. Most website copy does this backwards.
Keep the proof in the same section as the claim. If you say your crews are certified, name the certification right there rather than linking to a badge in the footer.
And write headings that say what is underneath. "Our approach" tells nobody anything. "How long a re-roof takes in winter" tells everybody everything, and it happens to be exactly what somebody typed into their phone.
- Answer first, background second, under every heading
- Claim and proof sitting in the same paragraph
- Headings that read like something a customer would actually ask
- Tables for anything you are comparing, because tables get read cleanly
- Nothing important hidden behind a tab, a slider or a click
The problem that catches good-looking sites
Some websites are built so the words only appear after the page finishes its animations and loads its widgets. It looks fine to you. But some of the software reading your site sees an empty page with a menu and a footer, and nothing else.
You can check this in about a minute. Open your most important page on a computer, right-click, choose View Page Source, and use the find box to search for a sentence you can plainly see on screen. If the sentence is not in there, that page is unreadable to a chunk of the software deciding whether you get mentioned.
On a site we build, the words are in the page from the start rather than being assembled afterwards. It is not something you would ever notice as a visitor, and it is a large part of why a page gets quoted.
The rest of the cluster
| Topic | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Getting named in the answer | A search gives ten names. An AI answer gives two. What decides which two. |
| What GEO really means | Some of what gets sold under this name is real. Some is old work with a new invoice. |
| Labelling your facts | A standard way to label your phone, hours and services so software reads them right. |
| Checking what AI says about you | An afternoon of asking the questions your customers ask, and writing down what comes back. |
| Letting AI read your site | Your site may already be blocking them without you knowing. How to check, and why it matters. |
| Checking your existing labels | After a few plugins, most sites quietly claim things nobody meant. The four usual problems. |
Back to AI search visibility, or see what publishing primary data looks like in practice on our contractor website research.