Guides

Why AI assistants do not mention your business

Most sites that go unmentioned are not penalised. They are unreadable, unspecific, or they answer a question nobody asked.

The page cannot be read without JavaScript

A great deal of what matters on modern sites arrives only after scripts run: tabs, accordions, prices loaded from an API, whole sections that exist as an empty container until a framework fills them. If the substance of your page is not in the markup, it may as well not be on the page. This is the single most common cause and usually the one with the clearest fix.

The answer is in a PDF or an image

Price lists, delivery terms, specifications and opening hours are routinely published as a PDF or as a picture of a table. A human can read them. A retrieval system usually cannot, or can but will not rank them highly. Putting the same facts in ordinary text on the relevant page is dull work that reliably changes what a model has to work with.

The page names the service instead of answering about it

A heading that says Whitening tells a reader what the page is filed under. A heading that says Does teeth whitening hurt matches something somebody actually asked. The same applies to Pricing against How much does it cost, and to Delivery against When will it arrive. The content underneath is often already correct. It is the framing that stops it being usable as an answer.

The site never says where it operates

Businesses that have served the same town for thirty years often never write the town down, because everybody involved already knows. An assistant answering a question about that town has nothing to match. The same is true of what you actually do: a strapline is not a description of a service, and a model cannot infer a category from a mood.

Or the answer simply went to somebody else

Sometimes the site is fine and a competitor was named because they have been written about more widely, for reasons no site edit will change quickly. This is worth saying plainly, because the alternative is pretending every result is within your control. A fix card is a hypothesis about your site. It is not a forecast, and the honest version of this work includes the cases where the answer is that you are up against something structural.