We were about to sell a service: making a company’s website visible to AI systems when someone asks them for a recommendation. Before offering it to anyone, we decided to check our own site.
It turned out that as far as artificial intelligence is concerned, our studio doesn’t exist. It sees a private individual there — a consultant who does something. No company, no list of services, no prices.
And there was no error. Validators are silent, the site works, people land on it and understand everything. It’s just that what a human sees and what a machine sees are two different websites — and we had never checked the second one.
What exactly was wrong
The markup that search engines and models read said “person”. Name, job title, a link to a profile. Technically flawless.
Now picture the query someone types into a chat: “recommend a studio that can build a website for a small shop”. The model looks for an organisation with a list of services and prices. Our site says a consultant lives here. The prices are published, the services are described, everything is there — for a human reading with their eyes.
None of it was carried into the layer a machine reads.
How AI actually reads a website
Three things worth knowing before investing in a site.
It doesn’t execute code on the page. If prices are loaded by a script after the page opens, they don’t exist for the model. Blank space. We checked ours: they’re rendered on the server and land in the finished HTML. Lucky — it wasn’t a deliberate decision.
It doesn’t look at images. A portfolio built from screenshots of your work is an empty page to a model. Beautiful case studies as pictures do not exist. The reason is plain and unromantic: processing text is cheaper than processing images, and at the scale of millions of pages that difference decides everything.
It discards whatever it could have written itself. “A tailored approach”, “a team of professionals”, “quality and reliability” — a model generates these in half a second, so they carry no information. What remains is what it cannot invent: specific prices, specific timelines, a specific location, specific boundaries — what you don’t do.
That last one is unobvious, and it’s the one that decides. A site that says “we do everything” is indistinguishable from a thousand others. A site that says “a landing page from 150 dollars, a few days, a template with your texts — and that’s often enough” gives the model something to answer with.
What we did
We replaced the “person” type with an “organisation” carrying a list of services and prices. We wrote out the directions in the order they actually sell, not the order that’s pleasant to list them in.
We added a block about formats of work. At first it looked different: “who we’re a fit for / who we’re not”, the way everyone advises doing it. We wrote it honestly — and the first item under “not a fit” turned out to be: if you need the cheapest website, there are people who’ll do it cheaper.
Then we looked at which orders actually come in, and realised that this sentence turns away the people who are paying right now.
We rewrote the block. Not “who we’re not a fit for”, but two ways to work: fast on a proven base when the solution is typical, and long with research when nothing off-the-shelf fits. A client with a small budget isn’t “not ours” — they’re simply in a different format, and they immediately see why it costs what it costs.
And in the “what we don’t take on” list, only the things that kill a project regardless of the sum remain: there’s no one to talk to about the process, it’s needed “yesterday”, the decision is made by someone we’ll never meet, you’re not ready to show your data.
We also added ten questions with answers. Half are what a client already on the site asks: how much, how long, what if I don’t like it. The other half are what people ask before they start looking for a contractor: what can actually be automated, how an AI assistant differs from a chatbot, whether it’s safe to give access to company data.
The difference between those two halves is the whole point. The first set brings in someone who already found you. The second brings in someone who doesn’t know you exist.
The honest part: the “before” numbers
Right after the changes we took a snapshot — so that in a month there would be something to compare against. Without it, any work on visibility stays a conversation.
A query about studios doing websites and AI automation in our city: seven were shown. We were not among them.
A direct query with our own domain in the text: the site wasn’t found. Instead it returned other owners of the same name — a studio making 3D figurines for collectors, a wrought-iron workshop, a manufacturing company, a venue in a neighbouring country.
Technically everything on our side is open: indexing is allowed, the sitemap is served, there are no blocks. We’re not being blocked. We’re simply not being seen yet.
We’re not writing this from a position of “we did it and it worked”. We did it, and the result will be visible in a month. Or it won’t.
The conclusion we didn’t expect
The most important thing the snapshot showed has nothing to do with markup.
The name we work under is held by at least six other owners. And here’s a distinction worth spotting early: they compete with us for a word, not for a client. A 3D-figurine studio will never take an automation project away from us — but it takes the search results every time someone looks up the name.
The practical consequence: the more you invest in promoting the name itself, the more of your budget burns in a fight over a word that already has six owners. It is far cheaper to be found by what you do. There the competitors are real, they’re fought with content, and that fight can be won.
If your name contains a common word — check who you share it with before building a strategy on it.
What to check on your own site in ten minutes
- Open your site with JavaScript disabled. Whatever disappeared doesn’t exist for a model. Pay particular attention to prices.
- Check whether the page carries organisation markup — with a name, services and contacts. If it says “person”, or nothing at all, you are not a company as far as AI is concerned.
- Find three phrases on your site that a model would have written for you. “A tailored approach” and its relatives. Replace them with specifics or delete them — they take up space and add nothing.
- Ask a chat about your industry in your city, the way a client would. Look at who gets named. Save the answer with the date.
- Check whether you state, in text, what you don’t do. It’s rare — which is exactly why it stands out.
The first and the fourth take a minute each. They’ll also tell you the most.
We’ll repeat these same queries in a month and write about what changed — with the same wording and the same honesty. If nothing changed, we’ll write that too.