Can AI Tell What Your Business Does From Its Website?

Search engines and AI tools build their picture of your business from what your website actually says, in text they can read. Many small business sites look great and say surprisingly little. Here is a ten-minute test to find out which kind you have.

Why “what the page says” matters more than ever

Google’s AI features draw on the same index as regular Search, and Google says a page needs to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet to appear in them.¹ A snippet is text. If your services, prices, or service area exist only inside a photo, a downloaded menu PDF, or a Facebook post, a search system has much less to work with, and so does a customer on a slow connection.

Google’s own starter guide makes a similar point in plainer terms: use words people would search for, put them in titles and headings, and make text readable.²

The test: six questions

Open your homepage and answer these questions using only the text on the page. Not what you know about your business, not the photos, not the logo.

1. What does this business do? Is it stated in a sentence, in the words a customer would use?
2. What specific services or products does it offer? Named individually, or lumped into “and more”?
3. Who is it for? Homeowners, contractors, families, event planners?
4. Where does it operate? A street address, a city, a service area?
5. How do I contact or book? Is there a phone number, a booking or quote button, and hours?
6. What would I pay, or how is the price decided?

If you can answer all six from the first screen or two, your site is in good shape. If you hesitated on two or more, a search system will probably hesitate too.

Read it the way a machine does

Two quick ways to see your page without the design:

• Select all and paste. On your homepage, select all the text (Ctrl+A or Cmd+A), copy it, and paste it into a blank document. What is left is roughly the readable text. Is your business name there? Your city? Your phone number?
• Check the title and description. Search for your business on Google and look at the blue title and the grey text under it. Those usually come from your page’s title tag and meta description. Do they say what you do and where, or just “Home”?

Our free website review automates part of this: it reads your page’s title, description, headings, and visible contact details, and flags what is missing.

Three patterns I see often

1. The beautiful image with the important words inside it

A hero banner that says “Fresh flagstone for every project” in a stylish font, as part of the image. People see it; search systems see an image file. The fix is to put the words in the page as real text and let the image sit behind them.

2. The generic headline

“Welcome to our website” or “Quality you can trust” could describe any business on earth. Compare that with the Mountain Inn homepage, which says in its first lines that it is a motel in Dayton, Tennessee, 45 minutes from Chattanooga, with rooms from a stated nightly price. A person and a search system both know immediately what it is and where. You can read how that site was put together in the Mountain Inn case study.

3. The missing old name

When a business renames itself, customers keep searching for the old name for years. When the quarry formerly known as Galvez Stone became Deer Creek Stone, the new site said “formerly Galvez Stone” in its page title, its description, its structured data, and a dedicated article. Anyone searching either name can connect them. The details are in the Deer Creek Stone case study.

What about structured data?

Structured data (often called schema) is code that labels facts like your business name, address, and hours. It helps search engines interpret a page, but Google’s guidelines require it to describe content that is actually visible on the page, and valid markup does not guarantee any special treatment.³ Google also says no special schema is needed to appear in its AI features.¹

My take: fix the visible text first. Structured data is a precise copy of what the page already says, not a place to say things the page does not.

A rewrite, in practice

Here is an illustrative before-and-after for a fictional business, to show the shape of the change:

The second version is less poetic and far more useful. It answers five of the six questions in two sentences. A customer can decide whether to call, and a search system can describe the business accurately.

Write for people first

None of this means writing for robots. Google’s guidance is to create content for people, not to manipulate rankings.⁴ The happy overlap is that the clearest page for a busy customer is also the clearest page for a search engine. If you only make one change after reading this, make your homepage’s first screen answer: what you do, where, and how to reach you.

Sources

Numbers in the text refer to these sources. Statements marked “My take” are my own interpretation.

1. AI features and your website (opens in new tab) Google Search Central
2. SEO Starter Guide (opens in new tab) Google Search Central
3. General structured data guidelines (opens in new tab) Google Search Central
4. Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (opens in new tab) Google Search Central