People increasingly ask an assistant instead of a search engine: who does this in my area, are they open now, do they handle this kind of work. The assistant answers from whatever it can read about you, and it reads very differently from a human visitor.
A person forgives a beautiful site with the hours buried in an image. A machine simply does not find the hours.
How do AI assistants read a website?
Your layout, typography and photography do nothing for a machine. What it looks for is plain, consistent statements of fact: the business name, what you sell, where you operate, how to contact you, when you are open. The more of that lives as actual text and structured data rather than pictures or clever wording, the more likely you are to be quoted correctly. (Text instead of pictures of text also makes your site easier to use for people with disabilities, so it pays twice.)
Why does consistency beat cleverness?
The single most common problem we find is not missing information. It is conflicting information. An old address in a directory, a phone number that changed, a service you stopped offering, three different versions of your opening hours across your site, your Google listing and a listings site you forgot about.
Faced with a conflict, a machine either picks one at random or leaves you out of the answer. Neither is good. Google says the same about its own local results: “Businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results.”
What should you fix first?
- Say the basics in text. Name, what you do, service area, hours, phone, email — as words on the page, not inside an image.
- Make every page state its own subject plainly. A page about a service should say the service in the heading, not a slogan.
- Fix the conflicts. Search your own business name and check the top ten results for wrong details, then correct them at the source, starting with your Google Business Profile.
- Add structured data. Schema markup states your details as data rather than sentences a machine has to interpret; Google describes it as “explicit clues about the meaning of a page”. It has to match what the page actually says.
- Keep it current. Stale facts are the reason most businesses get described wrongly. A short review two or three times a year is enough.
Can anyone guarantee an AI mention?
No. There is no way to guarantee an assistant mentions you, and anyone claiming a ranking in an AI answer is guessing. Google’s own guidance for its AI features says “there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary”: the ordinary basics are what count. What you can control is whether your information is readable, consistent and current. That is the part worth doing, and it helps ordinary search too.
We package this up as AI search and smart schema for the sites we host. You can also do most of it yourself with an afternoon and a list of everywhere your business is mentioned, or ask for a free website check-up and we will tell you what we find.
