Make your website easy to find (for people, and for robots)

One of our lovely clients spent the whole of August with their out-of-office on, taking a well-deserved break and not doing any posting or marketing.

They came back to two new business enquiries that had arrived over one weekend. 

One person had described a problem to Google Gemini and been told to go and speak to our client, by name. 

The other had searched for help with the specific thing our client does, found them, and looked at the website before getting in touch.

So how do you get your website to appear in AI search?

There are lots of things you can do. I'm going to look at one:

Be the clearest, most specific answer to a question someone is actually asking.

AI tools build their answers out of pages they can read and trust. So the work is to find out what your visitors are actually asking, answer it plainly, and make it obvious who you are and why you'd know.

Which sounds simple, but it's not usually where websites put their effort. Most only really answer one question well: who are you?

That question comes from people who already know you exist. Funders checking you out, a referral doing their due diligence, someone who met you at an event. All important, but they were already on their way.

The enquiries that arrive out of nowhere start somewhere else. Someone had a problem, described it in their own words, and you were pointed out.

So, forget your services list or your history page for a minute. What would someone type if they needed exactly what you do and had never heard of you?

That's the question your site should answer, in their words. People search using the language of the problem, not the language of the solution, and they most likely don't know your sector's terms or acronyms.

Finding your questions

You know your audience, you already know the questions they ask. But here are some more places you can look.

Your inbox. What are the recurring questions clients or service users email you about? Or perhaps if you have an enquiry form are there any patterns in what people ask?

Your first conversations. What are the key things prospective clients or service users need to know before they choose you? What have you definitely answered more than once?

Your meetings. If you have meeting transcripts with your clients you can have a look through to see what questions or issues consistently come up. This can be a super helpful bank of data for seeing the things you actually talk about over the things you think you might talk about.

Ask using an AI tool

Open ChatGPT or Gemini or whichever is your favourite right now, and ask the question someone with the problem you can solve would ask. Not your name, the problem. See what comes back. If you’re there in the answer, great! You probably don’t have to read any more of this article. 

If you're not there, look at who is, and click through to the pages cited. How does their content answer the question? Usually you'll find a page that does one job, plainly, in the words someone would use. Then go and find where that same information lives on your own site.

Then try one more thing. In a new chat, ask it to search for your organisation by name and tell you what you do, who you're for, and where you work. If what comes back is thin, vague or out of date, that's a gap, and it's usually obvious which page needs the work.

If it all comes back accurate, good. That means the picture of you out there is in reasonable shape. It doesn't tell you whether you'd be found by someone who doesn't know your name yet, which is the harder test and the one worth spending your effort on.

Answering them

Once you know the question, a few things make the answer work harder.

Put the question in a heading, in their words. If someone would ask "do I need a bookkeeper or an accountant", that's the heading. Not "our services explained".

Answer it in the first two sentences. People skim (I know I do). If the answer arrives three paragraphs down, after the context and the waffle, most of them have gone.

Be specific. "Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm" is useful. "Flexible opening hours" isn't. "We work with charities across Greater Manchester" is useful. "We partner with organisations who share our values" not so much. Warm language has its place, but wherever a concrete fact exists, use it.

Show who you are and why you'd know. Named authors, real examples, actual outcomes. Anyone cautious is trying to work out whether you genuinely know your stuff or are repeating what everyone else says.

Keep it current. An excellent page last updated in 2019 doesn't inspire much confidence, in a reader or anything else.

Checking it

Ask the question again in a few months. The same one, in Google and in an AI tool, in a new chat. Do you come up? Is what it says about you accurate and current? Try it a couple of times, because these tools don't always give the same answer twice.

Doing this occasionally is how you notice change. Whether the work you did made a difference, or whether something that used to be right isn't any more.

Why all this is worth doing

Everything above actually makes a website better for humans. Clearer headings, answers near the top, real specifics, obvious credibility, content that's current.

It also makes your website easier for AI tools to find and quote.

Write clearly about the thing you know better than almost anyone, in the words your clients actually use. Then go on holiday.