Here's a shift worth sitting with for a moment: your website's most important reader is no longer only a person. It's also the AI assistant reading on a person's behalf.
When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question about businesses like yours, the AI goes and reads the available websites and recommends whichever business made the answer easiest to find. Vague, mood-board websites — all hero images and "Welcome to our world" — give the AI nothing to work with. So it recommends your clearer competitor instead.
The test is brutal and simple: can your website answer, in plain text, the actual questions customers ask? Here are the seven that matter, with examples. (Our example businesses — Bergrivier Plumbing and Vine & Valley Guesthouse — are fictional.)
1. What exactly do you do?
Not your industry — your specific services. "Full-service plumbing solutions" is a category; a machine matching the query "who replaces geysers in Paarl?" needs the word geyser on your site.
Before: "Bergrivier Plumbing — quality workmanship you can trust." After: "Bergrivier Plumbing handles geyser replacements and repairs, burst pipes, drain unblocking, bathroom renovations and solar geyser installations for homes in Paarl and Wellington."
One rewritten sentence, five services now findable. List every distinct service you offer somewhere in real text — not only in an image or a PDF brochure, which many systems read poorly.
2. Where, exactly?
"The heart of the Winelands" is lovely and useless. Name your town, the towns you serve or that visitors come from, and the landmarks people navigate by. A guesthouse should say it's in Paarl, ten minutes from the wine route and 45 minutes from Cape Town — because "guesthouse near Cape Town for a Winelands weekend" is a real query, and only businesses that stated the relationship get matched to it.
3. Who are you for — and who are you not for?
AI queries carry situations: honeymooners, families with kids, businesses needing after-hours service. Say who you serve best. And stating who you don't serve ("we're an adults-only retreat"; "we do residential work only, no commercial contracts") isn't lost business — it's precision. It routes the wrong enquiries away and makes the AI confident recommending you for the right ones. Confidence is what recommendations are made of.
4. What does it cost?
The question every customer has and most websites dodge. You don't need a full price list — you need honest signals: ranges ("geyser replacements typically R7,500–R12,000 installed"), starting points ("rooms from R1,450 per night"), or even positioning ("premium tastings, R120–R250"). Sites that hide pricing entirely lose to competitors who signal it, both with humans (who assume the worst) and with AI answering "affordable guesthouse in Paarl" — a question it can only answer from businesses that gave it something to go on.
5. Why you and not the next result?
Every business claims quality and service, so those words carry no information. Differentiators are specifics: 24-hour emergency call-outs, 15 years in the same town, solar-backed hot water at the guesthouse so guests are never without power, a pool, on-site parking, pet-friendly rooms. Write them as facts, not adjectives.
Before: "Vine & Valley offers an unforgettable experience of warm hospitality." After: "Vine & Valley has six en-suite rooms, a saltwater pool, solar power throughout, secure parking, and welcomes dogs in two garden rooms. Breakfast is included and cooked to order."
The second version is less poetic and infinitely more recommendable.
6. How does someone take the next step?
State plainly how to book, get a quote, or make contact — and what happens next ("WhatsApp us for a same-day quote"; "book directly on this page — direct bookings get late checkout"). Every page should carry a clear next step, because you don't control which page a visitor (or an AI summary) lands them on.
7. The questions you answer on the phone every week
You already know your real FAQ — the five things every customer asks. Do you handle load-shedding-era solar conversions? Is the guesthouse suitable for kids? Do you charge a call-out fee? Put those questions on your site as questions, with direct answers underneath. Question-and-answer text is disproportionately what AI systems lift into their responses — which is why we end our own articles the same way, and why seeding your Google profile's Q&A matters too.
The 20-minute homework
Open your homepage and your main service page. Score them against the seven questions: could a stranger — human or machine — answer all seven from your text alone? Every "no" is a gap your competitors can be recommended through. Most sites we audit answer two or three.
Rewriting for clarity doesn't mean stripping the personality out — keep the beautiful photography and the warm voice. Just make sure the facts are there in text, underneath the charm.
Want to know which questions your site currently fails, and how visible that's left you across the AI tools? That's the first thing our audit shows you.