Issue 003 · Visibility · 5 min · 8 July 2026
What AI systems can read about you
Answer engines summarise businesses from whatever is machine readable. Most sites leave that summary to chance.
Search is no longer only a list of links. A growing share of buyers ask a question and read a summary. That summary is assembled from what a machine can parse about you, not from what your homepage looks like.
The gap between design and legibility
A page can be beautifully designed and almost unreadable to a machine. Services described only inside images. Pricing implied rather than stated. Location buried in a footer graphic. Structured data absent, so the page has no declared meaning at all.
When the machine cannot tell what you do, it substitutes something adjacent. Usually a competitor who spelled it out.
Four checks worth doing this week
- Does every service page state, in text, what the service is, who it is for, and what it costs or how pricing works.
- Does the site have structured data for the organisation and for the primary service.
- Are your most common customer questions answered on the site, in the words customers actually use.
- Can a crawler reach everything you want summarised, and is anything important blocked.
Write for the question, not the keyword
Answer engines reward pages that resolve a question completely in one place. That means fewer, better pages: the question stated plainly, answered directly in the first paragraph, then supported with detail underneath.
This is not a trick, and it is not new. It is the same discipline as writing a clear proposal. The difference is that the reader is now sometimes a machine, and machines do not infer generously.
The measurement problem
Visibility in AI answers is harder to measure than rankings, and anyone offering guarantees on it is selling something. What can be done is concrete: make the site legible, state the facts, structure the data, and check what is actually being said about you today.
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