Your Next Visitor Might Not Be Human

Everyone is busy optimising their website for people, which is sensible, but slightly behind. A growing share of the browsing that ends in a booking is now done by AI assistants working on someone's behalf. Ask one to find a plumber free on Thursday, or a florist that delivers to Guildford, and it will read a handful of sites, compare them and come back with a shortlist. Your next visitor might not be human, and it does not care how nice your hero animation is.

That sounds like a threat. In practice, it is mostly a reward for doing the basics properly. AI assistants favour sites that say clearly what they do, where, for whom and at what price. Most small business sites do not, because they were written to impress rather than to inform.

What AI assistants actually look for

An assistant is trying to answer a specific question with confidence. It wants facts it can lift and repeat without guessing: services, service areas, opening hours, prices or price ranges, how to book and what happens next. If those facts are buried in a PDF, hidden behind a "find out more" button or implied by a stock photo, the assistant simply moves on to a competitor who wrote them down.

It also wants consistency. When your website says you open at 8am, your Google profile says 9am and a directory says you closed in 2023, nobody trusts the answer, human or machine. Tidy, consistent information across the web is dull work, and it has quietly become some of the most valuable SEO work a small business can do.

Write for AI assistants by writing plainly

Here is the contrarian bit: you do not need a separate strategy for machines. The writing that helps AI assistants is the same writing that helps a busy person on their phone. Say what you do in the first sentence of each page. Use headings that describe the content underneath them rather than clever slogans. Answer the obvious questions (how much, how long, which areas) in words, not in a contact form.

Clear, specific copy sits at the centre of our content writing for exactly this reason. "Bespoke solutions tailored to your needs" tells an assistant nothing. By contrast, "kitchen fitting across Surrey, from £4,500, usually finished in two weeks" tells it almost everything it needs.

The technical layer underneath

Plain words do most of the work, although structure helps too. Structured data is a way of labelling your content so software can read it reliably: this is our business name, this is our address, these are our hours. Google publishes guidance on structured data, and the shared vocabulary lives at Schema.org. Many AI assistants lean on the same signals that search engines use.

Beyond that, the build itself matters. Pages that load quickly, show text as real text rather than images, and do not hide key content behind scripts are simply easier to read. We cover all of this in every website design and build, because a site that a machine struggles to parse is usually one that people struggle with as well.

A quick checklist

• One clear sentence on every page saying what you offer and where.
• Prices or price ranges written in text, even if they start with "from".
• Opening hours, service areas and contact details that match everywhere online.
• Structured data for your business, services and reviews.
• A booking or enquiry route that works without a phone call.

Will AI assistants replace your website?

No, and anyone selling that idea is selling something else. AI assistants still need a source, and the best source about your business is a website you control. What changes is the job of that website. It is no longer just a brochure for the person who finds you; it is also the reference document every assistant checks before it recommends you.

The businesses that will struggle are the ones relying on vague copy, outdated pages and a hope that people will phone to find out the details. Fewer people will, and AI assistants certainly will not pick up the phone for them.

Where to start

First, pick your three most important services and read those pages as if you were a stranger with one question. Could you answer it in ten seconds? If not, rewrite the page until you can. Next, check that your business details are identical across your site and your profiles. Finally, ask a couple of AI assistants about your type of business in your area and see who they mention. If you would like a second pair of eyes, look through our services or get in touch, and we will tell you plainly what an assistant would make of your site today.