How an AI assistant reads your website

When someone asks ChatGPT or another AI assistant nowadays about a plumber nearby, or about a shop's opening hours, that assistant gets that information from somewhere. Often from websites. But not in the same way Google does. Google looks at keywords, links and user signals. An AI assistant mainly tries to understand what a text says, and gives a summary of it in plain language. That sounds like a small difference, but it has implications for how you can best set up your website. Why clear sentences matter more than keywords With traditional search engine optimisation, it was often advised to repeat certain words frequently, because a search engine looked for them. That doesn't work that way for an AI assistant. It reads a text as a whole and tries to understand what is written in it, roughly the way a human would. This means that a sentence like 'we are the best installer in the region with the sharpest rates' has little value for an AI assistant. There is no concrete information in it. A sentence like 'we provide central heating installations in Utrecht and surrounding areas, Monday through Friday' contains useful facts: what you do, where, and when. So it comes down to the fact that ordinary, factual language works better than persuasive language. Not because it sounds nicer, but because an AI assistant can do something concrete with it when someone asks a question. What you can check today Go to the page on your website where it says what you do, and read it through the eyes of someone who knows nothing about your business. Is it literally stated which services you offer? Is your service area mentioned? Are opening hours, address or contact details somewhere in running text, not just in a separate block at the bottom of the page? Many websites have this information somewhere, but hidden in a menu, an image, or a contact form with no text next to it. For a visitor who is looking around on their own, that is not a problem, they just click through. For an AI assistant scanning a page to provide an answer, text that only appears in an image is invisible. So there is no need to completely overhaul your website. It's about making sure that the core information, what you do, for whom, where and when, really appears as readable text on the page. No need for fancy sentences, just clear ones. If you want to spend a bit more time on this: look at three or four pages that are most visited, and check whether they state in ordinary sentences what a visitor, or an AI assistant, wants to know. That is often enough to make a difference in how well your website is understood, by people and by machines.