Why text on your website is more important than a photo

Many entrepreneurs put important information in a photo or pdf on their website. A menu as an image, opening hours in a scan of a note, the service list as a pdf brochure. For a visitor who clicks through calmly and zooms in, that's no problem. For Google and for AI assistants like ChatGPT, it's a different story. These systems read text first and foremost. Letters they can directly extract from the source code of your page. An image is a picture to them, not text, unless there are explicit captions or alternative descriptions included. A pdf is sometimes read, but often not as well as regular website text, especially if the document consists of scanned pages. The result is that precisely the information you consider most important, such as what you do, what it costs and where you are located, is not taken into account when someone asks an AI assistant where they can find a painter, an accountant or a bicycle mechanic nearby. The assistant simply doesn't know your business well enough to recommend it. What you can do today Check what information on your site is currently in image or pdf form. Think of a menu, a price list, a folder with services, or a photo of a handwritten sign with opening hours. Put that information also simply as text on the page. It doesn't have to be beautifully formatted, it mainly needs to be readable for a machine. A simple example. Is your price list currently a photo of a printed card on your site? Type the prices out in plain text below or next to it. The same applies to contact details, opening hours and a description of exactly what you do. The more ordinary the sentence, the easier an assistant can use it. You perform repairs on washing machines in Utrecht and the surrounding area is a sentence that an AI assistant can quote directly. A logo with the same text in it cannot. You don't have to overhaul your website. The point is that the core information, the things a customer really wants to know, are also present as readable text somewhere on the page. A pdf or image can certainly stay alongside it for those who prefer to browse, but the text version is what counts for discoverability. If you're unsure whether this applies to your site, take a critical look at your own opening hours, prices and service overview. Are those anywhere as plain text, or only in a picture or document? That's often how it has grown, not done deliberately, but still something worth going through once.