Built to be found, part three

For about twenty years, being findable meant climbing a list. Ten blue links, and a scramble to be one of the top three, mostly won by whoever could afford to keep scrambling. If you ran a two-van business, the honest position was that you were competing against agencies on a budget line you could not match.

That picture has shifted, and it has shifted in a direction that suits the small operator better than the old one ever did.

A lot of finding now happens by summary. Someone asks an AI assistant for a decent local roofer, or types a question into a search box and reads the answer at the top instead of the results underneath. Something reads the available material about several businesses and writes a few sentences back. The question stops being who ranks first and becomes what the summary says about you.

Why summarising is kinder than ranking

Ranking rewarded budget, because ranking rewarded sustained effort at scale, and sustained effort at scale is a thing money buys.

Summarising rewards being clear. When something is reading your material in order to describe you, the qualities that help are specificity and currency. Does it say what you actually do. Does it say where. Does it look like the business is still trading this month.

A two-van outfit can win on all three of those against a national chain, because a national chain's material is written to cover everywhere and therefore says almost nothing about anywhere. Being small and specific used to be a disadvantage in a ranked list. Being small and specific is now closer to the thing being measured.

The five unglamorous things

1. A plain description of what you do

Write what you do in the words a customer would use. Not "bespoke domestic electrical solutions". Fuse boards, rewires, EV chargers, in Nottingham. Something reading that can repeat it back accurately. Something reading the first version has to guess, and it guesses generically.

2. Location details that stay put

Your address, your service area and your phone number should be identical everywhere they appear. Same format, same abbreviations, same number. Small inconsistencies here are the single most common reason a business reads as two half-businesses rather than one solid one.

3. The same information in every place it lives

Your website, your Google Business Profile, your social accounts and any listing you signed up to in 2019 should all agree. Hours, services, the trading name. The stale one you forgot about is doing active damage, quietly.

4. Recent activity

Something written this month tells a reader you are still here. A blog post, a job you photographed, a short update. It does not have to be substantial. It has to be dated recently, because currency is one of the few things a summariser can actually check.

5. A presence you do not own

Somewhere you are mentioned that is not your own website or your own social profile. A review, a local directory, a supplier's page, a mention in a community group. A business that only exists on its own site is a business with one source, and one source is thin evidence.

What we actually tested

We used our own tradespeople page as the subject, because it is ours and we could be rude about it.

The test was blind. We put questions to several AI tools that a real customer might plausibly ask, without naming Inkie, and read what came back. Then we changed one thing at a time on the page and asked again. What we were looking at was not position, since there is no position to look at, but whether the description that came back was accurate, specific, and current.

Consistency across places moved the answers more than anything else we changed. Recency was second. Word count on the page itself mattered a good deal less than we expected, which was mildly annoying given how much of it we had written.

What we are still not claiming

None of this makes your phone ring. We cannot see your postcode, your competitors, or how many people in your town are looking for what you sell this week, and any promise built on those unknowns would be invented.

What the five things above do is make sure that when someone does look, the business that gets described is yours, accurately, in the words you chose. Whether they then ring you depends on your prices, your reviews and your availability, which are all yours to run. The legibility part is the bit we can actually do, so it is the only bit we sell.