Getting found by AI, part two: what the assistant actually sees
Somewhere near you, right now, someone is asking their phone to find a dog groomer who is good with anxious dogs. Or a cake maker who delivers on Sundays. Or an accountant who actually understands sole traders. Three names come back. Nobody scrolled, nobody browsed, nobody compared nine tabs. The assistant read the candidates and picked.
Last month we wrote about this shift and the advice boiled down to two words: clear and consistent. It was our most-read piece of the summer, and the question that kept coming back afterwards was the right one. Fine, but what does that mean in practice? What is the assistant actually looking at?
So this is part two: the practical version.
Humans read vibes, machines lift facts
Here is the core difference, and almost everything else follows from it. A human visitor absorbs your page as an atmosphere. The photos, the tone, the charm, the slightly chaotic energy of a real person's real business. They can fall for you without reading a single full sentence.
An assistant cannot fall for you. It lifts facts. What do you do, who is it for, where are you, what does it cost, are you available. If a fact is not written down in plain words somewhere it can reach, then as far as the machine is concerned, it is not true.
"Award-winning bespoke celebrations for your special day" makes a human smile and gives a machine nothing. No service, no place, no specifics. The answer is not to strip out the charm. It is to carry both layers: the voice for the humans, the plain facts for the machine that decides whether the humans ever arrive.
Five ways to be one of the three names
1. Write the sentence a machine can lift
Somewhere prominent, in plain words, one sentence that states what you do, who you do it for, and where. "I'm a wedding florist in Shropshire specialising in dried flowers and small weddings." That sentence is quotable, and quotable is the whole game. When an assistant assembles an answer, it reaches for the clearest available statement of fact. If your page never contains that sentence, the assistant either guesses or moves on to a competitor who wrote it down. This is a ten-minute job and it is probably the single highest-leverage edit on your website.
2. Answer real questions, in full sentences
Assistants are fed questions, not keywords. Nobody types "florist Shropshire dried" into a chat. They ask, do you travel, what do prices start at, how far ahead should I book, can you do a small midweek wedding. A short FAQ written in actual sentences, question then answer, is exactly the shape an assistant loves to quote. It is also, not coincidentally, kind to human visitors who want the same answers without sending you a message and waiting a day. One page, both audiences.
3. Keep your facts agreeing with each other
One story, everywhere. This is the deeper version of "consistent" from part one. It is not about your branding matching. It is about the boring fields matching: name, address, phone number, opening hours, service area, across your website, your Google profile and your socials. When sources disagree, an assistant does what a cautious person does: it hedges, or it quietly leaves you out of the answer rather than risk sending someone to a door that might be shut. Two listings telling different stories is worse than one listing telling a modest one.
4. Be specific enough to match a specific ask
Nobody asks an assistant for "a groomer". They ask for the groomer who is good with anxious dogs, the vegan cake maker who delivers, the bookkeeper who gets creative freelancers. Assistants match detailed requests against detailed pages. Which means your specialism, written down plainly, gets you into queries that generic competitors never even appear in. There is something quietly lovely about this if you have ever been told your niche was too narrow or your way of working too particular. The quirk you were advised to smooth over is, it turns out, a search term.
5. Look alive
Recency reads as reliability. A page showing this month's work, a current offer and a recent post looks like a going concern. A page frozen in March looks like a maybe, and assistants do not recommend maybes to people asking for help this week. This is the part nobody wants to hear, because keeping things current is exactly the admin that slides. It is also exactly why we built Linkie the way we did: a link page that pulls in your newest content and offers on its own, so the freshness signal stays lit without you doing the polishing by hand.
Start with one page
Do not audit your whole web presence this week. Read one page, your homepage or your bio link, with a single rule: you may only take away facts, not feelings. Then ask, could a stranger's assistant state what I do, who for, where, and what it costs to start?
If the answer is no, write the missing sentence and put it near the top. Twenty minutes, one edit, and the next time somebody's phone goes looking for exactly what you offer, there is something there for it to find.