What AI says about you when you are not in the room.

Search engines spent 20 years learning to read badly structured websites. Answer engines haven't had 20 years. When an assistant summarizes your business it's working from whatever it can scrape, and what it scrapes first is usually your menu.

There is a plain text file you can put at the root of your site that says, in ordinary sentences, what you do, where you work, what you charge, and how to reach you. It has a name and a convention, and we're not going to print either here.

It's the difference between being described and describing yourself.

The part people get wrong

Almost everybody who writes one rewrites their brochure. That's the mistake. A customer never reads this file. Something that has to summarize you accurately to a stranger in 2 sentences does, and what it needs most is exactly what marketing copy leaves out. Written properly it's short, specific, unflattering in places, and it takes about an hour once you know what it's for.

Why bother now

Because it costs an hour and almost nobody in small business has one. The advantage won't last. In 3 years it'll be as standard as a sitemap. But right now, being the only plumber in your county with a machine-readable description of your own business is a real edge, and it compounds while it lasts.

We won't hand you ours

We used to print our own on the answer engine page and took it down. Everything above is what goes in one. What we won't do is publish a finished file for a competitor to paste their own name into, and neither should you once yours is written.