Open ChatGPT and ask it what your business does. Then ask where you’re based, and what you charge.
Some people get a decent answer. Plenty get something vague or quietly out of date — an old address, a service you dropped two years ago, a price from a page you deleted. Some get nothing at all.
Worth doing before you read the rest of this, because the answer tells you whether any of it applies to you.
Your website has two audiences now
A person reading your homepage works out what you do without thinking about it. They read the headings, glance at the photos, skim the pricing table, notice you’ve been going since 2011. They fill in the gaps automatically.
Search engines and AI tools don’t read a page that way. They read the text, and they read a second, hidden layer — a set of plain facts a website can state outright: this is a business, it’s called this, it’s here, these are the services, this is what they cost. When that layer is missing, the tools guess from loose prose. Usually the guess is roughly right. Sometimes it’s wrong, and sometimes they skip you in favour of a competitor whose site spelled it out.
That hidden layer is called structured data. Your visitors never see it. Google, Bing and — increasingly — AI assistants do.
What we found on our own site
We build websites for a living, so this is a slightly awkward paragraph.
Until recently, virgola.co.nz had one small piece of structured data, identical on every page, saying roughly “this is a professional service business.” That was the lot. No services, no pricing, no FAQs, and no indication that the forty-odd articles and case studies on the site existed at all.
All of that content was there. It had been for months, written out in plain English on the page where anyone could read it. We’d just never translated it into the form machines read. A person landing on our pricing page could see exactly what a care plan costs. An AI assistant asked “what does Virgola charge?” had nothing to work with but paragraphs of prose and its own guesswork.
That gap is the normal state of affairs, which is why it’s worth writing about. It isn’t a sign of a badly built website — it’s the part that gets left out of almost all of them, because until recently it didn’t cost you anything.
What we changed
We rewrote the layer so it hangs together: every page now states who we are, points to the right service, and carries the FAQ, article or project details that belong to it. We also updated robots.txt to make clear that AI crawlers are welcome.
And we added a file called llms.txt — a plain-text summary of the site aimed at AI tools. Being straight about this one: there’s very little evidence anyone reads it. The companies that would need to support it mostly haven’t said they do, and the research so far shows no measurable benefit. It took ten minutes and costs nothing, so we’ve done it as a bet on where things are heading. We wouldn’t charge anyone for it, and we’d tell you the same if you asked.
Nothing a human visitor sees changed at all.
When this really bites: when something changes
The problem is worst for businesses that have changed something — moved to a new town, changed trading name, dropped or added services, put prices up.
Search engines and AI tools are slow to let go of what they already believe. If you’ve moved and every machine-readable signal still points at the old address — your website, your Google Business Profile, the directory listings you’d forgotten you were in — you can spend a year with AI assistants confidently telling people you’re somewhere you’re not. Your homepage can announce the new address in large friendly letters and it won’t necessarily help, because that isn’t where the tools look first.
That’s the version worth actually worrying about. Not “am I invisible?” but “is what they’re saying about me still true?”
Is it worth your time?
If you’ve never asked an AI tool about your own business, start there. It takes a minute and it’s a better diagnostic than anything we can tell you.
If the answer comes back fine, this is a tidy-up, not an emergency. If it comes back wrong, out of date, or blank, it’s worth fixing — and the fix usually isn’t a rewrite. When the pricing, FAQs and service descriptions already exist as real content on your site, and on most decent sites they do, adding this layer is a translation job. It’s a one-off, not something that needs feeding.
Happy to check yours. Send us your web address and we’ll tell you what the machines can currently see, what’s missing, and whether it’s worth doing anything about. No charge, and if it’s fine we’ll just say so.