Your Website Was Built for Google, Not Claude
I'll start with the embarrassing part. When I rebuilt portalintegrators.com as a modern single-page app, it looked great, loaded fast, and was nearly invisible to the AI systems that now answer questions about businesses like mine. A tool that fetches a page the way an AI crawler does was getting back almost nothing: some meta tags, no real content. The site a human saw and the site a machine could read were two different sites, and I'd built the second one by accident.
That gap is more common than most business owners realize, and it has nothing to do with how good the website looks, and it's the same gap that decides what ChatGPT says about a business when someone asks. Here are the five things that actually determine whether an AI can read what you've built.
1. Crawler access
The most basic gate, and the easiest to get wrong invisibly. Your site's robots configuration and server rules decide who's allowed to fetch your pages at all. It's possible to be accidentally blocking the exact systems you want reading you, and you'd have no way of knowing without checking, because a blocked crawler doesn't send you an error message. It just quietly goes elsewhere for an answer about you.
2. JavaScript rendering
My own mistake. Modern websites are often built as applications that construct the page in the visitor's browser, after the initial page loads. A human's browser does that construction automatically and invisibly. Many AI crawlers fetch the initial, unconstructed version and stop there, which means a beautiful, fully interactive site can hand back something close to a blank page to exactly the reader you now need to convince. The fix isn't abandoning modern web tools; it's making sure the meaningful content exists in a form that doesn't depend on a browser to appear.
3. Content format
Even when a page is readable, format determines whether it's usable. Content buried in images, videos, or PDFs without accompanying text is effectively invisible to systems that primarily read text. The same information, restated as an actual paragraph on the actual page, becomes available to every reader, human and machine alike.
4. Schema and structured data
Beyond the words on the page, there's a layer of structured markup that explicitly labels what your business is, what it offers, and how it's organized, in a format built for machines to parse without guessing. Most small business sites skip this entirely, which forces every reader, human and AI, to infer structure from prose. Explicit labeling is one of the highest-leverage, lowest-visibility fixes available, precisely because almost nobody does it.
A different problem entirely: platforms built to keep crawlers out
Everything above assumes the surface in question is your own website, which you control end to end. Your social media presence is a different animal, and it deserves its own warning rather than a place on this list: platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook are largely walled off from the crawlers reading the rest of the web, regardless of how well you maintain your presence there. That's a big enough issue that the next post in this series covers it on its own; for now, the short version is that keeping your Instagram current is good marketing and does almost nothing for what an AI assistant knows about you.
5. Entity consistency
The quiet one. If your business name, description, and details are phrased differently across your site, your listings, and your social profiles, you're not one clear signal; you're several conflicting ones, and a system trying to determine the truth about you has no obvious way to pick a winner. Consistency across every place your business appears turns scattered mentions into one reinforcing signal instead of a set of contradictions.
The test you can run this week
Fetch your own homepage the way a text-based tool would, stripped of styling and scripts, and read what's left. If what remains is thin, generic, or missing the content you'd swear is right there on the page, you've found your gap, and you've found it before a customer's AI assistant found it for you.
None of these five are exotic. They're closer to plumbing than marketing, which is exactly why they get skipped, and exactly why fixing them is some of the highest-leverage, least-glamorous work a business can do right now.
Have you actually looked at what an AI sees when it visits your site? I can run that check for you if you haven't.
Rosemarie Withee has spent thirteen years helping operations teams get real work out of their software, first Microsoft 365, now AI. She’s written six books for Wiley and builds AI products at Portal Integrators.