Field note 07 · Search · Field Notes
Can an AI assistant actually see your website?
Quite possibly not. Many sites hand a browser an almost empty page and let code fill it in a fraction of a second later. A person never notices. An AI assistant that reads the page as it leaves the server, before any code runs, can receive almost nothing. You can test your own in about twenty seconds.
Key takeaways
- Many sites hand a browser an almost empty page and let code fill it in a moment later. An assistant that reads the page as it leaves the server receives the empty shell.
- A site can rank perfectly well in ordinary search and still be impossible to quote, recommend or answer with, with no error and no warning.
- Run the free Pulse Check on your own site. If the word count that arrives is near zero and your page plainly has more, you have found the gap yourself.
The symptom.
Your site looks complete and it ranks reasonably in an ordinary search. But when someone asks an AI assistant about your field, your business never comes up, even when you are a genuine fit for the answer. There is no error and no warning. You simply are not in the room.
Why it happens.
Many modern sites are built so the page arrives almost empty and code fills in the words a moment later. A person with a normal browser never sees the gap, because it closes in a fraction of a second. A growing number of AI assistants do not wait for that. They read the raw page as it leaves the server and stop there, so what they receive is the empty shell, not the content a person sees.
Ordinary search engines have largely solved this over the years. Many AI assistants have not, or solve it only sometimes. So a site can rank perfectly well in search and still be invisible to the assistant a buyer now asks first.
What it costs.
Total invisibility to a channel that is only growing. A business can have strong search rankings and at the same time be impossible to quote, recommend or answer with, for every assistant a buyer might ask, without anyone inside the business knowing. Nothing breaks. The site simply never comes up, and no report has a line for an answer that was never given.
Check your own in twenty seconds.
This is the one point here you do not have to take on trust. Run the free Pulse Check on your own site. It fetches your page the way an assistant does, with no code run, and shows you how many words actually arrive. If that number is near zero and your page clearly has far more than that when you look at it in a browser, you have found the gap, and you have seen it yourself rather than been told about it.
What we would look at first.
Whether the site is built to serve its content in the page itself or to assemble it after the fact. This is usually not a content or copywriting problem. It is an architectural one, and it is the first thing we checked when we rebuilt our own site: the old version served machines almost nothing.
We would rather show that than describe it. On our own sixteen-point reading, our old homepage scored 15 out of 32 and the rebuilt one scores 32 out of 32, the same instrument, our page against our page. You can inspect it live: press X on any page of this site and it shows you the words served and the score, computed from that page right then.
Two questions this raises.
- Is this the same as search engine optimisation?
- Related, but not the same. Classic optimisation is about ranking in a list of results. This is about whether an assistant can read you at all, which is the precondition for being cited and recommended in the answers it gives. You can rank well and still be unreadable.
- Do I need special tools to check?
- No. The Pulse Check is free, takes about twenty seconds, stores nothing, and reads your page the way an assistant does rather than the way you do. A near-zero word count against a page that plainly has more is the whole finding.
If this sounds like your business.
Start with the free check: run the Pulse Check on your own site and read the number. If it is low, the fix is usually architectural rather than cosmetic, and it is the kind of thing a Signal Audit is for. If your reports look healthy while nothing improves, that pattern has its own note.
Run the Pulse CheckRelated: Search, the work this note usually leads to · Why do my marketing reports look good and nothing improves?