Your website might be invisible to the AI people are asking
More customers are asking ChatGPT who to hire. Here is what it can, and cannot, see when it looks at you.
Last month a mate asked ChatGPT to recommend a good electrician near him. It named three. His own sparky, who has a website and years of great reviews, was not one of them.
That is happening more than you would think.
For twenty years, getting found meant Google. It still matters. But a lot of people now open ChatGPT, or Gemini, or the assistant built into their phone, and just ask. Who is the best plumber near me. Who should I use for a new roof. And the assistant answers from whatever it can read about you on the web.
Here is the part almost nobody has been told.
The robots read a different version of your site
When you open your website, your browser does a lot of work behind the scenes. It runs code, loads the fonts, plays the animations, fills in the words. You see the finished thing.
A search crawler and an AI assistant often do not wait for all that. They read the raw version, the plain page that arrives first, before the code runs.
On a well-built site, all your words are in that raw version. Your services, your reviews, your story. The robots read it fine.
On a lot of sites, they are not. The page arrives almost empty, and the real content only appears a second later when the code fills it in. You see a great site. The AI sees a blank page. So when someone asks it who to hire, it has nothing to say about you, and it points them at the business it could actually read.
How to tell if this is you
You cannot spot it by looking at your site, because your browser hides the problem. But there is a quick check.
Open your site, right click, and choose View page source. That is the raw version the robots get. Now use find, Ctrl-F on Windows or Cmd-F on a Mac, and search for a sentence you know is on the page. Your phone number. A service you offer. A line from a review.
If you find it, good. The robots can read it too.
If it is not there, that is the problem. Your content is real to people and invisible to the machines deciding who gets recommended.
The good news
This is usually a build decision, not a marketing spend. The words exist. They are just in the wrong place, loaded the wrong way. Getting them into the raw version is often a tidy-up, not a rebuild.
And because most small businesses have not caught up to this yet, being readable right now is a real head start. The ones who fix it are the ones the assistants keep naming, while everyone else wonders why the phone went quiet.
If you want to know exactly what the robots see when they look at your site, we built a free checker. Paste your address and it tells you straight, and whatever it finds is yours to keep.
Give it a burl.