What changes
Six businesses were unreadable to the machines their customers now ask.
Not unranked. Unreadable. The same evaluation engine measured each one before we touched it and again afterward, and both numbers are on this page with the date they were taken.
The part nobody tells a local business
People used to find a firm by scrolling. A growing share of them now ask something instead, and the answer is assembled from whatever a machine can actually read on the page. A site can look finished to a person and be almost empty to the thing doing the recommending: text inside images, a heading that is really a styled paragraph, a company described four different ways on four pages, reviews that exist and are invisible.
None of that shows up in a screenshot. It shows up when somebody asks for an estate planning attorney in Westlake Village and gets three names that are not yours.
Measured before and after, on the same engine
AI Trust Visibility, scored out of 10. Each pair was taken on the live evaluation engine: the first against the site as it stood, the second against the site as it stands. Every one of these has its own case study.
A score is not a ranking and we never present it as one. It measures whether a business can be read, understood and trusted by the systems that now answer questions about it. What it cannot tell you is how many people called. Where a client has given us their own numbers we publish those on their page with the source; where they have not, the page says measurement is in progress rather than filling the gap with something that sounds good.
What actually moved the number
Make the words readable
One site kept its content inside JPEGs. Six of its sixteen pages carried no machine-readable text at all, which is an invisible business rather than a badly ranked one. Text becomes text, headings become headings, and a label styled to look like a heading is marked up as one.
Say who you are once
A business described differently on every page is several weak entities instead of one strong one. One name, one address, one description, in the page and in the structured data, written from the same source so the two cannot drift apart.
Answer the questions people actually ask
Pages that answer one question each, in the words somebody would use to ask it, at a length that can be quoted back. Not more pages. More answers.
Then measure it again
The same engine, on the live site, after the work. That second measurement is the only thing that makes the first number worth taking, and it is why these are pairs rather than claims.
The one that is not a 9.9, and why we published it anyway
Bryant Benitez had written two novels, pastored churches for a decade and taken an MDiv from Fuller. His author site said none of it in a form a machine could read: the pages were images of text. The homepage carried zero body words. So did the page for his own novel. One file was named demon-dog-page-v2-w-words_orig.jpg, which is the whole problem in a filename.
His score went 4.2 to 7.3, not to 9.9, and the reason is the honest one. The largest scoring fix still available is structured rating data. His ratings sit on a retailer's site and are not his to publish as his own, so we withheld it deliberately and the number stayed lower. A score is the record of a choice as much as of the work.
What the number does not measure is a Saturday at a bookshop in Floresville, Texas, where a young reader who had been given the book finished it and had it signed by the man who wrote it. That is what the work is for. The score is only how the machines found out he exists.
What we will not do
- Publish a number without a source and a date. Nothing here was rounded up.
- Promise a ranking. Nobody controls what a model says, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something they cannot deliver.
- Write a review, invent a testimonial, or present a client's ratings as our own structured data. One client's ratings sit on a retailer's site, and republishing them as first-party data on his own would have raised his score. We left the score where it was.
- Publish a client's story before that client has said yes in writing.
If your business is in the same position
The evaluation is free, and it is the same engine that produced every number above. It will tell you what a machine can and cannot read on your site today, whether or not you ever hire anybody.