Somebody looked for a business like yours last week. They didn't open Google. They opened ChatGPT, typed a sentence, and got three recommendations in a paragraph. No blue links, no scrolling, no page two. Just three names.
If you weren't one of them, you never found out.
This is the part of search that's changed fastest, and it's the part most small business owners haven't been told about yet. We spent fifteen years learning how to look good on a results page. Now there often isn't a results page. There's an answer, and a short list of who got mentioned in it.
Here's the uncomfortable thing for those of us who design websites for a living: the AI can't see your website. Not the way a person does. It doesn't see your typography, your photography, your spacing, the hero image you spent three rounds on. It reads raw text out of your page's code and moves on. Everything you were praised for is invisible to it.
That's not an argument against good design. It's an argument for designing with a second reader in mind. So here are the four design decisions I see most often that quietly make a small business website unreadable to AI search.
Designers love baking text into graphics. It's the only way to get the type exactly right, and it survives every browser. It's also completely invisible.
Your tagline in the hero graphic, your service list inside that nicely laid-out infographic, the three differentiators on the pricing image. If it's pixels, it doesn't exist. A crawler pulls the text out of your HTML. Your image contributes nothing but a filename.
Anything that's actually a claim about your business needs to be live text on the page. Style it however you want, just don't flatten it.
This one catches a lot of otherwise well-built sites, and it's worth knowing precisely, because it's counterintuitive.
Most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript. Not "sometimes" they download the files and never execute them. Recent testing found OpenAI's crawler fetched JavaScript in about 11.5% of requests without executing it, and Anthropic's downloaded it in roughly 24% of requests and never ran it. Roughly 69% of AI crawlers can't execute JavaScript at all. Google's crawler is the notable exception.
So if your tabs, accordions, filtered galleries, or "load more" sections pull their content in after the page arrives, that content is invisible to ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Your FAQ hidden inside an accordion may be the single best-answering content on your site, and it may not be there at all as far as AI is concerned.
The fix is boring and effective: make sure the important text is in the page when it loads, not injected afterward.
Every designer has done this. You need a smaller heading, so you reach for an H3. You need a big one, so you make it an H1. The type scale becomes the reason, and the outline becomes an accident.
Headings aren't a font size. They're the table of contents a machine uses to decide what your page is actually about. One H1 that names the topic, H2s that name the real sections, in an order that makes sense read out loud with nothing else. Set the sizes separately. That's what CSS is for.
This is the expensive one, because it's usually the thing everyone in the room liked best.
Small business homepages love an evocative opener. Something aspirational, a little abstract, paired with a great photograph. It feels premium. And it gives an answer engine nothing to work with, because it never states what you do or who you do it for in a sentence that can be lifted out and quoted.
AI search works by extraction. It wants a claim it can repeat. "We build and maintain websites for construction and property management companies in Gig Harbor" can be quoted. Something about elevating your vision cannot.
Keep the beautiful line. Just put a plain one near it.
You'll get pitched this, so it's worth saying plainly. Schema is the structured code that labels your pages for machines, and a lot of people are currently selling it as the AEO fix.
The best data available doesn't support that. Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that added schema against 4,000 that didn't, and found citation changes of −4.6% in AI Overviews, +2.4% in AI Mode, and +2.2% in ChatGPT, no meaningful uplift anywhere. Their read was that pages winning citations were doing lots of other things right, and schema came along for the ride.
Add it. It's cheap and it helps in other places. Just don't buy it as the answer.
Two things, and neither is a trick.
The first is being genuinely useful in a format worth quoting. Analyses this year put original research and data-backed pages at citation rates in the 38–65% range, while ordinary blog posts land around 6–15% and marketing pages around 3–8%. One honest page of numbers from your own work beats twelve posts about industry trends.
The second is that regular SEO still underpins all of it roughly 75% of the links in Google's AI Overviews come from pages already ranking in the top 12 organic results. AI search isn't a replacement for showing up. It's a layer on top of showing up.
None of this means design matters less. It means your site now has two audiences, and only one of them can see. A good site should be beautiful to the person and legible to the machine, and getting both takes someone who's thinking about both while it's being built, not an SEO pass bolted on six months after launch.
If your website is gorgeous and still isn't getting mentioned anywhere, that gap is usually fixable. We do this for a living.
