Why “just fix the website” does not fix AI visibility
The most common advice about AI visibility is to fix your own website. Get the structured data right, state what you do, publish good content. All of that is correct, and none of it is enough on its own. I measured 37 sites for how often assistants named them in their own category. The results did
Posted on Oct 30 • Originally published at aaronstalberg.com
The most common advice about AI visibility is to fix your own website. Get the structured data right, state what you do, publish good content. All of that is correct, and none of it is enough on its own.
I measured 37 sites for how often assistants named them in their own category. The results did not line up with anything I expected.
The distinction that held up was not how good the site was. It was how Describable the company was, and how consistently that description appeared in places the site did not control.
The pattern is that AI visibility is largely a property of your reputation Elsewhere, what other sources say about you and whether they agree. Your site is where you make that easy to verify, not where you create it.
Website advice is popular because it is actionable and entirely within your control. That is also its limitation. Most of what determines whether an assistant names you happens off your domain, in sources you do not own and often cannot edit.
Which means the work splits into three kinds, and only the first is familiar:
37 sites is a small sample, chosen rather than randomly sampled, and measured at one moment. I would not dress it up as research. But the direction was consistent enough that I stopped expecting site quality to predict anything, and started looking at consistency and corroboration instead.
If you only fix your website, you will have done the part that was never the bottleneck.