A while back someone showed me their new website on a phone in a car park in Nottingham, absolutely delighted with it. And it was lovely – Proper photography, nice colours, the lot. They’d paid a fair bit for it and wanted to show it off.

Then they asked why nobody was finding it…

I had a look that evening and the problem wasn’t the design at all. It was that almost nothing on the site was actually readable. Not to me, I could read it fine. To Google, and to the AI tools people increasingly ask for recommendations. The whole thing was gorgeous and, as far as a search engine was concerned, nearly blank.

That happens more than you’d think. So here’s what makes a website easy for Google and AI to read, and what “readable” actually means…

A sktech of a web browser showing what makes a website easy for Google and AI to read

Say what you do in words a human would use

Google and AI tools both work off the words on your page. If your homepage says “bespoke solutions for the modern home”, neither of them knows whether you fit kitchens, clean windows or install boilers.

Say the plain thing. “I fit kitchens in Grantham, Bottesford and the surrounding villages.” It feels almost too obvious to write down. That’s usually a sign it’s right.

The test I use: if you covered up your logo and photos, could a stranger tell exactly what you sell and where? If not, the words need to work harder.

Text has to be text

This is the one that catches people out most.

If your prices, your service list or your phone number only exist inside an image, a JPEG your designer made or a nice graphic from Canva, then to Google it simply isn’t there. Same with a PDF menu. Same with text baked into a photo banner.

I’ve seen a whole services page that was one big picture. Beautiful. Invisible.

Anything you’d want someone to find you for needs to exist as real, selectable text on the page. If you can highlight it with your cursor, you’re fine. If you can’t, it doesn’t count.

Headings should mean something

Headings aren’t just there to look bigger. They tell Google how the page is organised, and AI tools lean on them heavily when they’re skimming a site to answer somebody’s question.

So “Emergency callouts in Newark and Grantham” beats “Our Promise” every time. One tells you what’s underneath it. The other tells you nothing.

Same goes for your page titles. “Home”, “About”, “Services” is fine as navigation, but the actual title of the page should say what the page is about. Make sure you always have an H1 heading at the top of your page, then layer down with H2s followed by any H3/4s if needed.

Answer the questions you get asked out loud

People don’t search in keywords much any more. They type whole questions, and when they ask an AI assistant they definitely do. “Who does emergency plumbing near Aslockton on a Sunday.” “How much does a bathroom fit cost in Nottinghamshire.”

You already know these questions. They’re the ones customers ask you on the phone before they book. Write them on the page, in their words, and answer them properly underneath.

It’s the cheapest bit of the whole job and I think it’s the most valuable.

Name your places

If you serve the Vale of Belvoir, say so, and name a few of the villages. Whatton, Orston, Elton, Cropwell Bishop, Radcliffe on Trent. Not a huge stuffed list at the bottom of every page, that looks daft and Google’s been ignoring it for a decade. Just naturally, where it makes sense, in a sentence about the areas you cover.

Nobody can recommend you for a place you never mention.

One page, one job

A single page trying to cover plumbing, heating, bathrooms and three towns will do all of it badly. If you offer a few genuinely different things, give the big ones their own page with their own heading and their own honest description.

You don’t need forty pages. You probably need four or five good ones.

And it has to load

I’ve written about slow sites before so I won’t go on, but it belongs here. A page nobody waits for is a page nobody reads, and that includes the automated readers.