Audit Your Page for AI

What “extractable” means

Think about how your home page reads to a person: a warm headline, some scene-setting, a story about why you started the business, and eventually the useful details. Now picture an AI reading it, hunting for a 50-word chunk that directly answers “what does this business charge for commercial cleaning in Irvine.” Beautiful, atmospheric writing that never states a plain fact gives the machine nothing to lift. Extractable simply means your page contains passages that can stand alone as an answer.

The six-point checklist

• •Answer-first: the direct answer appears in the first sentence or two, before the background. Journalists call this the inverted pyramid.
• •Question-based headings: your headings read like the questions customers actually ask (“How much does commercial cleaning cost in Irvine?”) rather than clever labels (“Our Approach”).
• •Self-contained passages: roughly 40 to 60 words each, placed directly under their heading, making full sense on their own.
• •Quotable specifics: real numbers, prices, timeframes, and named sources rather than vague claims like “affordable” or “fast.”
• •Definitive language: “Wilson Cleaning serves 40 offices in Orange County” rather than “we believe we may be able to help with your cleaning needs.” Analysis of cited passages found them far more likely to use definitive wording.
• •Named subjects: the passage says who it's about instead of opening with “we,” “our team,” or “it.”

Why the top of the page matters so much

One analysis found that 44% of the passages ChatGPT cites come from the first third of a page. That doesn't mean the rest is wasted, but it does mean the most valuable real estate you own is the top of each page, and most small business websites spend it on a slogan and a stock photo. If your prices, service area, and what you actually do are only reachable after three scrolls, you're keeping your best material where the engine is least likely to look.

The pronoun problem

This one is subtle and it's everywhere. Because the engine grabs a paragraph and reads it with nothing around it, a sentence like “We've been doing this since 2009 and our customers love the results” is unusable. Who is “we”? The engine can't be confident, so it moves on to a competitor who wrote “Wilson Cleaning has served Orange County offices since 2009.” Same fact, one is quotable. Writing your own name where you'd normally write “we” feels repetitive as you type it, and it is one of the highest-return changes you can make.

A word on schema markup

Schema markup is invisible code that labels what's on your page: this is a business, this is its address, this is a review. You'll hear it sold as an AEO must-have, and the truth is more measured. Google and Microsoft have both confirmed it helps their systems understand content, and cited pages do carry it more often. But controlled tests have failed to show it causes citations, and Google states no special markup is needed to appear in AI Overviews. Worth having as basic plumbing, especially for your business name, address, and hours. Not worth paying someone thousands for as a citation strategy.

Step by step

• •Pick the single page that matters most, usually your home page or your main service page.
• •Select all the visible text on it and copy it. You want the words, not the design.
• •Run the AEO Page Audit prompt below and paste the text in where it asks.
• •Read the grades honestly. Most small business pages score badly at first, and that's the opportunity, not a verdict on your business.
• •Save the prioritized fix list. The next lesson works straight through it.