- If AI tools can't read your website, they fill in the blanks. Sometimes with made-up facts.
- Many AI crawlers don't run the code that modern websites use to show text. They can see an empty page where you see a full one.
- The fix is to serve the real words in the page itself, so any reader, human or robot, gets them.
- You can check this yourself in five minutes. The steps are below.
A while back I asked a few AI tools about my own agency. Just to see what they'd say.
They gave a phone number. It wasn't mine. They gave a street address. Also not mine. Neither one exists anywhere on my website.
The AI wasn't being malicious. It was guessing. And it was guessing because of something I did.
What was actually wrong
My website looked great. To a person.
But the site was built so that the text gets painted onto the page by code, after the page loads. Your browser runs that code, so you see everything.
A lot of AI crawlers don't run that code. They grab the raw page and leave.
When I checked what they were getting, it was about 60 characters per page. Basically a title and nothing else. Page after page of nothing.
So when someone asked an AI about my business, it had almost no real information. It filled the blank with something that sounded right.
The AI wasn't lying about me. My website just wasn't telling it anything.
How I fixed it
I've been building websites for a long time, so I knew what I was looking at. I explained the problem to my AI tools in plain words and had them build the fix.
The fix was simple in idea. Before the site goes live, a robot browser opens every page, waits for the text to appear, and saves those real words into the page itself.
People see the same site as before. But now a crawler that doesn't run code still gets the full text.
Across 63 pages, the readable text went from about 8 words a page to a middle value of about 626 words a page.
Same website. Same design. The robots could finally read it.
Try this today
You can check your own site in five minutes.
- Ask two or three AI tools: what is the phone number and address of your business? Write down what they say.
- Open your website in a browser. Right-click and choose View Page Source. That is closer to what a simple crawler sees.
- Search that source for a sentence you can see on the page. If it isn't there, some AI tools probably can't see it either.
- If the facts are wrong or the words are missing, that's the thing to bring to whoever builds your site. Or to your AI.
Why this matters more every month
More people are asking AI for a recommendation instead of scrolling a list of links.
A bad search ranking costs you a click. A wrong AI answer can cost you the whole conversation. The person never even gets to your site.
The good news is that this one is fixable. And you don't have to be technical to find out if you have the problem.
Questions people ask
Why does ChatGPT get my business information wrong?
Often because it can't read your website. Many AI crawlers don't run the JavaScript that modern sites use to display text, so they see a nearly empty page. With little real information, the AI fills gaps with guesses. Old or conflicting listings around the web can add to it.
How can I check what AI tools can see on my website?
Open your site, right-click and choose View Page Source, then search for a sentence you can see on the page. If the sentence isn't in the source, a crawler that doesn't run code likely can't see it. Also ask a few AI tools for your phone number and address and compare to the real ones.
Do I need a developer to fix this?
Not always. The fix is to make the real text part of the page itself, which is sometimes called prerendering or server-side rendering. I described the problem in plain words and had AI tools build and test the fix for me.
