Insights Insights Longer answers, written down. How do we get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity? Be readable, be clear about who you are, answer real questions plainly, and have other sites vouch for you. AI assistants assemble answers from pages they can read and trust; the businesses they name are the ones whose details match everywhere and whose pages lift cleanly into an answer. How should we handle reviews, and what’s a waste of time? Ask every customer, at the moment the job is done well, with a direct link to the right location's profile. Answer every review within a few days, briefly, by name. Never buy, trade or script them, and never argue in a reply. The steady arrival of real reviews, answered, is what strangers and search engines both read as trust. Should we fix the site we have or rebuild it? Fix it if the foundation is sound and the problems are content: wrong words, missing pages, thin locations. Rebuild if the foundation is the problem: a slow, fragile page builder, a platform that can't do what you now need, or a site so patched that every change breaks something. A free audit tells you which in days, and I'll say so either way. What actually matters on our Google Business Profile? Five things: the exact name, address and phone matching your site and everywhere else; the right primary category; real photos, added regularly; reviews arriving steadily and answered; and accurate hours including holidays. Posts, Q&A and the rest help a little. Those five decide whether you appear in the map results at all. What are the mistakes on most business websites? The same seven, nearly every time: everything on one page; headings used for size, not structure; titles that say who instead of what and where; thin location pages; PDFs instead of real pages; images with no descriptions; and no links from the home page to the pages that need to rank. What do you need from us to quote properly? Five things: what the site has to do for the business and what success looks like a year after launch; who will edit it and what it must connect to; whether designs or brand assets exist; who provides words and photos and when; and a rough budget and timeline. Open questions are fine, stated openly. What does a stranger decide about us in the first ten seconds on their phone? Whether you're real, whether you're local, whether you do the thing they need, and whether calling you will be easy. They decide from what loads in the first screen: a plain statement of what you do and where, a phone number they can tap, a sign of life like a recent photo or review, and a page that appeared instantly. Miss one and they go back to the results. What does hand-coded actually mean for us? It means the site was written for your business rather than assembled from a kit. In practice: it loads fast, it doesn't break when a third party changes their mind, your team edits content without touching layout, and any competent developer could read it. Simplicity is the feature. What does the free audit actually look at? Where you show up and where you don't: for each location, the searches your customers make and whether you or a competitor appear in the results, the map and the AI answers. What visitors do once they arrive. What the site is built on: speed, structure, whether machines can read it. Back within three working days, in plain words, with a recommendation. What is structured data, and why do AI engines care? Structured data is invisible labelling that tells Google and AI systems exactly what a page is: this is a business, here's its name, address and phone; this is a service; this is a question and its answer. It's one of the main reasons some businesses get named in AI answers and similar ones don't. What should a monthly report from our web person actually tell us? Three things, in plain words: what happened (enquiries, calls and bookings per location, compared with last month and last year), why (what changed in search, in AI answers, on the site), and what's being done about it next month. If a report is twelve pages of charts and you finish it not knowing whether to be pleased, it isn't a report; it's a dashboard export. What should happen online when we open a new branch? Before the doors open: a page for the branch, a verified Google Business Profile, the address and phone on the directories that matter, and the service pages saying it's available there. Opening week: photos of the real place, the first reviews asked for, listings checked. In that order, a new branch is found in weeks instead of years. What’s the difference between hosting and looking after a site? Hosting is where the site lives: the server, the speed, the uptime. Care is someone looking after the site itself: testing updates, keeping backups, watching security, fixing small things before they become big ones. Most businesses buy the first and assume the second is included. It usually isn't. What’s the real cost of buying leads from a platform? The fee is the visible part. The hidden part: every lead you buy teaches the customer to go back to the platform, not to you; you're bidding against your own competitors for the same person; and when you stop paying, it all stops. Owning the channel costs more up front and less every year after. Most businesses your size already spend more renting. Why did our site break after an update, and how do we stop it happening again? Because something was updated without anyone checking what it would do. Nearly every break after an update is preventable: read what's changing, back up first, test on a copy, look at the live site afterwards, and fix before applying the next one. The real question is who owns that process. If the answer is "we're not sure", that's the risk. Why does being found start with how the site is built? Because the decisions that decide whether you get found are made during the build and are expensive to change later: how pages are structured, how URLs are shaped, how fast it loads, whether machines can read it. Bolting it on afterwards means paying twice. Why does our first location show up and the second one doesn’t? Because the web knows about one of you. The first branch has years of address mentions, reviews, a Google profile and a site built around it. The second has a line on the contact page. Google and AI assistants rank places, not companies; a place with no page, no profile and no reviews of its own doesn't exist to them. Why don’t you use page builders? Because they're borrowed decisions. A builder ships thousands of lines of code for things your site doesn't need, slows everything down, breaks unpredictably on update, and locks you to its roadmap instead of yours. Most builder sites get rebuilt within three or four years. Mine don't. Why is our PDF menu costing us customers? Because nobody can search it. Google can't read a PDF properly, phones make people pinch and zoom, and AI assistants can't quote a dish from it. A real menu page, one line per dish, is the single biggest change most restaurants can make to be found for what they actually serve.