"Trusted tradesperson for 20 years": the sentence that makes you invisible to an AI

Take the "about" page of any electrician, at random. You'll read, more or less word for word: "a trusted, attentive tradesperson for 20 years." Now take the pages of his fourteen competitors in the same town. You'll read the same thing. That's the problem, and it's more serious than a matter of style: that sentence gives nobody, neither a customer nor a machine, the slightest reason to remember that one over another.

I've explained elsewhere how AIs choose which businesses to mention, and the five things that matter when you're a local small business. Four of those can be fixed without writing a single line: your Google listing, reviews, consistency of information, site structure. The fifth can't. The fifth means rewriting what you say about yourself, and it's by far the hardest, because it touches a habit. This article deals only with that one.

The test that takes a minute a page

Open your homepage. Read every sentence and ask yourself a single question: could the competitor across the street write exactly the same thing? If the answer's yes, the sentence isn't working. It takes up space, it reassures whoever wrote it, and it gives nothing to whoever reads it.

Do the exercise honestly and the result is striking: on many small business sites, three quarters of the homepage pass the test. "Attentive service," "careful work," "free quotes," "fast response," "quality and expertise." Everyone writes it, so nobody reads it any more.

Vagueness doesn't make you universal, it makes you impossible to find.

What to rewrite them with

Let's go back to our electrician. "A trusted, attentive tradesperson for 20 years" becomes: "I bring electrical panels in 1960s and 70s houses up to code, east side of town." Now there's substance. A specific trade, an identifiable use case, an area. The day someone describes exactly that problem, to an AI or to their brother-in-law, that site has a chance of being the name that comes up.

Take a bakery, the mechanism is the same. "Your quality artisan bakery" gives no grip at all. "Naturally leavened sourdough baked over a wood fire, no additives, and wedding cakes to order" gives three distinct reasons to be mentioned, depending on what the customer's looking for that day. You haven't shrunk your market by writing that, you've multiplied the number of real questions your site is the right answer to.

Why precision pays on both sides

It's exactly what I see working on the Google side, and that's no coincidence. I worked with an estate agency whose bulk of traffic ended up coming from natural search within a few months, precisely because we stopped stacking generic keywords and started answering real, specific questions. The paradox is right there: chasing the keyword that pays makes you generic, and so invisible, at the very moment precision is what pays.

A precise, honest, well structured site is treated better by Google, understood better by an AI, and more convincing to the human who ends up reading it. You're not working for three audiences, you're working for a single principle, clarity. I've seen an estate agency's natural traffic take off for this reason alone.

What I won't promise you

Nobody truly controls how these systems choose who to mention, and anyone guaranteeing you first place in ChatGPT is selling something that doesn't exist. What we do know, though, is what excludes you for certain: a vague site that says nothing precise or verifiable about what you do. We can't promise you'll be mentioned, we can make you deserve to be, and that's already far more than most of your competitors will do this year.

You can run the test above yourself, tonight, at no cost. Knowing exactly where you stand in AI answers, no: you have to go and ask the engines the questions, one by one, and see who comes up. That's the work of my AI visibility audit: you find out exactly which questions you come up on and which ones go to your neighbour instead, with screenshots to prove it, for €490 excl. VAT, with the firm price of the project written into it if you go ahead. And if your foundations need work, a clear site can be rebuilt without breaking the search rankings you already have.