Symptoms you may be seeing
- New buyers reach you only through references and old contacts.Buyers who do not know you cannot find, read or trust enough on your website to put you on a shortlist.
- Ask ChatGPT for suppliers of your product in your region, and competitors are named. You are not.The assistant cannot read or match enough about you, so it names the suppliers it can.
- Most new enquiries come through B2B portals, where you are one of many quotes.Your own website does not win the buyer directly, so you pay to be compared on price.
The moment it matters
A buyer asks ChatGPT: "Which manufacturers in western India make GI cable trays for solar plants?" The assistant answers in a paragraph and names three companies.
What the buyer sees
Specification tables uploaded as images. Banners with the key facts written into the picture. Product details that appear only after a slider or tab runs a script. Each page carrying the same title. Sometimes a line in the site's robots file, or a firewall setting, that turns away the crawlers search engines and AI assistants use to read pages.
The person looking at the screen sees all of it. The assistant sees a few headings and a footer.
What it costs you
An assistant tends to name the suppliers whose facts it can find, read and match with other sources. If it cannot read yours, it is unlikely to name you, however good the plant.
Google runs most scripts, but later and not always completely, and it can only rank what it manages to read.
What the buyer is asking at this point
"What do others say about you?"
He is checkingWhat he finds when he searches your name, on Google, LinkedIn and the AI assistants.
A good answerConsistent facts across the website, Google listing, LinkedIn and directories, and reviews or testimonials he can trace to a person.
"Can I find you when I ask ChatGPT or Google's AI?"
He is checkingIncreasingly, the first check of a name he has just heard.
A good answerPages that can be read as text, company facts marked up for machines, and the same facts on the listings assistants read.
All 62 questions industrial buyers ask, with good answers →
Check your own website in two minutes
- On a product page, try to select the specification text with your finger or mouse. If it cannot be selected, it is a picture.
- Type
site:and your website address into Google, for a rough count of how many of your pages are listed. - Open your website address followed by
/robots.txt. Look for "Disallow: /" under "User-agent: *", or under Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot or Claude-SearchBot. Ask your web team about any you find. - Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity "What does [your company] make?" and compare the answer with what is true.
What good looks like
- Every fact a buyer needs written as text on the page.
- A title and description for every page, written around what buyers type.
- The company's facts (name, addresses, products, the questions buyers ask) labelled in the page code in the form search engines and assistants read reliably, the same way on every page.
- The crawlers that search engines and assistants use to answer buyers allowed in, and old addresses forwarded to their new pages.
How this gets put right
This problem rarely comes alone. It usually shares a cause with others on this list: a website written once, years ago, without the facts the plant and the sales team hold. Patching one page at a time seldom changes what a buyer concludes.
The AI Search Visibility Blueprint shows how far your own site has this and every related problem, how Google and the AI assistants read it today, and what to correct in what order. A Website Transformation rebuilds the site from your own documents so the whole set is put right together, and measures what moves each month.
Written by Arun Agrawal, founder of EbizIndia and author of Invisible to Prominent, a free guide to how Google and the AI assistants decide which businesses to name.