Symptoms you may be seeing
- 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.
- Your sales team sends the catalogue and company profile on every first call.The facts live in PDFs and in people's heads, not on pages a buyer can open and forward.
- Buyers ask questions on the phone that the website should have answered.Product pages without figures, standards or the questions buyers ask.
The moment it matters
An engineer at a consultant's office has been asked whether your make can be approved for a project. He needs the size, grade and standard before he will put your name forward.
What the buyer sees
A page called Products with twelve photographs, each with a name under it: "MS Pipes", "Fittings", "Custom Parts". Tapping a photograph enlarges it, or does nothing.
Where product pages do exist, they were often carried over from a template: the same paragraph on every page with only the product name changed.
What it costs you
An engineer approves a source on figures. With no figure to check, he either calls, which takes effort he may not spend, or moves to a supplier whose page states it.
Buyers search for the product they need, often with its size or grade: "C purlin 2 mm galvalume", "GI cable tray 300 mm". Google shows a page about that product. A photo grid is not one, so it cannot be shown, and an AI assistant has no statement of yours to quote.
What the buyer is asking at this point
"Do you make this exact product, in my size and grade?"
He is checkingWhether you are a maker of his item or a general supplier who might arrange it.
A good answerA page for the product, named the way he searches, with the size range, grades and standard in a table. "We make C and Z purlins from 1.0 to 3.0 mm, web depth 80 to 300 mm" settles it in one line.
"Which standards do you manufacture to?"
He is checkingWhether your product can be written into his specification without a deviation.
A good answerThe IS, ASTM, EN or customer standard named on each product page, with the grade, and a line on which standards you can test to in-house.
"Do you keep stock, or make to order?"
He is checkingWhether a small or urgent order can be met from stock.
A good answerWhich items are stocked, in which sizes, and which are made to order.
"What is your minimum order?"
He is checkingWhether his order is worth your while, and his.
A good answerMinimum order quantities stated where they exist, so small buyers and large ones both know where they stand.
"What warranty do you give?"
He is checkingWho carries the risk if the product fails.
A good answerThe warranty terms by product, in plain words, and how a claim is made.
All 62 questions industrial buyers ask, with good answers →
Check your own website in two minutes
- Pick your best-selling product. Is there a page about that product alone?
- Does that page carry at least one figure: a size, thickness, grade, standard or capacity?
- Type
site:yourwebsite.comfollowed by the product name into Google, using your own address. See which page comes up, if any.
What good looks like
- A page for each product or product family, named the way buyers search for it.
- A specification table taken from your own sheets: sizes, thicknesses, grades, the standard it meets (IS, ASTM or EN), finishes and lead time.
- The questions buyers ask about the product, answered on the same page.
- A route to a quote from the page, with the product already chosen. See the anatomy of a product page.
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 Before the Buyer Calls, a free guide to what industrial buyers check on a supplier's website.