Symptoms you may be seeing
- 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
A consultant has your datasheet open on one side of the screen and your product page on the other. He is preparing a list of approved makes for a client.
What the buyer sees
A product page that gives 0.45 mm where the datasheet says 0.5 mm. A grade that was discontinued two years ago. A paragraph about one product that mentions the coating of another, because it was copied across and not every word was changed.
This rarely comes from carelessness. Websites are usually written once, from an old brochure, by someone outside the company, and then edited here and there over the years without anyone reading the whole site against the current sheets.
What it costs you
An engineer who finds two figures for one property does not know which is current. He either asks, which slows the approval, or quietly prefers a supplier whose documents agree.
AI assistants take facts from your website as written. A wrong figure on your page can become a wrong figure in their answer, under your name.
What the buyer is asking at this point
"What material and coating do you use, and from which source?"
He is checkingWhether the raw material meets his project's approved list.
A good answerThe material grades and, where relevant, the mills or approved sources you buy from, with a note that mill test certificates go with each dispatch if they do.
"Is the figure on your website the same as on your datasheet?"
He is checkingUsually not asked aloud. He compares, and decides quietly.
A good answerFigures on the page and in the downloadable datasheet that come from the same sheet and agree, with the datasheet dated.
All 62 questions industrial buyers ask, with good answers →
Check your own website in two minutes
- Take the current specification sheet for three of your main products.
- Compare every figure on each product page with the sheet, line by line: sizes, thickness, grade, standard, coating, tolerance.
- Do the same for any PDF the website offers for download. It may be older than the page.
- Read each product description in full and note any sentence that belongs to a different product.
What good looks like
- Each product page carries a specification table copied from the current sheet, never retyped from memory.
- Every downloadable datasheet carries a date or an edition number.
- One person in the company, often the quality head, owns the figures and approves changes to them.
- When a sheet changes, the page changes the same week.
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.