A prospect described their evaluation process to me last month. They pasted four vendor websites, the pricing pages, and a handful of review-site extracts into an assistant and asked which best fitted their situation and what the risks were. Then they read the summary and booked two demos. Your marketing now has a second reader, and it doesn't read the way a person does.
What this reader is good and bad at
It's excellent at extracting specific, stated facts and comparing them across vendors — pricing model, integrations, deployment options, stated limitations. It's poor at inferring anything you've implied, and it has no reaction whatsoever to your visual design, your animation, or the tone you spent three months developing. Everything you left implicit for a human to intuit is simply absent from its summary.
The practical implications for your site
State things plainly, in text, on the page. If your pricing model is only comprehensible after a call, the summary will say pricing is unclear, and unclear compares badly against a competitor who published a number. If you never state which company sizes you serve, you'll be described as unclear on that too. Vagueness that a human buyer would have resolved by asking now becomes a permanent negative in a comparison table.
- Say who you're for and who you're not for, explicitly, in text
- Publish the pricing model even if you withhold the number
- State integrations, limits and deployment options as facts, not as reassurance
- Put the answer in words — text in an image or a video is invisible to this reader
Don't write for the machine at the cost of the human
There's an emerging temptation to structure everything for extraction, and it produces cold, listy pages that fail the human reader who arrives afterwards. The two audiences aren't actually in conflict — clarity, specificity and stated facts serve both. What the machine reader punishes is vagueness, which was never doing anything for your human buyers either. Treat it as an argument for clarity rather than a new format.
Go and read your own summary
Do what your buyers are doing. Paste your site and three competitors into an assistant with a realistic buyer prompt and read the output. It's an uncomfortable and extremely efficient positioning audit. In every instance I've run this for a client, the summary has surfaced at least one thing the company believed it communicated clearly and demonstrably does not.
You've spent years optimising for a human skimming for eight seconds. There's now a second reader that reads everything and infers nothing, and it's writing the shortlist.
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