An AI-ready website answers, in plain text, the basic questions anyone would ask about a business: who it is, what it offers, what it knows, what it can prove, why it can be trusted and whether the information is current. Search engines and AI assistants can only describe you accurately if those answers exist somewhere they can read, and the most reliable place is your own site. A press release can add evidence and reach, but it cannot fill gaps your website leaves open.
Why start with your own website?
When someone asks an assistant about your company, or about the kind of service you provide, the system looks for pages that answer the question. Your website is the one place where you decide exactly what those pages say. Directories, reviews, articles and releases all help, but they describe you from the outside and often in passing.
If your site does not say where you operate, when you were founded or what you actually sell, other pages have to fill in the blanks, and they may be out of date or wrong. The post on consistent company information covers keeping those outside pages in line. This post covers what your own site needs to say first.
The six areas and the questions to answer
Go through each list and check that a stranger could find the answer on your site within a minute, in text, without guessing.
Identity
- What is the business called?
- Does it have another trading name, or a former name?
- What type of business is it?
- When was it founded, and by whom?
- Where is it headquartered?
Offering
- What products does it sell and what services does it provide?
- Who are they for?
- Where are they available?
- What makes them materially different from the alternatives?
Expertise
- Which subjects does the company know unusually well?
- Who inside the company has that expertise?
- What experience supports it?
Evidence
- What data has the company collected?
- What outcomes can it show?
- What examples or case studies can it point to?
- What method supports its findings?
Trust
- Is the business registered or regulated where that applies?
- Does it hold relevant certifications?
- Are its contact details easy to find?
- Are its people named and identifiable?
- Are its claims backed by sources?
- Do independent sources confirm the important facts?
Freshness
- When was each important page published?
- When was it last updated?
- Is it still accurate?
Where does each answer belong?
Most of these answers have a natural home. This is a starting map, not a rule.
| Area | Where it usually lives |
|---|---|
| Identity | About page, footer, contact page, Organization structured data |
| Offering | Product and service pages, location pages, pricing |
| Expertise | Team and leadership pages, guides, explainers, FAQs |
| Evidence | Research pages, case studies, reports, methodology notes |
| Trust | About page, contact page, licence or registration numbers, links to independent coverage |
| Freshness | Visible publication and update dates on every page that states facts |
What does a good answer look like?
Plain and specific. Compare two About page openings for a fictional business.
Northwind Clinics puts people first, delivering care that makes a difference.
Northwind Clinics Ltd is a physiotherapy provider founded in Leeds in 2017 by Dr Sam Okafor. It runs two clinics in Leeds and offers home rehabilitation visits across West Yorkshire for adults recovering from surgery or injury.
The first could describe thousands of businesses. The second answers five of the identity and offering questions in two sentences. Sentences like the second name the business, its category, place, founder and audience outright, which is what search engines and assistants need to tell it apart from others.
Evidence works the same way. "Trusted by patients across the region" answers nothing. A case study page that says how many rehabilitation visits the clinic completed last year, according to its own records, and explains how that figure was counted, answers an evidence question directly.
Why can a press release not fix this?
A release is a short, dated account of one piece of news. It can confirm that something happened, put your name and description on many pages, and point readers to a first-party source page. It cannot turn a vague website into a clear one.
If a release says Northwind Clinics offers home rehabilitation across West Yorkshire, and a reader or an assistant follows the link to a site that mentions neither, the release has raised a question the site does not answer. Worse, if the site says something different, you now have two versions of the facts.
The order that works is the reverse: make the website answer the questions, then publish news that adds to that record. Each release then reinforces facts that are already visible and verifiable, rather than standing alone.
What about technical access?
Answers only count if they can be read. Pages need to be crawlable, indexable and in text. Google states that its AI features need no special schema or AI file, and that the usual SEO basics apply, including keeping important content in text and keeping Business Profile information up to date. The post on whether your site is readable by AI has the full technical checklist.
What this standard does not promise
Meeting it will not guarantee rankings, citations or recommendations from any search engine or AI assistant. Those systems decide independently what to show. What it does is remove the most common reason a legitimate business is described vaguely or wrongly: the facts were never clearly published in the first place.
Frequently asked questions
How long does this take for a small business?
For most small businesses, a focused day. Much of it is rewriting the About page, adding dates to key pages and making sure contact details and services are stated plainly. Evidence pages take longer, because they depend on having data or examples to publish.
Do I need every answer before publishing a release?
No, but identity and offering should be clear first, because every release will point readers back to them. Expertise and evidence can grow over time, and research releases are a strong way to add to them.
Where should I start if the site is thin?
Start with identity. Write one plain paragraph that says who you are, what you do, where and for whom, put it at the top of your About page and use the same facts in your release boilerplate.
Where the series began
This post closes a series that started with a simple question: what a press release is actually for. The answer there, a chain from a clearly defined business through expertise, evidence and corroboration to retrieval and citation, starts with exactly what this post covers. If you are coming to the series from the end, that is the place to read next.
media:on Editorial. Written and reviewed by the media:on editorial team, who edit every release before it files.