I’ve measured more than a thousand local business websites. The average scores 46 out of 100 for AI readability. Nine in ten are failing — and most of your competitors don’t know it yet.
Twenty years ago, getting found meant ranking on a page of blue links. Now a growing share of your customers ask a question in plain language — in ChatGPT, in Perplexity, in the summary above Google’s results — and get back two or three recommendations instead of ten options.
To make a recommendation, an AI has to find you, understand what you do, and trust you’re a reasonable answer. Most local websites fail at the first step. Not because the business isn’t good. Because the site was built for people and nothing else.
That’s a translation problem, and it’s fixable.
Where do I stand?
An automated audit that reads your site the way ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews do, scores it across every signal that matters, and hands you the specific fixes — the literal schema block, the exact title to use. Free, and yours to act on whether you hire me or not.
What should my website say?
Most sites fail AI search because they don’t answer questions. The Content Engine turns what your customers actually ask on the phone into pages an AI can quote — written in your voice, structured so machines can lift them, published on a rhythm you can keep.
Where is my week going?
A workflow assessment for businesses that suspect they’re spending time on work that shouldn’t need a person anymore. I map what your team actually does in a week, find the five hours that AI can carry, and hand you the systems to do it. No software to buy.
Ride the Dirt Wave · A three-venue mountain bike race series on the Oregon Coast
The series standings recompute from the official timing sheet after every race — it’s a working system, not a brochure.
Before
After
The old site’s homepage title read “Home Page — Ride the Dirt Wave.” Not one of its twelve pages had a meta description, so Google wrote its own snippet out of the menu text. There was no Organization schema and no Event schema, which meant that a real, multi-venue race series across three Oregon counties gave an engine nothing it could cite when someone asked what mountain bike races run on the coast. The FAQ content existed — it just wasn’t marked up anywhere a machine would look.
The rebuild carries the whole race series in schema — the series, all three events, each venue as its own locatable place with real coordinates and a registration link. Eighteen question-led headings, alt text on ninety-seven per cent of images, and every page with a title written for the thing that page actually is.
The Newport Cafe · A long-running diner in Newport
Migrated off WordPress with the domain moved deliberately, after sign-off on a preview.
Before
After
The first thing the old site showed anyone was a pop-up covering its own headline.
Moved off WordPress entirely. The whole menu — two hundred and twenty-five items, checked line by line against the printed one — is now marked up so an engine can answer “what does the Newport Cafe serve for breakfast?” by quoting the actual menu rather than guessing.
The homepage answers the five things people phone up to ask: hours, where it is, whether there’s seafood, whether breakfast runs all day. Plain headings, plain answers, marked up so they can be lifted.
I published newspapers for twenty years. The job was not selling ads — it was understanding a business well enough to know what would actually help it, then saying so. Hardware stores, restaurants, clinics, charter operators, contractors. A few hundred of them, one conversation at a time.
That’s still the work. The tools changed.
What that means practically: I’ll tell you when you don’t need what I’m selling. The audit is free and complete because the diagnosis isn’t what’s valuable — doing the work is. And every fix I find is written out plainly enough that you could hand it to anyone.
They can’t, and I’d be careful with anyone who says otherwise. This all changed inside about two years, and the engines rewrite how they answer on their own schedule — some weeks the ground moves under something I wrote in the spring.
I learned what AI search actually was ninety days ago. Since then I’ve put about two hundred and fifty hours into working out how to detect it — what a machine can and can’t see on a page, and how to measure it the same way twice. That’s where the audit tool came from.
So instead of claiming expertise I do two things. I measure, before and after, so what changed is a number rather than my opinion. And I write down what I learn in plain language and give it away, which is a hard thing to keep faking.
Because it’s mine, and because it’s part of what you get.
I’ve spent years photographing this coast — for Travel Oregon, the Oregon Coast Aquarium, the Columbia River Maritime Museum, and galleries up and down the shoreline. Every website I build includes original photography of your actual business. Not stock. Not AI-generated. Your dining room at golden hour, your crew on the boat, your storefront on the one clear morning in February.
Search engines and AI reward real images with real descriptions. Customers reward them more.
Usually not. If your site renders properly and allows custom code — most Squarespace, WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow sites do — this is a fix to the site you already have, not a rebuild. The exception is a site that comes back empty to a crawler. That one can’t be patched from the inside, and I’ll tell you if that’s you.
Fixing findability on an existing site is $500. A full rebuild on my hosting, including original photography, is $2,000. Ongoing care and advisory is $125/month. The audit that tells you which one you need is free.
Search engines re-crawl within days. AI answers update on a lag nobody outside those companies fully understands. Expect weeks, not hours. Anyone promising faster is guessing.
No, but it’s where I know the ground best. Local means I can show up, shoot your place, and sit across a table from you — which matters more than people expect.
Then do it. The report hands you every fix in plain language. I’d rather you get found than get billed.
The report returns your score, what’s holding you back, and exactly what to change. No call required, no card, nothing to install — and it’s yours whether you hire me or not.
