The Price Was on the Page

My price was on my website four times.

It was in the copy on the consulting page. It was in the one page description of the audit. It was in the plain text file I wrote specifically so that machines could read my business. Four separate places, stated plainly, in a sentence a ten year old could parse.

A machine could not read a single one of them.

I found this out a few days ago, looking at my own structured data, which is the part of a website written for software rather than for people. Mine described who I am, what I know about, where I work, what I have published. It did not contain a number. There was no field saying this thing costs this much in this currency, because I had never put one there, because nobody had ever told me the sentence was not enough.

The page said three thousand five hundred dollars. The machine saw a page that mentioned consulting.

The part that should have been obvious

I went looking further and found something worse.

The page on my site for the one thing I actually sell, the audit, the product with a price and a scope and a delivery date, had no structured data at all. Not incomplete. None.

Every essay had it. The research pages had it. The page that takes money had nothing.

I know exactly how that happened, because it is the same way the specials board ends up with last Tuesday's fish on it. The pages I fussed over were the ones I thought of as work. The page that sells was finished months ago, in my head, and finished things do not get checked.

What this is actually about

There is a category of consultant appearing right now who will make your restaurant visible to AI. I am about to become one of them, which is why I want to be precise about what the work is and is not before I take anyone's money for it.

Here is the honest version.

There are two separate problems and the industry is selling one while implying the other.

Legibility is whether a machine can extract what it needs about you: that you are a wine bar rather than a bakery, that you are open Tuesday, that a booking happens here, that the thing costs this much. This is fixable. It is mostly a week of unglamorous work. Most restaurants have never had it done, because whoever built the site used a template and nobody has looked since.

Authority is whether the machine mentions you at all. That is a slow problem made of other people writing about you, and no one can shortcut it honestly.

Fixing the first does not buy you the second. It removes the reasons to leave you out and corrects the things being said wrongly about you. That is worth real money and it is not the same as being recommended.

Anyone selling you the first while letting you believe you bought the second is selling weather.

I have the receipts on myself, including the bad ones

In August I ran a three question test on my own consulting business. Does a machine know I exist, does it get me right, does it know what makes me worth choosing.

I failed all three, and published that.

Invisible for every query a buyer would actually type. The file I had written for machines mentioned the thing I sell zero times, because I wrote it before I had a business to sell and nothing was checking it. And the identity the machines retrieved confidently was a restaurant I opened and that closed years ago, described in the present tense.

So I fixed it. Rewrote the machine file, corrected the identity, added the disambiguation, and, this week, finally put the price where software can see it.

Now the uncomfortable half.

My site has gone from seven pages to fifty in two months. Everything above is fixed. My average position in search has not moved at all. It sits where it sat in August, on the fourth page, exactly where it was before any of this.

Three measurements now, the same result each time. The legibility work worked. The authority problem underneath it did not budge, because that is not what legibility does.

I could leave that number out of this essay. It is my own website and nobody audits me. I am including it because a person selling this work who will not show you their own flat line is not showing you the thing you most need to see.

The one detail I am proudest of

When I finally encoded the price, I had a small choice.

The simple version is a flat number: three thousand five hundred. The page actually says from three thousand five hundred, for a single venue, scaled for bigger groups.

So I encoded it as a minimum rather than a price. It took four extra lines.

It matters because of who reads it. A person seeing a flat number in a summary will click through and find the nuance. An agent comparing three consultants for somebody will not. It will take the number, put it in a table, and move on, and the nuance will simply never exist.

Counting is not choosing, and the number you publish is the number that travels. When your reader is software, a rounded truth is just an error you chose.

What I would tell an operator to do tonight

Nothing that requires hiring anyone.

Ask two different machines for a good restaurant in your category, in your area. Phrase it the way a guest would. Read what comes back.

Three outcomes. You are not mentioned, which is an authority problem and slow. You are mentioned and something is wrong, which is the worst one and the most fixable, because it is actively sending people away in your name. Or you are mentioned and described as a place that serves food, which means you will lose to any room the machine can describe better.

Then look at who it did name, and what it credited them with. That last part is the one I find operators cannot stop thinking about, because it is the first time anyone has shown them the shortlist they are being left off.

The thing I keep landing on

I wrote recently that knowing a risk precisely is not a control, because naming a problem produces the feeling of having addressed it and none of the addressing.

This is the same shape, one layer down. My price was known. It was written. It was true, and repeated, and correct.

It was on the page four times, and structurally it was not there at all.

Most of what a business believes it has communicated is like that. Stated somewhere, in prose, to a reader who no longer exists.