AI search, plainly
When your own site gives an AI two different answers
A contradiction is worse than a missing fact, because a missing fact is only absent once.
We found this by accident while scanning a car rental site: the homepage advertised one day rate, and the
page summary two clicks away described a different one. Nothing was broken. Both pages loaded, both ranked,
a human could read either and be satisfied.
An assistant, reading both, has to pick one — and it picks whichever chunk matched the question more
strongly, not whichever is correct.
Why it happens to careful people
- Growth by addition. A new price on a new page; the old page nobody wanted to delete.
- Multiple templates. A service page, a location page and a menu page each restating the
same facts in slightly different words.
- Copy-pasted seasonality. "Open until 10pm" left in the footer after the hours changed.
- Translations. An English page updated, an Arabic page left behind.
None of these is carelessness. They are what a site looks like after a few years of ordinary edits.
What a model does with two answers
Retrieval selects chunks by fit to the question, one at a time. Two conflicting chunks do not cancel out
or trigger a warning; they compete. The result is a coin flip that varies with how the question was phrased —
which is why two people asking about the same business in the same week can get different prices, different
hours, or different phone numbers, and neither is told the site disagreed with itself.
The four facts that go wrong
- Price. Any figure stated in more than one place, especially ranges and "from" pricing.
- Hours. Especially in footers, which are the most-copied block on most sites.
- Contact. Two numbers, one retired; an email on one page and a form on another.
- The name itself. Trading name, legal name and legacy brand spelled three ways — the
single fastest way to become unresolvable as an entity.
The fix is boring and it works
- Choose one page as the source of truth for each fact, and link to it from everywhere else instead of
restating it.
- State those facts once in structured data, so the machine-readable version cannot drift from the copy.
- Put the same hours, phone and address in one shared block — footer or schema — not hand-typed per page.
- After any price change, search your own site for the old number. It is almost always still there.
Which is why we built the scanner to check facts across pages, not just one page. A
single-page audit cannot see a contradiction; by definition it is looking at only half of it.
Start with what your site says right now
The free scan reads your pages the way a crawler does and grades the six things that decide whether you
get recommended — including whether your facts hold together.
