More facts, less fluff
If you're filling space on your website, don't be offended when nobody reads it. People scan for facts, and now AI does the scanning for them.
People never really read your website. They scan it for the one fact they need. Now they're asking AI to do the scanning for them, and AI is even less patient.
Fluff doesn't get found
AI search tools don't care how lovingly you described your "passionate team". (The jargon for getting found by them is GEO, generative engine optimisation. Plain English: being the answer AI gives.) They're hunting for facts: what you do, where, how much, how long, how high.
A page full of adjectives gives AI nothing to quote. A page full of facts gets quoted, and being quoted is how you get found.
Fluff used to be harmless. Now it costs you.
Then the facts have to match. Everywhere.
Here's the nerd bit. Mount Everest was remeasured in 2020 at 8,848.86 metres, or 29,032 feet. Before that, the official figure was 8,848 m, and plenty of sources used 8,850 m. Search today and you'll find all three, on websites, in brochures and in guidebooks.
In adventure travel, this is an everyday challenge. One mountain, three heights. One remote Himalayan village, three spellings. Across a website, an itinerary, a brochure and a booking email, the details drift.
Then there's metres and feet. A traveller in Sydney thinks in metres; one in Denver thinks in feet. To cover every market, every height needs both, and both have to match.
None of this is anyone's fault. It's simply more information than humans can keep on top of: thousands of products, each with heights, distances, spellings and dates, updated by different people at different times. Drift is inevitable.
A human reader shrugs. AI doesn't. When it finds facts that disagree, it can't be sure which one is right, so it trusts that source less and quotes someone else.
Why it matters for your business
You don't need Himalayan villages for this to bite. Opening hours on Google that differ from your website. A price on Facebook from last year. Your business name spelled two ways across your listings. Every mismatch is a small vote of no confidence.
Small businesses feel this more, not less. If your website has fewer than 20 pages and a couple of them disagree, that's not a good look to AI. With fewer pages to prove your authority, every fact has to pull its weight.
The fix starts with one simple idea: pick a single source of truth for every key fact, and make everything else match it. The tricky part is finding every place your facts live. It's almost always more places than you think, and the ones you've forgotten are the ones AI still reads.
The good news: I've spent years keeping facts straight across thousands of products, heights, spellings and all. Your business is a much smaller mountain to climb.
Fluff fills space. Facts get found.
Every idea here is mine, sorted with Claude's help. Nothing scraped, nothing auto-generated.