Put on your website what a competent stranger would need in writing before they could describe your business accurately: who you are, which situations you handle, what you will not take on, where you work, who does the work, and the reasoning behind the advice you give. An assistant answering a buyer's question is doing that job from the outside, with no phone call available to it.
Picture the week somebody covers your desk. Not a rival, just a capable professional who has never met your clients. You would write things down for them. Which callers to take and which to refer out, what the common jobs cost, how you handle the situation that walks in every March. That page of notes is the most useful document your business has never published.
Your website was written for a different reader. It was built to make a good impression on a human being who is already interested in you. A brochure is written to be admired. A briefing is written to be used.
None of that is a verdict on your writing. Your site is probably pleasant to read and thin in exactly the places a stranger would need it thick. This guide covers the pages worth having, what a service page has to actually say, the part only you can write, structured data in plain terms, and the popular additions that change nothing.
The Test That Decides What Goes on the Page
Every decision about your site gets easier once you know what the machine is trying to do with it. It is not grading your work. It is trying to build a short, accurate description of you that it can hand to somebody who is about to act on it. That is a describing job.
As we put it at Probably Genius: AI can't feel your reputation in a room. It can only work with what it can verify. The room is where you earned the reputation. The page is where a machine reads it.
So run the covering-your-desk test on any paragraph before you write it. Would a stranger be able to use this sentence to answer a caller correctly? Take a line most professional sites carry somewhere: comprehensive family law services tailored to your needs. A stranger cannot answer a single phone call with that. Now take the version underneath it: we handle contested custody where one parent has moved interstate, and we do not take collaborative divorce. That sentence sends the right caller in and the wrong caller elsewhere, which is precisely what a recommendation has to do.
Four things have to be legible before any of the rest matters. Who you are as one identifiable business, consistently, everywhere a machine looks, which is the work we call Entity Identity and explained in plain English in the guide for non-technical owners. Which situations you handle. Where you are allowed to handle them. And who does the work, by name and credential.
What Each Page Has to Answer
Most firms do not need more pages. They need each existing page to answer one question completely instead of five questions vaguely. Here is the working architecture, in the order worth fixing it.
- Home: what you do, for whom, and where, in the first screen and in plain words. This is the page where a machine confirms it is looking at the right business at all.
- About: the entity page. Legal name, founding year, locations, the people with their credentials, licenses and admissions, and links out to the profiles that confirm all of it. This is the page a verification step lands on.
- One page per real service: not one page per keyword. If two pages would say nearly the same thing, they should be one page saying it properly.
- Buyer questions, answered in your own words: the qualification and comparison questions you answer on the phone every week, written the way you say them.
- Location pages only where there is a location: a real office, real people, real jurisdiction, real local facts. Without them, the page starts to look like what Google's spam policies describe as doorway abuse.
The About page repays attention first, because it is cheap to fix and everything downstream leans on it. Names and dates and license numbers are unglamorous, and they are the difference between a business a machine can confirm exists and a website that gives it nothing to check. If the same details are already scattered across your directory listings and profiles, make them agree word for word before you write anything new. Agreement is cheaper than volume.
What a Service Page Has to Actually Say
This is where most sites lose the answer, so it deserves a specification rather than an adjective. A service page is doing its job when a stranger can read it once and correctly route a caller. Six statements get you there.
- The situation, not the category. Name the circumstance the buyer is actually in. Estate administration where the executor lives out of state beats estate services.
- What is included, in what order. The steps, the sequence, the artifacts they end up holding.
- Who it is not for. A stated boundary makes every other claim on the page more believable, and it keeps the wrong matches out of your calendar.
- Where you are allowed to work. States, jurisdictions, admissions, service radius. Say it explicitly, because it cannot be inferred from your address.
- Who does the work. The named person, with their credential, linked to their bio.
- What it costs, or how cost is decided. A range, a fixed fee, an hourly rate, or an honest description of what moves the number. Buyers ask this early and many sites answer it last.
Two habits make those statements easy to lift. Answer the page's question in its first two sentences rather than building to it, and let the length follow the content. Google's people-first guidance asks directly whether you are writing to a particular word count because you heard Google has a preferred one, and answers its own question: "No, we don't."
The Part Only You Can Write
Everything above is admin, and it is the price of entry rather than the reason anyone gets recommended. The reason is the judgment, and judgment is the thing most experts leave off the site because it feels too obvious to write down.
Google's current guidance for its generative features is unusually direct about this. It tells you not to "just recycle what others on the internet have already said, or could easily be produced by a generative AI model," and draws the line between commodity content "based on common knowledge" and content that "provides unique expert or experienced takes that go beyond common knowledge." Its people-first documentation asks whether a page demonstrates "first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge." The generic version of your field's advice is already in wide circulation. Yours is not.
The practical source is your own calendar. The questions you answered three times last month, the decision you talk clients out of, the thing that goes wrong in this kind of matter when nobody catches it early. Write the reasoning and not only the recommendation, because the reasoning is the part that is hardest to copy and the part a model has no other route to. If your best material is confidential, write the pattern rather than the client: the situation type, the choice, and why you made it.
This is also the part that stays stuck longest, because it lives in conversation rather than on paper. Two companion pieces go deeper than a checklist can: the expertise locked in your head, and why nothing gets cited until somebody claims it. Modesty reads as absence on a page.
Structured Data, in Plain Terms
Structured data is a set of labels in the page code that tells a machine which words are the business name, which is the address, which is the phone number and which person holds which credential. It does not make a claim true. It makes a true claim easy to file.
Two pieces cover almost every professional firm. Organization markup describes the business, and Google is specific about where it goes: "We recommend placing this information on your home page, or a single page that describes your organization, for example the about us page. You don't need to include it on every page of your site." Google says it can "help Google better understand your organization's administrative details and disambiguate your organization in search results," which is the entity problem stated in Google's own words. The fields that matter are the plain ones: name, logo, url, address, contactPoint, and sameAs pointing at the profiles that confirm you elsewhere.
If you have a physical location, add LocalBusiness markup too. Google's documentation asks for name and address as the required properties, tells you to "define each local business location as a LocalBusiness type," and to "use the most specific LocalBusiness sub-type possible." One office, one entry, one subtype that actually describes you.
Now the boundary, because this is where budgets get wasted. Google states plainly that "structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add," recommending it instead because it helps with rich result eligibility on Search. Correct markup has never guaranteed a rich result either. So treat structured data as filing, not as strategy. Get it right once, keep it matching what the page actually says, and put the rest of the effort into the pages themselves.
What Not to Bother With
An entire product category has grown up around the anxiety this topic produces. Five popular items have published evidence against them, or no evidence at all. Most of that published evidence is Google's, and Google speaks only for Google. It is also the only engine documenting any of this in detail, while the advice it contradicts tends to get sold as universal.
- Special AI files. Google's guidance on its generative features says llms.txt and similar files neither help nor harm visibility there. That is Google speaking about Google, and the sorting rule for this whole genre of advice sits in the guide to getting recommended.
- FAQPage markup bought as a visibility tactic. Google had already limited FAQ rich results to government and health sites back in 2023, and on May 8, 2026 it announced that "this feature will no longer appear in Google Search results starting May 7, 2026," removing the documentation the following month. The markup does no harm and the FAQ is still worth writing. It just is not buying you a result.
- Service pages multiplied by city names. Google defines scaled content abuse as "when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users," and doorway abuse as pages built to catch similar queries that lead somewhere less useful. A local page with no local facts in it is drifting toward exactly that description. How local answers actually get assembled is the better read before you build any of them.
- Chopping your pages into machine-sized fragments. Google's own answer: "There's no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it."
- Rewriting the same page with different keywords. It was thin when there was one of it.
What deserves the reclaimed budget is unglamorous and it compounds. Get the identity right once. Say what you actually handle and for whom. Put your reasoning on the record where it can be quoted. Then work on the surfaces you do not own, because everything on your own domain is still you talking about you.
Want to Learn More?
Probably Genius builds the public record around expert-led businesses so buyers and machines can both check it. It starts with a conversation that gets your expertise out of your head, and becomes 12 done-for-you thought-leadership articles every month, planned to produce approximately 60 clear Knowledge Entries, each scored 0 to 100 through the Integrity Gate, where nothing publishes under 80. If your website reads beautifully and still cannot brief a stranger, you have a writing job rather than a reputation problem. You're probably a genius at what you do. We make sure AI gets the memo.