An assistant does not scroll ten links — it names two or three. Where it takes those names from, what it actually sees on your site, and how to check in five minutes whether it sees anything at all.
Assistants read your site with their own bots, and they see only the text that sits in the page code.
If the text is drawn by a script, lives inside an image, or the page loads slowly — for an assistant that text does not exist.
You can check it yourself: open the page source and look for your own heading. If it is not there, the assistant will not find it either.
Until recently a person typed a query, got ten links and decided for themselves who to trust. Now part of that work is done for them: they ask «recommend someone who builds sites end to end» and get a short answer with two or three names. The list of ten disappears before anyone sees it.
For a business this changes the rules. You used to need the first page — now you need the paragraph. The difference is that far fewer companies fit into a paragraph, and a place there cannot be bought with ads.
Assistants do not invent names. They either rely on what they have read before, or they open sites at the moment of the question — with their own bots, which work like a search robot: they go to the address, take the page code, read the text.
The page code is the key part. An assistant does not look at your site with eyes: it sees neither the design, nor the animation, nor what appears after a click. It sees the text that sits in the code, and the structure that labels that text.
An assistant recommends not the best site, but the one it could read enough of to be sure it is not making a mistake.
The most common reason a site is empty for an assistant is text that is not in the code. That happens when the page is assembled by a script in the browser: a person sees the full text, the bot takes an almost empty shell. The second reason is text inside an image: a price written on a banner does not exist for a machine.
A note on robots.txt: this file is where you can accidentally close the door to assistant bots — a line added once «so they do not load the server» now means «we are not in the answers». It takes a minute to check and about as long to fix.
The set that works for search and for an assistant is the same one, and it is short.
| What | Why the assistant needs it | How to check |
|---|---|---|
| Text in the page code | It is the only thing it reads | Open the page source and find your own paragraph in it |
| Page title and description | That is how it names you in the answer | Look at the browser tab and at the card when you send the link |
| Services and prices as text | So there is something to quote | Find the price with a text search on the page, not by eye on a banner |
| Markup about the company | That is where the name, address and phone come from | Run the page through a structured data test |
| A fast page | A bot does not wait for a slow site | Measure the speed — it is free and takes a minute |
Do this on your own site right now — nothing to install.
There is no way to guarantee a place in an assistant’s answer, just as there is no way to buy first place in ordinary search results. Anyone promising a guarantee is promising something they do not control.
There is one thing you can control: that there is something to read about you and that reading it is easy. That is not a trick — it is ordinary technical tidiness, and it works for search and for people alike.
Every SKERRY site is built so that all the text sits in the page code up front rather than being drawn by a script in the browser. Services, prices and contacts are labelled with markup, and every page has its own title and description. This is not a separate service or an extra charge — every page in every package is built that way.
If you already have a site and want to know what is wrong with it from this angle, there is a review: a document and a twenty-minute video walkthrough for 6,000 UAH, and that sum counts towards the bill if you order the work afterwards.
An assistant will not fill in the gaps for you. It retells what it found on the page — so the cheapest way into the answer is to write that answer on your own site.