How to write a page a machine can read
Your answer is on the page and the agent still says it cannot find it. That is almost always the page at fault rather than your words. Here is what quietly stops a page from being read, and the five minute check that finds it.
By The Cluable team
You wrote the answer. It is on your website. You can open the page right now and point at the sentence. And the agent still says it cannot find it.
This happens more often than you would think, and it is almost never because the answer is missing. It is because of how the page was built. A page has two readers now, the person and the software, and the person is far more forgiving. They can see that the bold blue text is a heading, that the number in the picture is the price, that the little card is clickable. Software gets none of that for free.
Here is what actually stops an answer from being read, in the order it tends to bite.
The answer has to be text
If a sentence lives inside an image, it does not exist. A screenshot of your pricing table, a nicely designed graphic of your returns process, a photograph of your opening hours on the door. All invisible.
A PDF has the same problem, for a duller reason. Our crawler asks for web pages and turns away anything that is not one, so a returns policy that only exists as a download is a returns policy nobody can quote. Worth fixing regardless of us, since a customer on a phone does not want to download a file to find out whether they can send a jumper back.
The same goes for the shape of the page. Text is read out of headings, paragraphs, lists, table cells and quotes. A sentence floating loose in a styled box, with no paragraph around it, gets skipped. If you write in a normal editor this is already handled and you never need to think about it. If somebody hand built the page, it is worth a look.
Very short lines fall through
This is the one that surprises people. Fragments under about twenty characters are dropped, because on a real website most of them are menu items, button labels and the word "Home" repeated forty times.
So a tidy little block with Returns as the heading and 30 days. underneath it does not survive. Two words and a fragment, both too short. The page looks complete to you and reads as empty to everything else.
Written as a sentence it survives easily: "We accept returns within 30 days of delivery, in original packaging." Same fact, whole thought, and better for the person reading it too.
Write the answer as a sentence, not as a label with a value sitting next to it.
If you take one thing from this post, take that one.
Your footer does not count
Every page on your site carries the same navigation, the same footer, the same sidebar. If those were read as content, every page would look identical and be mostly menu. So they are stripped out before anything is read.
The consequence catches nearly everybody. Your phone number, your opening hours, your free delivery threshold, the fact that you are based in Leeds. If those only appear in the footer, then no page on your site actually says them, and the honest answer to "where are you based" becomes "I could not find that".
Put the important facts in the body of a page as well. The footer is for finding things, not for stating them.
The page has to be linked
Links are followed by looking for real links. A card that navigates when you click it, built out of a box and some code, is not a link, and a page nobody links to is a page nobody reaches. If the only route to your shipping page is a newsletter you sent in March, it is invisible.
There is also a budget. We read up to twenty pages, starting from your homepage and working outward, and we go for the ones customers ask about first: help, FAQ, contact, pricing, shipping, returns, about, terms. That list is a genuine advantage if you use it. A page at /shipping is found early and confidently. The same page at /info/page-2 has to get lucky.
So give pages the obvious name, and link to them from somewhere a person would look. Both of those were good ideas anyway.
One page, one subject
The last one is less mechanical and more about clarity. A single page called "Information" that covers delivery, returns, sizing and the warranty is four answers wearing one coat. Ask it a question about sizing and you get a reply with delivery times mixed in.
Split them. Give each one a name that matches the question somebody would ask. You will find your own site easier to use afterwards, which is usually the sign that you did it right.
The five minute check
You do not need a tool for any of this. Open your most important help page, right click, choose View Page Source, and search that source for a sentence from your answer.
If it is there, we can read it. If it is not, no amount of clever software will find it, because it genuinely is not on the page. It is in an image, or behind a click, or in a file, or it was three words long.
None of this is really for us
Everything above is ordinary advice about publishing on the web. Text should be text, pages should be linked, headings should be headings. Search engines have wanted this for twenty years. Screen readers need it. The next person you hire will thank you for it.
We are just an unusually literal reader who tells you, immediately and out loud, when a page is not saying what you think it says. That feedback used to take months and arrive as a quiet drop in traffic.
If the wording of the answer is what you are stuck on rather than the plumbing, we wrote about that separately in the answer you have typed forty times. And if you are wondering where the line is on what we read at all, what Cluable is not allowed to see covers it.
