What the machine saw when we let it loose on the internet

This month we built a tool that reads websites the way Google and AI do. Then we pointed it at real businesses and let it work. Dozens of sites. Roofers, dentists, plumbers, law firms, vets. Small companies that run the world and never think twice about their website code.

We learned things. Some useful. Some genuinely funny. Here are the highlights, in plain English.

The internet's most common secret: your title tag

Every website has a title — the words on the browser tab and in Google results. It's the first thing a search engine reads. You'd think it would be important. And yet, of the sites we checked, a shocking number had titles that were too long, missing, or so vague the machine had no idea what the business did. We saw a dentist whose title just said the name of the town. A roofer whose title was a full paragraph that Google quietly cut off mid-sentence. It's like walking into a shop with no sign and hoping people guess.

The empty promise of the "contact" page

Almost every business knows they need a contact page. Far fewer know it needs to contain a working email address. One site we checked had, as its official contact email, the words: user@domain.com. Not a placeholder the developer forgot. The actual published email. We double-checked. It was real. Somewhere out there, a business is waiting for enquiries from a mailbox that doesn't exist.

The machine gets blocked more than you'd think

A surprising number of websites accidentally lock the door on the very visitors who might recommend them. Their robots.txt — the digital doorman — says no entry to AI crawlers. The business doesn't know it. They'd never block Google on purpose. But somewhere in a config file, one wrong line, and ChatGPT can't read them, Claude can't read them, and when someone asks an AI "who's a good plumber in my area," that business is invisible.

The good news: most of it is fixable in an afternoon

These aren't deep, expensive problems. They're small, visible, human-sized fixes. A shorter title. A real email. A line of code. The kind of thing a careful person could do over coffee.

Here's the human truth behind all of it: most business owners aren't careless. They just never knew. Nobody sat them down and said "your title is what Google reads first." They built a website, it looked beautiful, and they moved on to running their actual business.

That's what we're for. Not to make people feel bad about their website — the internet would be a much sadder place if that was the point. We're here because small things, fixed early, change everything. And because every business deserves to be found.

Want to see what the machine says about your site? It's free, it takes ninety seconds, and unlike some reviewers, it'll be honest with you. That's the deal.

Want to know how your own website measures up?

Run the free Website QA — ninety seconds, no signup, honest results. Or ask Sage on the bottom-right of any page.