Every hiring manager knows the truth about résumés: nobody reads them. They’re skimmed — six seconds, eyes jumping to titles, dates, and concrete achievements, everything else evaporating. Your website now faces the same reader. AI systems don’t savor your prose; they skim for keepable facts, extract what’s concrete, and discard the rest. Understanding what survives the skim — and what evaporates — is the most practical writing lesson a business owner can absorb this year.
What Evaporates
Start with the discard pile, because most small business websites are built almost entirely from it. Superlatives without substance: “best-in-class service,” “unmatched quality,” “your trusted partner” — unverifiable, unextractable, gone. Mission-statement fog: paragraphs about passion and commitment that could describe any business in any industry carry no distinguishing information, and machines are distinguishing engines. Clever headlines that require context to decode. Stock phrases so common across the web they carry zero signal. If a sentence could sit unchanged on a competitor’s site, the machine learns nothing about you from it.
What Gets Kept
Now the keep pile — the résumé lines that survive. Concrete nouns: the specific services, brands, materials, neighborhoods, and problem types you handle. Numbers: years in business, response times, price ranges, quantities — machines treasure numbers because numbers are unambiguous. Named credentials: licenses, certifications, affiliations, attached to named humans. Direct answers: complete responses to real questions, self-contained enough to lift whole — the format AI answers preferentially extract. And structured facts: the Schema.org layer that hands over your particulars with no skimming required at all.
Rewriting for the Six-Second Machine
The rewrite discipline is subtraction plus substitution. Take any page and strike every sentence that would survive on a competitor’s site unchanged — what remains is your actual signal, usually two sentences drowning in twelve. Then substitute: for each struck superlative, one verifiable specific. “Unmatched expertise” becomes “licensed for commercial refrigeration since 2009.” “Serving the community” becomes the four neighborhoods you actually serve, named. The page gets shorter and denser, which suits both readers — the human skimmer and the machine one.
The Uncomfortable Test
Paste any page of yours into an AI assistant and ask: “List every specific, verifiable fact about this business in this text.” The list’s length is your page’s keepable content. Most owners discover their proudest pages yield three bullet points. That’s not a writing failure; it’s an inheritance from an era when websites performed for humans only. The era ended. The rewrite is overdue.
A useful rule for every future page you publish: before it goes live, count its keepable facts. Under five, and the page is décor. Ten or more, and you’ve written something both readers — human and machine — can actually use.
Performing that rewrite across a whole digital presence — keeping the brand’s warmth while packing the résumé lines machines retain — is LeadSupport.net’s daily craft. We audit what your site currently yields to the skim, rebuild pages fact-forward, and verify the machines are keeping more of you. The skimmers are already reading. Contact LeadSupport.net, and let’s give them something worth keeping.