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What do Google and AI read on your site?

Your site has two kinds of visitors. Your customers look at a photo, a headline, a button. Crawlers don't look at anything. A crawler is a program that travels the web on behalf of Google or an AI tool. It receives the page's code, the hidden text that tells the browser what to display, and builds a summary of you from it.

Since July 22, 2026, Google answers on its own in France too, with AI Overviews and AI Mode. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity do the same. If your code doesn't say clearly what you do, they'll name someone else.

Let's take a made-up example: the website of a roofer in Lyon. Its code is full of tags, small labels that say what each piece of text is for.

The customer sees a photo and a promise. The crawler reads a trade, a town, services and a type of business. But before it can read anything, it has to get in.

First, the door has to be open

Every site can have a small public file, robots.txt, that tells crawlers where they're allowed to go. One extra line is enough to turn them away. Google reminds site owners that your hosting provider, or the service that protects your site, also has to let them through. None of this shows on screen.

These crawlers don't all do the same job. Some read your site to answer a question. Others collect pages to train an AI.

ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity also have a crawler that opens a page on demand, during a conversation. In short: let those through, along with the ones that read to answer. The ones that collect to train AI are your call.

On ChatGPT and Claude, you can refuse training and stay visible in answers. Blocking the wrong crawler is costly: on ChatGPT, a site that blocks OAI-SearchBot no longer appears in its search answers, except as a plain link. So blocking everything at once also takes you out of the answers. Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity each publish a list of their crawlers.

Google has added a separate setting. In Search Console, its free tool for site owners, open Settings, then Search generative AI. Include is the default. Exclude removes your site from these answers without touching the rest of your ranking. Unless you have a specific reason, leave it on Include.

The text has to be there from the start

Some sites send an almost empty page, then fill it at the last moment with JavaScript, a language that runs in the browser. Your customer sees no difference. A crawler may get an empty page.

Google can run that program as long as it isn't blocked, even if it takes more work. With AI tools, nothing is guaranteed. In a test published by RESONEO in January 2026, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini read only the text present from the start, while Copilot, Microsoft's AI, ran the program. The test only covers pages read on demand, during a conversation, so treat it as a warning, not a rule.

Google reads what your code says,not what your page shows

Five elements that say who you are

Five elements do most of the work. None of them guarantees a ranking.

The blue title on Google

Google picks it from several sources, and the title tag comes first on its list. Write one per page, with what you do and where. Avoid “Home” and piles of keywords. Our roofer says what and where in one line.

The page title

This is the big headline visitors read when they arrive, the h1 tag. Our roofer uses it to speak to customers: “Your roof fixed before the next rain.” The blue title, meanwhile, gives the trade and the town.

The text under the link

You suggest it. Google decides. It starts mainly from the page content, and uses your description if that describes the page better. Write one per page: what the customer will find there, in a few short sentences.

What the image describes

This is the alt text, written in the code and invisible on screen. For Google, it's the most important attribute for describing an image. It also helps screen readers, which read the page aloud for people with low vision. Describe what you see, without piling on keywords.

The business ID card

This is structured data: information organized for machines, invisible on screen. Our roofer states that it's a roofing business, with its address and phone number. Google writes that it isn't required for its AI answers, but recommends it because it makes a page eligible for rich results, listings that show more than a plain blue link. It has to match the visible text on the page.

In the RESONEO test, AI tools didn't read it when opening a page on demand. So also write your contact details, hours and service areas in plain text on the page.

Five well-written elements save machines from guessing.

What code won't do for you

Perfect tags on a thin page are useless. Google writes that unique, useful content will likely matter more, in the long run, than any other advice in its guide.

Write what only you can say: your real lead times, your service areas, what you refuse to do and why, the questions people ask you on the phone. And keep what matters in text: a price written on a photo is hard to read.

What happens beyond your site

Google and AI tools don't stop at your pages. Your Google Business Profile, not to be confused with the structured data in your code, carries your hours, phone number and reviews. It can make you more visible in Google's AI answers as well as its results. Keep the same hours, phone number and address there as on your site. The rest, what others say about you, is in SEO and GEO, the difference in plain English.

The check to run this week

All you need is your browser, on a computer.

Want a second pair of eyes? Our online analysis gives you a first look in a few minutes. The full audit is done by a person: your site page by page, with fixes ranked by priority.