When someone asks AI about your services, who answers? | News

Summary

• Google and AI tools now answer questions about your services, often before anyone visits your website
• Wrong answers rarely come back as complaints. They come back as calls, wasted journeys and people giving up
• One menu label change lifted clicks by over 1,000%
• Most of the fix is in how your pages are written, not in code
• Five checks you can run this week

In the week before our webinar, Zach Jones searched for a handful of NHS trusts and housing associations the way their patients and residents would: the organisation's name, followed by a question. How do I cancel my appointment? How do I report a repair?

The answers were good. They were accurate, consistent and there in seconds.

What stood out was where each organisation's own website sat. The answer was at the top of the page, written by Google's AI. The website it came from was a small link underneath. Someone could read the answer, get what they needed and close the tab without ever visiting.

The website had done its job. Nobody had visited it, and the user completed their task without ever clicking on the site.

Zach took NHS and housing teams through what the future holds when people stop using websites and rely only on AI answers. This article covers what he shared and how to prepare for what's to come.

A quiet website can mean it's working, or that it isn't

Most organisations judge their website by visits. That made sense when every search ended with a click. Now the answer often comes first, from Google's AI summary or a tool like ChatGPT or Copilot, built from what it reads on your pages.

"Your website's not just somewhere people visit," Zach said. "It's what Google and AI tools read to answer on your behalf."

So when visits fall, the numbers alone can't tell you whether people are getting the right answer without clicking, or the wrong one and giving up. The only way to know is to look at what people are being told, and whether they get things done.

Showing up in those answers is often called answer engine optimisation, or AEO. It doesn't replace search engine optimisation (SEO). AI tools rely on the same things search engines do: pages they can find, read and trust.

Four AI tools gave four different answers to one question

To show how unpredictable those answers can be, Zach ran a small test. He asked Google, Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT the same question: what is the most surprising statistic about AEO?

He got four different statistics. Google and Gemini were measuring the same thing and still didn't agree. When he traced the sources, three came from marketing blogs and only one from independent research.

"I'm not showing you these because they're true," he told the webinar. "I'm showing you because they're all different."

Now imagine the question isn't about AEO. It's a patient asking how to cancel an appointment, or a resident asking how to report a repair. Each tool picks its own sources, and sometimes it won't pick yours. No one can promise you'll be the answer every time. What you can do is make your organisation the clearest and most consistent source on its own services, so the odds are on your side.

Nobody rings to say the answer was wrong

Here's the uncomfortable answer: in most cases, you wouldn't.

AI repeats old information with confidence. If a phone number has changed but an old page is still live, AI may find the old page and give that number to everyone who asks.

If the answer is buried in a PDF, a long policy or more than three clicks deep, AI often can't use it. It looks elsewhere: a forum, a directory or another organisation's page.

And nobody tells you. "No one's going to ring you up and say Google gave me the wrong phone number," Zach said. They ring the wrong number, turn up at the wrong place or give up.

Each of those lands somewhere else in your organisation. In the Q&A, VerseOne's Jamie Harper asked attendees to picture where: people who can't find or trust the information turn up at the contact centre or the A&E waiting room instead, the queues build, and some end up with medical or service problems as a result.

The word nobody understood

The most common cause Zach sees isn't technical. It's language.

Nobody searches for "outpatient booking policy" or "responsive repairs procedure". They search for "cancel my appointment" and "report a repair". When page titles use internal language, search engines and AI struggle to match the question to the right page.

One VerseOne customer, a housing association, couldn't work out why residents kept calling and emailing to report antisocial behaviour when the page for it sat in the website's main menu. Almost nobody clicked it. The menu item said "ASB". Residents knew what antisocial behaviour was. They didn't know what ASB meant.

The team changed the label to "Antisocial behaviour". Click-through went up by over 1,000%.

Every organisation has its own version of ASB. In a hospital, it might be a clinic or department name that makes sense to staff and to nobody else.

Most of the fix is in the writing, not the code

Some of this work is technical. Most of it comes down to how pages are written, titled and kept up to date, which puts it in the hands of the people who already write and run your services.

If you write or edit the website

Use the words people use, starting with page titles and menu labels.

Give each task its own page. If parking, visiting and getting here share one long page, people and AI both struggle to find the part they need.

Put the answer on the page, not in a PDF, wherever you can.

Lead with the action. Many pages open with a paragraph about the team's commitment to the service. Keep a short intro if it helps, but "To cancel or change your appointment, call this number or use the online form" shouldn't sit nine paragraphs down.

Give every key page a named owner and a review date, so someone is always checking it's still true.

If you run the contact centre

You already know the questions people ask most, which makes your team the best test of what AI is telling them.

You're also best placed to spot details that don't match. If the website shows one phone number or address and Google shows another, AI has to guess. If it guesses wrong, someone turns up 50 miles from where they should be.

If you look after the technical side

Under the content is a layer nobody sees from the page. Zach pointed to the four problems he finds most often: pages search engines can't see, pages that load slowly on phones, old pages competing with newer versions of themselves, and not knowing what people search for to find you. Duplicate pages are the quickest win: remove the older version so there's one source of truth.

Google Search Console, a free tool, shows much of this. Asked in the Q&A where to start, Zach said to check whether your pages are being indexed at all. "You'll be asking why is this page not showing up, or why is AI not citing it. And Google might not even be indexing it."

What no one can promise you

Zach was clear about the limits. All of this is general advice, and what sits beneath the surface is different for every site. No change guarantees that AI will use your page. And the five checks below are a starting line, not a finish. "If you do all five, don't assume your AEO is perfect and done," he said.

Five checks you can run this week

1. Ask AI your top five questions. Put the questions patients or residents ask most into Google, ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot. Not sure which five? Ask your contact centre. A wrong or missing answer means AI is reading an old page, or someone else's.
2. Search your own site. Type site: followed by your web address and a topic such as parking or repairs. Several pages on the same thing means old pages are competing with new ones.
3. Read your page titles as a patient or resident would. Rename any that use internal language.
4. Check your details match. Phone numbers, opening hours, email addresses and locations should be the same on your website, your Google listing and any directories.
5. Find out who has access to Google Search Console. If nobody knows, that's your first fix.

Finding gaps is normal. It tells you where to start.

The answer comes first now

For many patients and residents, the first thing they read about your services isn't your website. It's an answer built from it. The organisations that come through that well won't be the ones with the most visits. They'll be the ones whose pages use their patients' and residents' words, answer one question clearly and stay true.

Want to know what AI is telling your patients and residents?

In a free 20-minute consultation, Zach and the VerseOne team will look at what search and AI say about your organisation, show you where the gaps are and give you the two or three things to fix first.

Book your free consultation →