By Urban Gavelin, , AI Visibility & Website Strategy
My First Customer From ChatGPT Made Me Rebuild My Entire Website
Last week I wrote about the buyer who has already done the needs analysis before you walk into the room. This week I want to show the other side of the same coin. If the buyer's AI is doing the comparing, what does it see when it looks at you?
A Referral From an AI
I recently closed a deal that started with a referral from ChatGPT. The client had asked an AI service a question and got my name back in the answer. That felt good for about a minute.
Then it got uncomfortable. If ChatGPT could find me that time, how many times had it not? I had no idea what it was reading about me, or what it was missing entirely. My website had been written for people who already knew who I was.
So I rebuilt gavelin.net from the ground up. Today it is, first and foremost, a site for bots. It is the first time in my career that I have written for a reader who never drinks coffee at the morning meeting.
Writing for a Reader Who Never Drinks Coffee
In practice this means that every newsletter, including this one, automatically becomes an article in Swedish, English, and Spanish. Each article has clear headings, keywords, and a short FAQ at the bottom, with the questions a buyer actually asks and straight answers to them.
None of this is pretty to look at. All of it is easy for a machine to read.
How Humans and Machines Read Differently
A human and a machine read a website in completely different ways. The human skims, looks at the images, senses the tone, and decides within seconds whether you seem credible. The machine does not care about the images. It is looking for claims it can repeat: what you do, for whom, at what price, and with what result.
That is why the FAQ at the bottom of the articles does so much work. A question and an answer that sit together can be lifted out and quoted without the rest of the text. Most of what we have spent money on in web design over the years, the big images, the animations, the airy messaging, is invisible to that reader.
Why does it matter? Because the buyer's AI rewards what it can read and compare. What it cannot find does not count as neutral. It counts as uncertainty. A hidden price, a case study that is just a logo, a service described in fine words but no substance: all of it pushes you further down in the comparison, and you never find out why.
Five Things to Do Right Now
- Ask the question your customer would ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Copilot, without mentioning your company name. Which providers does it suggest? Are you on the list, and what does it say about you?
- Read your homepage as if you were a machine. Can you say in three sentences what you do, for whom, and roughly what it costs?
- Write down the five questions customers ask in a first meeting. Answer them on the website, in plain language.
- Turn one case study from a logo into a story: industry, problem, what you did, and what resulted.
- Publish your pricing level, or explain how the price is set. A 'contact us' reads as a question mark.
In August I wrote about the CRM, about how what is not written down does not exist for your own AI. This is the same thing from the other direction. Now it is the buyer's AI that is reading, and it only reads what you have published. A first meeting is increasingly booked only after a machine has already sorted out most of the alternatives. You cannot charm it. You can only be understandable.
Frequently asked questions
How did a referral from ChatGPT turn into an actual client?
A prospective customer asked an AI service for recommendations in their field, and the AI named Urban Gavelin in its answer. The customer followed up directly, which led to a real deal, prompting a closer look at how AI systems actually read and interpret the website.
What should a website FAQ include to be useful to an AI?
It should contain the exact questions buyers ask in a first meeting, paired with short, direct answers written in plain language. A question and answer that stand together can be extracted and quoted by an AI without needing the surrounding text for context.