MACHINE 404 / The three names

Why ChatGPT does not recommend your business

Somebody asks an assistant for a supplier in your city. It answers with three names. Not a list of ten links, not a page of results: three names, and a sentence about each. Being the fourth is the same as not existing, and nothing on your site tells you it happened.

An assistant does not browse, it parses

A person lands on your homepage, sees a photograph, reads a headline, understands within two seconds what you sell. None of that reaches a language model. What reaches it is the text and the structured data behind the page, usually fetched without running a single line of your JavaScript.

So the question is not whether your site looks professional. It is whether the facts a model needs in order to name you exist in a form it can lift: who you are, what you sell, where you operate, what it costs, and how somebody reaches you.

The four things it looks for, and the one that decides

Identity first: a machine-readable statement that this company exists, with a name, a contact point and profiles it can cross-check. Then the offer: what you sell, with a price and an availability, as data rather than as a sentence. Then answers: the questions a customer asks, written where they can be quoted back. Then access: whether the crawler was allowed in at all, and whether it found a real page or a shell.

The offer is the one that decides, and it is the one almost everybody fails. A price that lives inside a paragraph, or inside an image, is invisible. A shopping agent comparing three suppliers reads two prices and one silence, and silence loses.

We ran this on our own four sites first

Before selling it. The site with the strongest search performance of the four, over a hundred thousand impressions a quarter, scored 30 out of 100 on the machine read. It ranks for a human and says almost nothing to a model. That gap is the entire product, and we found it in our own work before we found it in anybody else's.

There is no guarantee available here, from anybody, that a model will name you. Nobody controls ranking inside a model and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. What can be guaranteed is the data and a measured score, before and after.

Three things you can check yourself, today

Open your homepage and view the source. Search it for application/ld+json. If there is nothing, no machine has been told who you are. Then invent a page that does not exist, yoursite.gr/this-is-not-a-page, and look at what comes back: if it is anything other than a 404 you have a soft 404 and every guess a crawler makes looks real to it.

Then look at a price on your site and ask one question: is that number inside an image, inside a PDF, or inside a sentence? All three are invisible. And none of this needs us: the checks are published in full, and a competent developer can fix most of them in an afternoon. What you are buying, if you buy anything, is the afternoon and the measurement.