Record PLay: what an assistant can read, and what it cannot check

The title is the sentence used to name your page everywhere it appears. Without one, whatever is quoting you invents a name for it.

This is the block that states the business itself: name, address, phone, area served, licence. Without it, who the company is has to be inferred from the prose rather than read from a field.

Pages missing from the sitemap lean on links and other discovery signals instead, yours and other people's. They are the ones most likely to be missed.

Two pages with the same title look like the same page. Anything choosing between them has nothing to choose on.

The meta description is often the sentence quoted about the page. Without one, the quoting engine takes whatever text it finds first, which is frequently a menu.

Those pages are reachable only by knowing the address. Anything that finds pages by following links never reaches them, so work already paid for is not doing anything.

A description repeated across pages describes none of them.

The canonical tag is where you say which address is the real one. Without it a search engine picks one itself, and the same page reached two ways can end up counted twice.

Open Graph tags are how you choose the title, description and image shown when one of your addresses is shared. Without them, whatever is quoting the page chooses for you.

The H1 is the page's own statement of what it is. None leaves it unstated, several leave it ambiguous.

A page with almost no words has little to answer with, so it is rarely the thing that gets quoted.

The pages without it are the ones least likely to be quoted correctly.

llms.txt is a short plain-English summary of what the business is and what it sells, written for assistants. It is not yet a standard and nobody should promise results from it, but it costs one file and it is the one place you get to state the business in your own words.

Very short titles carry no information, very long ones get cut mid-phrase.

Headings are how a machine works out which parts of a page belong to which. Skipping levels leaves that hierarchy less clear than it could be.

Alt text is what an image says to a screen reader and to anything reading the page as text. Missing, the image says nothing.

Service, FAQ and Person blocks are how the specific things you do, the questions you answer and the people who do the work become readable rather than inferred.

Some sites send an almost empty page and then draw the content with code once it is open in a browser. People see a full page. An assistant that only reads what was sent sees the empty one.

An assistant can check what a business says about itself against a listing somebody else controls. A site that links none of them gives it nothing to check against.

Structured data is the machine-readable version of facts already on the page. Without it those facts have to be guessed from prose, and guessing is where a business gets described as something it is not.

A single generic form means every enquiry arrives without saying what it is about, so the first reply is a question the visitor already answered by clicking.

A rating on your own website is a claim, not evidence. What makes it evidence is a link to the place the reviews live, where a stranger can count them.

Where a name, address, phone or list of services differs between a website and its profiles, the difference is what gets noticed, and it makes every other claim look less certain.