> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.signal-lock.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Why can't AI assistants read my website?
- URL: https://www.signal-lock.com/why-cant-ai-assistants-read-my-website/
- Published: 2026-09-02T20:45:54.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-02T20:45:54.000Z
- Author: Adam

Because some websites only exist once your browser has done some work, and many of the things that read the web on behalf of AI assistants do not do that work.

Here is a real case. In July 2026 I measured a martial arts academy in Zürich. A good site: clear schedule, prices, five membership options, a beginner message repeated three times on the homepage. To a person in a browser it was complete.

I then fetched the same homepage the way a simple crawler would, without running any of the page's code. It returned 955 bytes: the page title and one line of description. About 150 characters of readable text. None of the classes, none of the schedule, none of the prices. Everything a person could see was being drawn in by JavaScript after the page loaded, and a reader that does not run JavaScript never saw any of it.

The assistants' answers matched. With web search switched off, none of the four assistants named the academy in any of 180 answers. With search switched on they named it sometimes, when what they found elsewhere, directories, reviews, a map listing, gave them enough to go on. The site itself was contributing almost nothing.

One caution on what this shows. Which assistants run JavaScript when they fetch a page is not something I measured. What I can say is that the page served 955 bytes to a reader without it, and the answers behaved as if the site were empty.

The fix was unglamorous. The site was rebuilt so that the content is present in the page as delivered, before any code runs. The same homepage now returns about 70,000 bytes of readable text to the same simple fetch. The sitemap went from 2 addresses to 22\. A human visitor sees the same design as before.

The owner reports enquiries rising from roughly 10 a month to roughly 40 in the weeks that followed. I give that as his figure rather than mine: several things changed at once, including directory listings, and I have not yet re-measured the assistants' answers. That re-measurement is the next step, and it will be published here whichever way it goes.

How to check your own site in a minute. Open your homepage in Chrome. Press Ctrl+U (Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) to view the source. Search the page for your own words: a service name, a price, your opening hours. If your content is there in plain text, you do not have this problem. If the source is a few short lines and your words are nowhere in it, you do.