A while back I was going through a company’s website with a list of copy changes their compliance people had written up. Standard stuff. Some claims on the site were older than the facts behind them, a few were stronger than anyone could back up, and the job was to swap the wording for something accurate.
It was a good list. Someone had clearly gone through the site page by page.
The problem was that fixing all of those pages would not have fixed the problem.
Most websites built in the last few years quietly publish a second version of themselves. There is the site people read, and then there is a set of machine-readable files that AI tools and search engines read instead. Structured data, usually. And increasingly a file called llms.txt, which is meant to give AI assistants a plain summary of what a business is and what its pages cover.
Here is the part almost nobody knows. On a lot of sites, those files are generated automatically, and the thing they are generated from is your page titles and meta descriptions. Not your body copy. The title tag. The one-line description that shows up in search results.
So you can rewrite every paragraph on every page, sign it off, publish it, and the summary that ChatGPT or Google’s AI reads can still be quoting the old claim word for word. It was built from a field you never touched.
Why this is worth ten minutes of your time
If you have ever changed how you describe your business, this probably applies to you.
Say you used to advertise “same day service” and you stopped, because you could not always honor it. You take it off the homepage. You take it out of the service pages. Good.
If your page title still reads “Same Day Service | Your Company” then your structured data almost certainly still says it, your llms.txt summary almost certainly still says it, and an AI assistant asked “who does same day service near me” may still be handing you out as the answer. You will get the call. You will have to explain that you do not do that anymore.
The same thing happens with prices you no longer charge, service areas you no longer cover, certifications that lapsed, and awards from a decade ago.
None of it is malicious. It is a plumbing problem. The tool did exactly what it was configured to do, and the configuration is older than your copy.
How to check your own site in about five minutes
You do not need a developer for this, and you do not need to hire us.
Type your own domain into your browser with /llms.txt on the end. So yourcompany.com/llms.txt. If you get a page of plain text, read the first few lines. That is what a lot of AI tools are being handed as the summary of your business. Ask yourself whether you would say it out loud on a sales call today.
Then look at the very top of your browser tab on your homepage. That short line is your page title. Compare it to what your homepage actually says now. If those two disagree, the machine layer is following the title, not the page.
If nothing loads at that address, that is worth knowing too, though it is a different conversation than this one.
What to do about it
If the two versions disagree, the fix is usually small and it usually lives in the same place: the page titles and meta descriptions your SEO plugin is reading from. Correct those and most sites regenerate the rest on their own. That is genuinely most of the work.
It is worth doing in the same pass as any copy change rather than later, because the whole point of a copy change is that the old version stops circulating.
We publish an llms.txt on this site. You are welcome to go read it and see whether it matches what we say we do. That is sort of the test.
If you want a second set of eyes on yours, I am happy to look and tell you what I find, whether or not it turns into work. My email is on the contact page.