Most homepages do four things at once: explain who you are, sell your services, demonstrate credibility, and route visitors deeper into the site. From a brand perspective, that is fine. From a large language model’s perspective, it is a mess.
Why LLMs ignore homepages
When a model like ChatGPT is asked a buyer question, it is not looking for a brand statement. It is looking for a clear, citable, answer-first paragraph that addresses the question directly. Homepages almost never contain that paragraph. They contain hero copy designed to convert, not to inform.
The pages that get cited tend to share three traits: they answer one question, they answer it in the first paragraph, and they support that answer with structure that is easy to extract — definitions, examples, and clear sub-headings.
The fix is not about your homepage
The fix is to build the supporting layer that homepages cannot. Specifically: a topical authority cluster of pages that each answer one buyer question with the citation-friendly structure described above. Your homepage continues to do its conversion job. The cluster does the citation job.
What to do this week
- List the ten questions your buyer asks before they decide to buy.
- Check whether you have a dedicated page for each one. Most brands have two or three at most.
- For each missing page, draft an answer-first 800 to 1,200 word piece that defines the term, gives a concrete example, and links back to the relevant service or product page.
That is the unglamorous core of AI SEO: not optimising your homepage, but building the supporting layer that makes you citable.