Three Claims We Narrowed on Our /ai Page Before AI Search Could Quote Them
AI answer engines don't paraphrase. They quote. If ChatGPT or Perplexity surfaces your page in response to a local search, they pull your exact sentences and hand them to the prospect. That means every claim on your landing page is now a statement you're making on the sales call, in advance, without context.
We ran our /ai page through what we call a quote-back test: read each claim and ask, if a prospect repeated this sentence to us verbatim at the start of a call, could we confirm it? Three things didn't survive.
"Built workflows for businesses doing $500k to $20M a year"
This was in the founder bio section. The intent was to signal range. The problem: $20M was the ceiling of one project, not representative of what we typically work with. Most of our clients are in the $500k to $5M range, which is exactly what the sentence should have said.
The fix was straightforward: change $20M to $5M. But the reason matters more than the fix. If a prospect reads "$20M" and pictures a team with enterprise tooling and a headcount to match, we're setting up a misalignment before the call starts. The accurate number is also the more honest positioning. We work with smaller service businesses. That's the offer. The copy should say so.
"SLA-backed support response"
This was in the phase four description, describing the optional monthly retainer. "SLA-backed" implies a formal service level agreement with defined response times and penalties for missing them. We don't have one. We respond promptly and take maintenance seriously, but there's no signed SLA document.
The fix: "Priority support response." That's accurate. Retainer clients go to the front of the queue. But we're not making a contractual commitment we haven't written.
The distinction feels small until a prospect cites it. "Your page says SLA-backed, so what's the response window in the SLA?" is a question we'd have to walk back. "Priority support" is something we can confirm without producing a document that doesn't exist.
"What your engine did today" with a live date
The hero section had a ticker of sample automations with a label that read "what your engine did today" and a dynamic date rendered via new Date(). The intent was to make the section feel live. The problem: the ticker content is static JSX. The date would read "Jun 23" for a prospect visiting in late July. "Today" and a date from four weeks ago next to a list that hasn't changed is worse than no date at all.
We changed the label to "what your engine handles in a day" and replaced the date with "sample activity." Now the section reads as illustrative, which is what it is. Visitors understand they're looking at representative examples. The live-date framing suggested a real-time feed that we weren't actually running.
The pattern
All three changes follow the same logic: the original copy was technically related to true things but framed in a way that implied more than we could back up. Revenue ceiling instead of typical range. SLA language for a priority-queue system. "Today" for a static list.
None of these were lies. They were approximations that would create friction if a prospect took them literally, and AI search makes literal quoting the default behavior.
The quote-back test is simple: imagine a prospect opening the call with the exact sentence from your page. If your first response would be "well, what I meant was," the sentence needs to change before the page goes live.