What Google Reads on Your Website, and How to See It Yourself

Google does not look at your website. It reads it. Every page you have is, to Google, a page of text with a few labels attached, and everything it will ever say about your business comes from that text.

That is good news for a local business, because text is cheap and you already know the facts. It is bad news for a site where the facts live inside photos, menus, and buttons. Here is what Google reads, what it skips, and three ways to check your own site in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Google reads your site as text, top to bottom

When Google visits a page it takes the words, in the order they appear, and notes which words are the page title, which are headings, and which are links. That is the page, as far as Google is concerned. The photo of your storefront is a file with a name and a one-line description. The layout is instructions it follows once and forgets.

This is why a plain page with the facts in words beats a beautiful page with the facts in pictures. Google is not judging taste. It is matching words to searches.

The words Google weighs most

Some text on a page counts for more than the rest. In rough order:

• The page title. The line in the browser tab. For a service page it should name the service and the place: "Hot Towel Shave in Coconut Grove".
• The main heading. The big line at the top of the page. It should say the same thing in plain words.
• The first paragraph. What this page is, where, and for whom.
• The rest of the body text. Prices, what is included, how long it takes, how to book.
• Link text. "Book a hot towel shave" tells Google what is on the other end. "Click here" tells it nothing.
• Photo descriptions. The short line attached to each photo, called alt text. Google reads that line, not the photo.

If your title says "Home", your heading says "Welcome", and your first paragraph says "We are passionate about quality", Google has read three lines and learned nothing about what you do or where you do it.

What Google cannot read, or reads late

• Text inside images. The hours on a photo of your door sign. A price list you photographed. A flyer uploaded as a picture. To Google those are pictures, and pictures have no hours in them.
• A menu or price list as a PDF. Google can open a PDF, but it treats it as a separate document, not as part of your services page. The page itself still reads as empty.
• Anything that arrives after the page loads. Reviews pulled in by a widget, a services list added by a script, hours fetched from a booking system. Google can run that code, but it does so later and not always, so the safe assumption is that it is not there. Reviews on your page as words count every time. Reviews that arrive by widget are a maybe.
• Text that only appears when tapped. Accordions, tabs, and "read more" buttons. Google says it reads what is behind them. It still pays to keep the facts a customer needs in plain view, because a customer does not tap either.

Test one: try to select the text

On your phone, open your own website. Press and hold on your hours. Press and hold on a price. Press and hold on a review.

If the words highlight, they are text, and Google can read them. If the whole picture selects, or nothing happens, it is an image, and to a machine it says nothing.

Do this on the homepage, one service page, and the contact page. Most sites fail on hours, because the hours were a photo of the sign someone took on launch day.

Test two: switch on reader mode

Most phone browsers have a reader button, usually near the address bar, that strips a page down to its words and pictures. That view is close to what Google works from.

Turn it on and read your homepage top to bottom. Three things to look for:

1. Does the first line say what you do and where? If the first thing in reader view is "Welcome" or a photo caption, that is what Google read first too.
2. Is anything missing? A service you offer that is not in the words. A neighborhood you serve that appears nowhere. Hours that vanished because they were an image.
3. Does it read like your business? Reader view is unforgiving. Filler stands out, and so do gaps.

Here is what a services page looks like when every fact is text. Every service and every price on the page as words, so a search for any one of them has somewhere to land:

Test three: ask Google what it saw

Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that shows how Google sees your site. If you have it set up, the URL Inspection tool at the top lets you paste in any page and see whether Google has visited it, when, and a copy of what it read. If that copy is missing your hours or your services, so is Google.

If you do not have Search Console, search Google for site: followed by your web address, with no space between them. The results are your pages as Google has them. Fewer pages than you expected, or a homepage titled "Home", is your answer.

Google retired the old "cached page" link in 2024, so that trick no longer works. These two do.

What to fix, in order

1. Hours, phone, and address as text, matching your Google listing to the letter. A mismatch costs you with every system that reads both.
2. A title and a heading on every page that name the thing and the place.
3. Services and prices as words on the page, not a photo of a menu and not only inside a booking widget.
4. Reviews quoted as text.
5. A description on every photo that says what is in it: "barber chair at Grove Batu, Coconut Grove", not "IMG_4471".

None of that needs a designer. It needs the facts, typed.

The same text feeds AI answers

Chat bots like ChatGPT and Google's own AI answers read the way Google's crawler does, with less patience for anything that needs a script to appear. What they say about you comes from what they could read. No one can promise you a spot in those answers, and we do not. What you control is whether the words are there to find. Google Maps and AI answers is what that looks like when a site is built that way from the start.

See your site written as text

Type your business name at 30secondsites.com and see the site built from your Google listing, with every fact as words a machine can read. Looking is free. No card, no login, no email until you want to keep it.