Does Your Website Tell the Truth?

Here is an uncomfortable question. If a machine read every single page you have ever published, every old PDF, every forgotten landing page, every page description nobody has touched since the rebrand, would it all agree?

For almost every company I have ever looked at, the answer is no.

And machines are reading all of it.

Hi! I am Bob Michaels, and this is Evolving the Web. Every two weeks I talk through the essays I just published on my blog, in plain language, as one connected story. This episode, the story is about truth. Specifically, whether your website is telling one.

Start with what your website actually is, because it is not what you think it is.

You think of your website as the pages you look at. The homepage, the services page, the about page. The stuff you keep current.

But your website, the way a machine sees it, is a pile of claims. Claims made in different years, by different people, for different reasons. The brochure PDF from four years ago that says you serve small businesses. The page description from before the rebrand that still uses the old company name. The old case study with a client you no longer mention. Pages no menu links to anymore, but which are still there, still public, still indexed.

Search engines crawl all of it. AI systems crawl all of it. And when two of your pages disagree about what you do, you do not get to pick which one the machine believes. You have handed that choice to the machine.

So the first essay is about what I call the truth audit. You inventory every public claim your web presence makes. Who is it about, who was it written for, what does it say, when was it written, and does anything else you publish contradict it. Every contradiction gets a decision, on the record. This one is true, that one gets fixed or removed.

Here is the part that matters if you are about to spend money on a redesign. Do the truth audit first. A redesign without one just repaints the confusion. It makes the disagreeing claims prettier.

The second essay is about what happens when you move.

Companies redo their websites all the time. New platform, new structure, new addresses for every page. And in the process, they casually destroy something they cannot see. Machines have spent years reading their old pages. Citing them. Linking to them. Every one of those old addresses is a little pile of earned trust.

Think of it like moving houses and not filing a forwarding address. The mail does not follow you. It just stops.

The fix is not complicated, it is just discipline. Before you move, list every address you have. Decide for each one, does it live on, does it merge into another page, or does it retire. For everything that moves, set up a permanent forward from the old address to exactly one new one. Then, after launch, actually check. Request every old address and verify it lands where it should.

Nobody can promise you a move with zero loss, and anyone who guarantees it is selling something. But the difference between a careful migration and a careless one is the difference between forwarding your mail and burning it.

The third essay asks what machine readable actually means, because the phrase gets thrown around a lot and it is simpler than it sounds.

Your website has a second audience. Crawlers, models, and agents. They never see your design. They read the code underneath, the descriptions, the structured facts, the files that say what is on this site.

And here is the punchline of the whole essay. The pass condition is not more markup, more files, more technical tricks. The pass condition is agreement. Every surface, human facing and machine facing, telling the same story. Same company name, same claims, same facts, everywhere.

There are new machine facing files you can publish, little descriptions of your site aimed at AI systems. Worth doing, and I do it. But publish them as bets, not as magic. Google has said plainly that no special file is required for its AI features. What is proven is the boring layer underneath. Content a machine can actually reach, saying one consistent thing.

Consistency is cheap to say and expensive to fake. That is exactly why it works.

The fourth essay is about accessibility, and I want to connect it to everything I just said, because it is the same idea wearing different clothes.

Accessibility means your site works for people who read it differently. Someone using a screen reader. Someone navigating by keyboard. And the new AI interfaces, the chat windows streaming answers word by word, break this in fresh ways. Text appears with no announcement. Status changes silently. A screen reader user sits there hearing nothing while the answer streams in.

The rules for this already exist, and for public sector work in the United States they now come with real dates and real deadlines. But forget compliance for a second.

The whole episode has been about one discipline. Build your site so that every reader, whatever they use to read it, gets the same true story. A screen reader is another reader. An AI crawler is another reader. If your site only works for one kind of visitor, looking at one kind of screen, it was never really finished.

So the two week arc in one breath.

Your web presence is a pile of claims, and machines read all of it, so audit it and make it agree. When you move, forward every address or lose what the machines learned. Machine readable means every surface telling one story. And accessible means every reader gets that story, no matter how they read.

One discipline, four essays. Tell the truth, everywhere, to everyone.

All four essays are on the blog at bobmichaels dot ai with the full checklists, and the episode page links each one.

If you suspect your own site would fail the audit, that is a fixable problem, and finding out is cheap. This is the work I do for companies, as a consultant or fractionally, a slice of my week for as long as you need it.

Thanks for listening. Go open the oldest PDF on your website and read what it claims about you. I will bet you find a surprise.