What it is
In plain words, before anything else.
There are two halves to this. Contact details in a form a machine can read, meaning your address, phone and email stated as facts rather than drawn into a header image. And a way to act, meaning a booking or enquiry route software can follow.
Most small business sites have neither in a usable form, and many have a booking widget that a machine can see but cannot understand, because nothing on the page says what it is.
What it costs you
The loss you never see happen.
Assistants are increasingly asked to do the thing, not just to find it. Book me a haircut Thursday. The business that can be booked wins, and the runner up is not told it was close.
The half measure hurts too. A booking system with nothing describing it reads as an unlabelled box, and software does not click unlabelled boxes on somebody's behalf.
Check it yourself
Do not take our word for it. Look.
This takes about a minute, costs nothing, and needs no account with us or anybody else. A finding you have confirmed with your own eyes is the only kind worth acting on.
- 1
View the source of your contact page and search for your phone number as digits.
- 2
If it is not there, it is inside an image, and no machine has read it.
- 3
Search the same source for telephone or ContactPoint. Those words appearing means the number is labelled as a phone number rather than sitting loose.
- 4
If you use a booking system, check whether your site says anywhere, in text, what it is and what it books.
What we found
Out of 186 businesses we checked ourselves.
- 122 of 186
gave a machine no way to contact or book at all. Another fifty eight had part of it, usually a booking widget with nothing describing it.
Counted from our own checks of 186 real businesses, measured on 2026-09-10, one count per business. No business is named and none of their reports is public. The full write ups are in what we found.
How we fix it
What we do, and what we leave alone.
We publish your contact details in the structured form assistants read, and describe your existing booking system so software knows what it is looking at. You keep the booking system you already pay for.
Nothing on your page moves. This is a layer under it, not a replacement for it.
Next
The checks closest to this one.
- L3
Your hours and services, in a form a machine understands
A hidden block on the page that states your address, your hours and what you sell as facts, not as words on a picture. - L6
A direct line an assistant can use to ask your business a question
Reading a website is guessing. An interface is asking, and getting an answer that is not a guess. - P2
The assistant got as far as your checkout and stopped
Finding you was the easy part. Finishing the purchase is where almost every business loses the machine.
Is this one open on your site?
The free check runs all sixteen against your own address and tells you which came back clean, in the same plain words as this page.
Free. No signup. Takes about a minute.