Industries › print shops
AI visibility for print shops and packaging suppliers
Two print and packaging suppliers sit in our twelve-site cohort. They are the clearest example in the programme of a business that exists commercially and barely exists to a machine.
Client names are withheld. Not publishing client names without written permission is a declared gap on our own fact sheet, and these pages are not an exception to it. Every number below is from MARKETING_NOTES_AGENT_VISIBILITY.md, with its note number.
what we found
What agents got wrong in this trade
Asked by name, models mostly did not know them
With no tools and no hints, models produced the correct website 2 times in 6 for one of them and 1 time in 6 for the other, at mean confidence 0.27 and 0.13 (Note 27). Across the whole cohort only 1 answer in 72 was confidently wrong — this is absence, not invention. A machine that has never heard of you cannot be argued with.
Price was unavailable, as it was almost everywhere
Across sixty-four cold agent visits to the twelve sites, 89% could not state a price for what the business sells (Note 27). Print is a trade where the honest answer is “it depends on the specification” — which is fine, and which is still an answer you have to write down.
One page, then a verdict
57 of 64 visits read a single page and stopped (Note 27). For a print shop that means the homepage decides whether the buyer hears about your turnaround, your minimums and your file requirements, however good the quoting page is.
the questions
The questions a buyer in this trade asks an assistant
These are the answers that belong in the bytes of your homepage, because an agent reads one page and answers from it — 57 of 64 cold visits across twelve sites read a single page and stopped (Note 27). Whatever is not on that page does not exist, however good the page four clicks down is.
- What is the minimum order, and does the unit price move with quantity?
- What is the turnaround, and what does a rush job cost?
- What file formats and bleed do you require, and do you fix files that arrive wrong?
- Do you proof before printing, and is a physical proof available?
- What stocks, sizes and finishes are actually in stock rather than theoretically available?
- Do you ship, and where does the shipping cost land?
“It depends on the specification” is a legitimate answer and we will publish it, with the two or three variables that drive the number. What we will not do is invent a price you have never quoted.
what we do about it
The fix, and what it is measured to do
You answer those questions once, in a profile a named person signs off. Eight surfaces are generated from that one file — the homepage fact block, a where-to-go index, a machine-readable fact sheet, an identity card, robots.txt pointers, structured data, and a tamper-evident version history — so no two surfaces can contradict each other. Three of five audited sites contradicted themselves before we started (Notes 28, 33).
Measured, on a controlled run: 78% of fact checks recovered with the block in place against 30% without it, and agents stopped after 1.1 pages on average (Note 41). On a live client site, two facts that had been unrecoverable went to full recovery and the two we deliberately left out stayed unrecovered, with no halo effect (Note 30).
Sources: MARKETING_NOTES_AGENT_VISIBILITY.md, Notes 27, 28, 30, 33, 41. Your site is not one of these sites: if the facts you are missing turn out to be already recovered at ceiling, we will tell you that and you should not buy the package.
other trades
Where else we have measured
Three pages, because three is how many of these trades sit in our own measurement cohort. When we have measured another, there will be a fourth page.
free audit
See what AI sees on your site
Your trade's version of this is a measurement, not an opinion. The free tier runs one model against your homepage and tells you what it could not find.
One model fetches your homepage and answers buyer questions from it. You get the recovery score and the specific answers it could not find. That is the whole free tier: it shows you the problem, and the fix package is not included.