Is my old website going to have a detrimental effect on whether my business gets mentioned in AI conversations?

If you haven’t thought about this yet, now is the time

The short answer is yes, but you knew that, really.

Key takeaway: It’s time to decide whether your old website is good enough for the future of search. Websites built several years ago, especially those built on page builders like Elementor or WP Bakery, are not built for AI crawlers.

Page builders pump out endless inline CSS, extra HTML classes and other clutter. AI bots have to sift through all of that just to get to your actual content.

AI search is expensive for the companies that provide it. This means AI bots don’t get anywhere near the crawl budget that a standard Google bot used to get. They need to reach your data fast and understand what you do and who you do it for, fast. If that information sits buried under layers of code, the bots won’t find it. You won’t get mentioned. It’s that simple.

• Is your website too old for AI search.
• Google search and AI search play by different rules.
• AI search costs more and crawls less.
• What AI bots actually want from your content.
• Get your website ready now.

Is your website too old for AI search?

If your website runs on a page builder, it needs rebuilding.

You might think I’m bound to say that, since it’s how I make my living. I’m just being honest. Slow sites with a bulky DOM don’t get found in AI search. In around 12 months, most people won’t use Google the way we use it now. Searches will move to direct conversations with AI tools.

Google search and AI search play by different rules.

Traditional SEO ran on a set of factors: the content on your page, your internal link structure, backlinks to your website and so on. In traditional search, there was a position one. Rank number one on Google and you got clicks to your website. Whether those clicks turned into leads depended on your content and your site. That’s not how the future of search works.

Google search is deterministic. It has positions one through ten. Get your website into one of those positions and you can usually hold it and reap the rewards. AI search is non-deterministic. Every time someone asks an AI tool a similar question, it’s like asking a different person each time.

There is no number one position. This is also why the new tools promising to monitor your brand mentions in AI don’t hold up. They can show you where you sat the moment they ran the query. Thirty seconds later, you might be mentioned first, or not mentioned at all.

That constant shift makes answer engine optimisation hard to benchmark. The results change by the minute, not by the month.

AI search costs more and crawls less.

Every Google search costs Google money. Adverts offset some of that, but it still costs money. AI-based searches cost roughly ten times more than a standard Google search, according to Alphabet chairman John Hennessy in an interview with Reuters.

AI crawler traffic has grown fast too. Search Engine Land reports that AI crawler traffic jumped 96% in a year, with GPTBot’s share of that traffic rising from 5% to 30%. Most AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript either. If your site relies on client-side rendering, that content is invisible to them before crawl budget even comes into it.

That cost changes how AI bots behave:

• AI bots have far less time to crawl your website during a live search. They move through it fast.
• Some AI tools say they’re searching the web when they’re actually searching their own cache, which can be up to six months old. Change the H1 tag on your homepage, then ask ChatGPT what your H1 tag says. It will likely give you the old version, despite claiming it searched live.
• AI tools want to give the answer they’re most confident in. They don’t want to be wrong. This means they lean on information they can cite if challenged. Any ambiguity on your website and you get passed over.

What AI bots actually want from your content.

AI tools are cautious about inference. If your website implies you do something you don’t actually do, because someone in marketing thought it sounded good, that’s a problem.

This includes claiming you’re the best at something when you haven’t won an award for it, or listing a service you don’t actually offer because it might pull in search traffic. AI tools won’t reward that. You won’t get mentioned. Worse, if the AI does check and finds the claim doesn’t stack up, it associates your brand with the gap, not the ambition.

What AI tools want is the opposite: clear, specific, checkable statements. Who you are, what you do, who you do it for and what makes that true. State it plainly and back it up. Vague, aspirational copy written to “sound impressive” is exactly the kind of content AI passes over.

Get your website ready now.

None of this is a reason to panic. It’s a reason to look at your website with fresh eyes. Strip out the page builder bloat, tighten your HTML, make your claims specific and make sure an AI bot can find and trust what you do in the time it’s willing to give you.

The businesses that fix this now will be the ones still getting mentioned in a year’s time. The ones that don’t will keep wondering why they’ve dropped off the map, in a search landscape that no longer has a map to drop off.

If you want a second opinion on whether your website is ready for AI search, get in touch with Searchworthy and we’ll tell you straight.