Because some pages are built in the visitor's browser after they arrive. A person sees the full page. Most AI tools read the page as it arrives, before anything is built, and get an empty shell. They don't say so; they answer from someone else's page instead.
What a person sees, and what an AI tool gets
Take a made-up council tool that answers "Do I need a building consent for a deck?". It asks a few questions and gives an answer. Here's the same page, twice:
What a person sees
Do I need a consent for my deck? Most decks under 1.5 metres high don't. Answer three questions to check yours.
The text appears once the browser has run the page's scripts.
What an AI tool gets
Deck checker. Skip to content.
The page as it arrives: a title, a link, and instructions for building the rest.
Asked about decks, the AI tool can't use the council's answer, so it quotes a builder's blog, another council or what it remembers. The tool built to give the official answer is the one source it can't read.
How common it is
Most government pages are fine. They're published as ordinary pages, with the text in the page from the start. In October 2026 I checked the home pages of two dozen national agency and council sites the way an AI tool reads them. Three came back almost empty: one home page was just the site's name and "Skip to content".
The pages most at risk are the useful ones:
- Tools and finders. Eligibility checkers, fee calculators, "what can I get", "do I need a consent", "find your bin day".
- Sites built as an app. The whole site arrives as one empty page and builds itself, often for a newer service or a campaign.
- Content that loads on a click. Tabs, "show more" and some accordions that fetch their text only when opened.
Why nobody notices
Google runs the page's scripts before it reads it, so the page shows up in Google search and the web team sees nothing wrong. Most AI tools don't. The gap only shows when you ask an AI tool the question and notice it never cites your page.
How to check a page yourself
- Look at the page source. In Chrome, right-click the page and choose View page source, then search for a sentence you can see on the page. If it isn't there, AI tools probably can't see it either.
- Turn off JavaScript. In your browser's site settings, block JavaScript for the site and reload. What's left is roughly what an AI tool reads.
- Ask an AI tool. Ask ChatGPT or Claude to summarise the page from its address. If it can't, or describes a different page, look closer. (If your site blocks AI crawlers, this test shows that first: see should government websites block AI crawlers?)
What to do about it
- Put the general answer on an ordinary page. Keep the tool for the personal answer, and write the rule beside it in plain text: "Most decks under 1.5 metres don't need a consent. Use the checker for your deck."
- Ask your vendor to send the text with the page. The request is simple: the content should be in the page when it loads, not added afterwards. Developers call this server-side rendering or prerendering, and most modern platforms support it.
- Don't hide key facts behind a click. Fees, dates and eligibility belong in the page text, not in a tab that loads later.
- Make it a requirement for new builds. Add "readable without JavaScript" to the requirements for any new tool or site. It's cheap at the start and expensive to add later, and it helps people on slow phones too.
The fix usually involves several people: the product owner of the tool, the designers who chose how it works, and the developers or vendor who build it. A clear statement of the problem, with the page and what an AI tool sees, gets it onto their list.
Where to start
List your five most-used tools and finders and check each one's page source. If one comes back empty, ask an AI tool the question it answers and see where the answer comes from instead.
The findability audit checks this across a whole site, alongside the answers people get. I also work alongside teams on findability, AI search and AI implementation: see AI project consulting.