Getting Found by Search and AI Assistants
People find businesses two ways now. They search, or they ask an assistant. Your Vivreal site is built for both, and most of it happens without you doing anything.
This page covers what is automatic, and the short list worth filling in yourself.
What happens on its own
You do not need to set any of this up. Every Vivreal site publishes it.
| What | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| A list of all your pages | Tells search engines what exists, so nothing gets missed |
| A summary of your business on every page | Your name, what you are, and how to reach you, in a form machines read directly rather than guessing at |
| Product details on product pages | Price and availability, read directly rather than scraped out of the wording |
| Event details on event pages | Dates and times, same idea |
| Share cards | A proper image, title and description when someone posts your link |
The upshot is that a search engine or an assistant does not have to interpret your page to work out what your business is. It is told, in plain terms, on every page.
How AI assistants are handled
This is the part most site builders do not do, and it is worth understanding because Vivreal makes a deliberate choice on your behalf.
There are two kinds of AI traffic, and they are not the same thing:
Assistants answering someone's question right now. Somebody asks "who does wedding cakes near me", the assistant fetches your page, and your business turns up in the answer. Vivreal allows these, because that is a customer trying to find you.
Crawlers collecting text to train future models. These take your content into a training set. Your business gets nothing back. Vivreal blocks these.
You are opted into being found, not into being training data
The two are usually bundled together, so blocking one blocks the other, and most tools make you pick all or nothing. Vivreal separates them by name, so you show up when somebody is actually looking for you without your work being fed into a training set.
You do not have to configure this. It is the default on every site.
Your site also publishes a short machine-readable description of itself at a couple of standard addresses that assistants know to check, so an assistant can work out what you offer and look up your products without having to read every page first.
What is worth filling in yourself
Three things per page, all in Studio. Open a page, then its search settings.
1. The title and description
The two fields are labelled Meta title and Meta description. They are the headline and the blurb Google shows for that page.
Studio shows you a preview of the search result as you type, so you can see it rather than imagine it. There is a soft character counter too. Going over is not an error, it just means Google may cut it off.
Leave either blank and Vivreal uses a sensible default from your page content. Filling them in is better, because you know what a customer is actually looking for and the default does not.
Write for the person, not the search engine
"Sourdough and pastries, baked daily in Camden" beats "Bakery | Bread | Pastries | Camden | Best Bakery". Keyword stuffing has not worked for years, and it reads badly to the human deciding whether to click.
2. The share image
Upload a social image for the page and that is what people see when your link gets posted. Studio previews the card. Without one, Vivreal generates a reasonable card for you, so this is a nice-to-have rather than a must.
3. Whether the page should be found at all
Show this page in search results is on by default, which is what you want almost everywhere.
Turn it off for pages you only hand out by link: a thank-you page, an internal price list, a one-off landing page. The page stays reachable by anyone with the address, it just stops turning up in searches.
Two things that will stop you being found
Your site is still a demo. A site that has not gone live is deliberately hidden from every crawler. That is on purpose, so an unfinished site cannot compete with anything or get indexed half-built. It lifts the moment the site goes live.
You have not connected your own domain. Your list of pages is only advertised to search engines once the site is on a real domain. A site on a vivreal.io address still works, but connecting your own domain is the single biggest thing you can do for being found. See Custom domains.
A realistic timescale
Nothing here is instant. Search engines take days to weeks to find a new site and longer to rank it. Assistants pick things up faster because they often fetch live, but neither is a switch.
The order that actually helps:
- Connect your own domain.
- Make sure the site is live, not a demo.
- Write the title and description for your homepage, then your three or four most important pages.
- Leave the rest alone and go get on with the business.
If something is not working
- Nothing shows up in Google yet. Check the two blockers above first, then give it time.
- The wrong text shows in search results. Fill in
Meta titleandMeta descriptionfor that page rather than relying on the default. - A page you did not want public is showing up. Turn off Show this page in search results for it.
- Your link looks bare when shared. Upload a share image for that page.
Next steps
- Editing your site in Studio, where all the above lives.
- Custom domains.
- Site settings.