Tell AI Who You Are: The Hero Sentence That Ranks

If ScoutRival’s Site Audit flagged “Machine-clear who / what / where,” it means the top of your homepage doesn’t make it obvious — to a machine — what you do, where you do it, and who you do it for. This is one of the most common and most fixable AI-visibility problems for small businesses, because good marketing copy and good AI copy pull in opposite directions. The clever, aspirational tagline that feels premium to a human reads as noise to a model that’s trying to file you under a category. This guide shows you the exact sentence to add and where to put it.

Why AI has to classify you first

When someone asks an engine “best med spa in Austin for laser treatments,” the model isn’t searching for a vibe — it’s matching a category (med spa), a place (Austin), and often an audience or specialty (laser treatments, busy professionals). Before your business can be an answer to that question, the engine has to have understood that those three things describe you.

Here’s the problem. A homepage that opens with “Elevate your journey to radiance” contains zero of those signals. There’s no category, no city, no audience — nothing a model can use to classify you. It reads beautifully and it’s completely uninformative to a machine. Compare:

Vague: “Elevate your journey to radiance.”

Machine-clear: “Lumina is a med spa in Austin offering Botox and laser treatments for busy professionals.”

The second sentence hands the engine everything: who (Lumina), what (med spa, Botox, laser), where (Austin), for whom (busy professionals). You haven’t dumbed anything down — you’ve simply put the facts where the machine can find them, and you can keep your poetic tagline underneath.

We grade this signal inferred, and we’re upfront about why. There’s no controlled experiment proving “add this sentence, get cited more.” But it’s advice that every AEO and SEO practitioner agrees on, it aligns with how classification demonstrably works, and it costs you one sentence. For a fix that cheap with that much consensus behind it, the honest verdict is: do it.

The formula

Write one literal sentence using this template:

“[Business name] is a [category] in [city/area] that [core service] for [target audience].”

Worked examples:

• “Smith Roofing is a roofing contractor in Austin, Texas that repairs and replaces residential roofs for homeowners across the Hill Country.”
• “Bright Smiles is a family dentist in Portland offering cleanings, crowns and Invisalign for kids and adults.”
• “PestGuard is a pest control company in Tampa that removes termites, ants and rodents for homeowners and property managers.”

Notice what each does:

• Names the business (helps entity resolution — see keeping one consistent brand name).
• States the category in plain words a buyer would use (“roofing contractor,” not “exterior envelope solutions”).
• Names the city or service area explicitly.
• Names the core services and the audience.

You can — and should — keep a shorter emotional tagline beneath it. The point isn’t to delete your brand voice; it’s to make sure the machine-readable facts exist somewhere near the top, in text.

Where to put it

The sentence needs to be in the first screen of your homepage and within roughly the first 600 characters of readable text. AI extractors weight the top of the page heavily, so a perfect “who/what/where” sentence buried three sections down does far less than the same sentence in your hero.

WordPress

1. Edit your homepage. Find the top heading or subheading block in your hero section.
2. Replace or supplement the vague tagline with the literal statement. If your hero has a big headline and a subheading, the headline can stay punchy while the subheading carries the who/what/where sentence.
3. Make sure it’s a real text block (Heading or Paragraph), not text baked into a background image (see the next section).
4. If you use a page builder (Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder), edit the hero text widget directly — just confirm the result shows up in View Source.

Wix, Squarespace, Webflow

Edit the hero text element and drop the sentence into the headline or subheadline. On all three, avoid putting the sentence inside an image or a decorative SVG — use a text block so it ships as real HTML.

Shopify

For a store, put a plain “who/what/where/for-whom” line in your homepage hero section text (via the theme customizer’s hero/banner section), and mirror it in your store’s meta description under Online Store → Preferences.

Any platform

Wherever your hero text lives, replace or extend the vague line with the literal one, and confirm it’s selectable HTML text.

Don’t bake it into an image

A surprising number of hero sections put the headline inside a JPG or PNG — the text is part of the picture. To your eye it looks like a headline; to a crawler it’s an opaque image with no readable words. AI can’t read a JPG. If your who/what/where sentence only exists inside a hero graphic, it may as well not exist. This is the same trap covered in the View-Source test for raw HTML: if it’s not selectable text, it’s invisible.

To check: try to highlight your headline with your cursor. If you can select it as text, good. If your cursor just drags across a picture, the text is trapped in an image — rebuild it as a real text block over the image instead.

Mirror it in two more places

The hero sentence is the priority, but reinforce it:

1. Your About page. Open with the same who/what/where sentence, then go deeper. This doubles as a fix for a real About page.
2. Your homepage meta description. In Yoast or Rank Math, write a meta description that leads with the same category + city + audience. It’s another place the model reads your classification.

Consistency across the three reinforces the entity: the engine sees the same clear statement in the hero, the About page and the metadata, and its confidence in classifying you goes up.

How to confirm it’s fixed

1. The stranger test. Show your homepage’s first screen to someone who’s never heard of your business and ask, “What is this company, where is it, and who is it for?” If they can answer from the first two sentences, a model probably can too.
2. View Source (Ctrl-U) and search for your category word and city — they should be present as HTML text in the top portion of the page.
3. The highlight test — you can select the hero sentence as text, meaning it’s not trapped in an image.
4. Re-run your ScoutRival Site Audit. The who/what/where check evaluates the opening text of your home and about pages for a clear category, city and audience.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Leading with a metaphor. “Your journey to a brighter tomorrow” is not a category, a place, or an audience. Lead with the literal sentence; keep the metaphor as a secondary tagline.
• Category jargon instead of plain words. Write the term a customer would type — “med spa,” “roofing contractor,” “family dentist” — not an industry euphemism no one searches.
• Leaving out the city. For a local business, the location is half the classification. “Serving the greater metro area” is vaguer than naming the city.
• Hero text baked into an image. If you can’t highlight it, neither can an AI. Use real text.
• A clear hero but a vague About and meta. Reinforce the same sentence in all three spots so the signal is consistent.
• Stuffing every service into one run-on sentence. Name your core services and audience clearly; you don’t need to cram your entire menu into the hero — the rest belongs in the body and on service pages.

The bottom line

An AI can’t recommend you until it has classified you, and it classifies you from the plain-language facts at the top of your site. One literal sentence — business, category, city, audience — does more for your machine-readability than a page of beautiful but empty copy. Add it to your hero as real HTML text, mirror it in your About page and meta description, and you’ve made the cheapest high-impact AI-visibility fix there is.

Not sure whether a machine can tell what your homepage is about? Run a free Site Audit with ScoutRival — it reads your site the way an AI does and shows you exactly where your who, what and where are unclear.