Your website will be appearing in search results for what is unique about it (which may, at first, only be your name) shortly after publishing, but it won’t immediately be in the top results for more general descriptions of what you do.
It takes a lot of work over time to move up in the search results for phrases that relate equally to other individuals and companies whose websites are well-established.
Search engines will track users’ engagement with your website over time, however, and when their robots detect that users are interested in your content, your search engine results will improve.
Google is no longer the only place people search. A great many people now begin with an AI assistant. They type a full question and read the answer they are given. OpenAI reported 900 million people using ChatGPT every week at the start of 2026. Most of what they type into it is writing and image work, but around one in five prompts is the kind of question a search engine would once have answered—who does this kind of work, where do I find one, which of these is right for me. Google’s own results now open with an AI-written summary sitting above the list of links. Some of your visitors arrive because an AI assistant named you in its answer. This raises the stakes on what you were already doing.
Your best bet is to optimize your website for the kinds of questions you expect people to be entering in the search field if they are likely to be interested in what you do. To some extent you can do this by experimenting with searches but you can also use the data about what people actually search for. There are tools for this and we can help get your search engine optimization focused.
An AI assistant chooses what to quote on the strength of how plainly a page answers the question in front of it. The pages that get used are the ones that state who you are, what you make or do, where you work, and what is distinctive about it. Promotional language works against you here—there is nothing in “creating work that will make a difference in the world” for an AI assistant to pass on to anybody. Concrete detail works for you: materials, techniques, dates, places, names, the kind of people you work with, and prices where you publish them.
These systems also read what other websites say about you. A gallery listing, a press notice, an interview, a directory entry, a museum or archive record—each one is a second source confirming what your own website says. Anywhere your name appears next to a description of your work is worth having, and worth keeping accurate.
Three pieces of text on each page do most of this work:
The page title is the line that appears as the heading of a search result, and it is the strongest single signal of what a page is about. Make it the phrase a person would actually type, followed by your name or your business name. A page titled “Home” tells a search engine nothing.
The meta description is the couple of lines shown underneath the title. It doesn’t affect your ranking directly, but it decides whether somebody clicks, and AI assistants often draw on it when they summarize you. It’s good to keep this to around 150 characters, written as a proper sentence, accurately describing what is on that page.
The page text itself is what a search engine and an AI assistant both have to work with. A page that answers one question thoroughly does better than a page that touches on six, so give each page a job. Use the words your visitors would use for what you do, and put the most important of them in the first paragraph and in the headings, where both a reader and a machine will find them early.
Image ALT text on your images counts as page text too, and it is read by search engines as well as by people using screen readers.
Titles and descriptions can be written one page at a time, in the editing screen for each page. On a hamiltro-built website there is a faster route: an SEO Entry page in your admin menu listing every page, post and record on your website with a field for the title and a field for the description beside each one, so you can work down the whole website in a single sitting and see them all against each other as you go. Like the Image ALT Text bulk-edit page, this is not something most website systems provide, so it is easy to assume the one-at-a-time route is the only one there is.
Start with the pages people land on first—your home page, and whichever page describes the work you most want to be found for—and consider this work to be ongoing.
