When someone asks an AI for the best in town, who comes up?
A new visibility index audited 531 small-business sites, asked four assistants buying-intent questions, and got back almost no names. Also today: Cursor on iPad, Seedance 2.5, and Figma on the skills past fluency.
Ask for the best in town. See who answers.
Audited sites never named in an AI answer94.8%
Assistant answers that named the business asked about1.9% of 5,978
Sites blocking at least one AI crawler8.9%
The Lead
A
The AI Visibility Index puts numbers on the silence
Website Auditor's ongoing study audited 531 small-business sites across 458 domains, then asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity buying-intent questions about each one's category; only 10 sites were ever named. The index scores answer presence and machine readability separately, because a site can be perfectly crawlable and still go unmentioned.
The detail to sit with: only 8.9% of sites block an AI crawler. For nearly every business audited, the problem is not that assistants were kept out. They came in, read the site, and recommended someone else.
Today’s Art Direction
B
The Yellow Pages
A chrome-yellow classified directory page: display listings, dot leaders, category bars, and one-ink spot illustrations.
Before search, visibility was a book: chrome-yellow stock, condensed gothic headlines, ruled columns, and boxed display listings a business paid extra for. Today that vocabulary dresses a local-service landing page. Sections open with reversed category bars and tab letters, figures land on dot-leader rows, the offer is a coupon with a clipping border, and every illustration is a single ink printed straight onto the yellow. The whole page runs on one paper color, one ink, and one red.
Display listing
Dot leaders
Category bar
Tab letter
Coupon block
One-ink spot
Running head
Tooling
C
Editors
Cursor rebuilds itself for the iPad
Cursor for iPad, in Tuesday's changelog, pins sidebar chats so several coding runs stay visible at once, holds a review open beside a chat in split screen, and renders full file diffs. It lands three days after issue 084 asked who the dev environment is actually for.
Video
Seedance 2.5 holds a shot for 30 seconds
ByteDance's new video model generates 30-second audio-video clips in a single pass, then extends them across rounds, with reference-based generation for continuity. One take at that length covers a full landing-page hero loop.
Technique
D
Retype the machine’s code, on purpose
Ankur Sethi has his coding assistant write code in chat, then retypes every line by hand into his personal projects. He calls the debt it prevents cognitive debt: typing forces the close reading that skimming a generated diff lets you skip.
Workflow
E
Figma: fluency is the entry fee, not the edge
Figma's head of insights argues the skills that matter next are collaborative: turning one person's prompt tricks into shared internal tools, plugin libraries, and systems a whole team can trust. Drawn from the company's 2026 AI report on how product builders actually work.
Picking models on speed, not smarts
Martin Alderson now chooses daily-driver models on speed, arguing current frontier models cleared his good-enough bar and that 100 tokens a second is the new 100 milliseconds. A useful frame for anyone deciding which model sits inside a build workflow.
Design move: clip and keep
The machine-readable identity block
Put who the business is, what it does, and where it works in plain HTML high on the page: name, trade, city, and service area as real text, backed by LocalBusiness JSON-LD, never locked inside a hero image or a script-rendered widget. Style it like a directory listing so it reads as design, not boilerplate.
Use it on any local-service or storefront client site. Today's visibility study measures exactly this as its machine-readability pillar: identity an assistant's crawler can parse on arrival. What keeps it honest is that people see the same block the crawler does, so there is nothing cloaked and nothing to maintain twice.
Prompt Lab
F
Build a one-page landing page for a local service business, art directed
as a mid-century classified telephone directory page.
Canvas: chrome-yellow paper (#F3C024), warm black ink (#201708), cream
card stock (#FBF2D7), one vermillion accent (#B23A20), dark olive small
print (#57430C). Type: Oswald in condensed uppercase for display, Libre
Franklin at 19px/1.7 for body, Courier Prime for coupon and fine print.
Structure: a black running-head bar with the business name left and nav
right; below it one thin justified line with page number and date; a hero
styled as a boxed display listing with a double ink border, headline and
deck left, a one-color ink illustration right; a stat or price table as
dot-leader rows, labels left and bold condensed figures right; sections
opened by reversed black category bars, each with a small red tab-letter
square at its end; supporting items as bordered cream listing cards in a
two-up grid; one offer inside a coupon block with a dashed clipping
border; a black business-card colophon.
Rules: square corners, radius 2px max. Red only for large labels, rules,
and tab squares, never body text. Illustrations are single-ink prints
blended onto the yellow with multiply, no photographs. Body text stays
near-black on yellow or cream at WCAG AA. No gradients, no glow, no drop
shadows except a hard 4px ink offset on card hover (150ms ease, with a
prefers-reduced-motion guard). No fake readable text in images. Include
a plain-HTML identity block near the top naming the business, trade,
city, and service area, backed by LocalBusiness JSON-LD.
Paste it into Bolt, v0, Figma Make, Lovable, or Beaver Builder AI (from our publisher).
Field note
A directory was never neutral: the listing was the product, and businesses paid for bigger boxes. The new answer engines hand out the box for free, but only to sites they can read, parse, and remember.
