A search engine ranks a page. A generative engine takes a passage out of it and drops that passage into an answer it is composing.
That is one sentence and it changes everything about how a page should be written.
The Extraction Test
Take any sentence from your website. Remove everything around it. Does it still say something true and complete about your business?
Most marketing copy fails immediately. "We take a different approach." Different from what? "Our process is built around you." Built how? "It starts with understanding." Understanding what?
These sentences depend entirely on their neighbors. A model lifting one gets nothing. So it lifts a competitor's instead.
Now the passing version: "A custom website in Arizona typically ranges from $1,500 for a focused single-brand build to $12,000 and up for a real-time 3D experience." That sentence survives on its own. It carries a subject, a place, a range, and a reason. It can be dropped into an answer without distortion, which is exactly why it would be.
The Structure
- Heading phrased as the actual question. Not "Pricing" but "How much does a custom website cost in Arizona." The heading is the retrieval hook.
- Direct answer in the first one or two sentences. No throat clearing, no "great question," no history of the industry. The answer.
- Support underneath. Why the range is what it is, what moves it, what the exceptions are.
- Specifics, not adjectives. A number, a timeline, a place, a constraint. "Fast" is not a fact. "Three to four weeks from kickoff" is.
- The caveat stated plainly. Naming what a service does not do increases trust with human readers and gives models the boundary conditions they need to represent you accurately.
What Gets Discounted
Hedging. "May help," "can potentially," "often tends to." Language models weight confident, specific statements over qualified ones, because a qualified statement contributes almost nothing to an answer.
Promotional density. Three superlatives in a sentence read as noise. "Industry-leading premier award-winning solutions" contains zero facts.
Buried answers. The answer arriving in paragraph nine after eight paragraphs of context. If the retrieval never reaches paragraph nine, the answer does not exist.
Contradiction. One price on the pricing page, a different one in a blog post, a third on a directory listing. All three lose confidence. This is the most common self-inflicted wound in the discipline.
The Question Inventory
Before writing anything, list the questions buyers actually ask in their own words. Not keyword phrases. Questions.
The sources are already sitting there: sales calls, inbound emails, the objections that come up at proposal stage, the things people ask right before signing, the things they ask right before walking away. Twenty of those, answered directly and specifically, is worth more than fifty pages built around search volume estimates.
Then put them on the page visibly, in a real FAQ block, matched to FAQPage schema. Visible, because generative engines read rendered text and because hiding them violates guidelines. The schema side is covered here.
The Uncomfortable Part
This produces writing that is plainer than most brands want. Fewer flourishes, more numbers, more direct statements, more admitted limits.
It also produces writing humans find easier to trust, because it is answering rather than performing. The two goals are not in tension. Copy that a model can quote accurately is copy a buyer can understand quickly.
UM Media rewrites pages this way as part of every SEO / AEO / GEO Foundation. See what the Foundation covers, or the web lanes.