How to write facts an assistant can quote

What a quotable fact is

When an assistant writes a paragraph about your business, it is assembling sentences from the pages it retrieved. It does not summarize your whole site. It looks for the sentence that answers the question and repeats it, usually with a light rewording. So the question is whether the exact fact the customer asked about exists on your site as a sentence that can be lifted out on its own.

A quotable fact has four parts. It names the business, or sits on a page where the business name is unmistakable. It states one specific thing: a number, a date, a place, a credential. It is a full sentence that makes sense with nothing around it. And it is true today, which is where freshness and dates come in.

Compare two sentences. We work hard to get you to closing quickly has no fact in it. Portneuf Home Loans closes most conventional purchase loans in Pocatello within 21 days of a complete application has a business, a loan type, a town and a number. The second will be attached to your name.

What unquotable pages look like on a mortgage lender's site

Portneuf Home Loans is a mortgage broker in Pocatello with four loan officers, closing about 22 loans a month, most of them FHA purchases for first-time buyers. The site has a page for each loan type and a page about the team.

A buyer asks Copilot: Which mortgage lender in Pocatello Idaho is good for a first-time FHA buyer and how long does closing take? The answer names a national online lender and a credit union in Idaho Falls, and gives a general closing estimate of 30 to 45 days. Portneuf is not named.

The FHA page on the Portneuf site is 340 words. It explains what FHA loans are, says the team is experienced with first-time buyers, and invites the reader to call. It does not state the minimum down payment the lender works with, the credit score floor, the typical closing time, the counties served, or the fact that three of the four loan officers are Spanish speaking. Every one of those facts is true and none is on the page. The credit union that got named has a page that says, in one sentence, that it closes FHA purchases in an average of 28 days and serves Bannock County.

A worked example: rewriting a Pocatello lender's FHA page

Here is the opening of the FHA page as it stood, and as it was rewritten. The rewrite adds no facts that were not already true. It puts them in sentences.

FHA loans are a great option for first-time homebuyers. At Portneuf Home Loans, our experienced team will guide you through every step of the process and work hard to make your dream of homeownership a reality. We take pride in fast, friendly service and clear communication. Contact us today to learn more about whether an FHA loan is right for you.

Portneuf Home Loans arranges FHA purchase loans for first-time buyers in Pocatello, Chubbuck and Blackfoot, and closes most of them within 24 days of a complete application. FHA loans through Portneuf require a down payment of 3.5 percent and a credit score of 580 or higher. Three of the four loan officers speak Spanish. The office is at 425 N Main St in Pocatello and is open Monday through Friday from 8:30 to 5:30, and pre-approval takes one business day when documents are complete.

The rewrite has six facts in five sentences. Here is how they read to an assistant.

Four weeks after the rewrite was indexed by Bing and Google, the Copilot prompt above named Portneuf Home Loans, quoted the 24-day closing time and the 3.5 percent down payment, and mentioned the Spanish-speaking officers. The same page also won the featured snippet on Google for FHA closing time in Pocatello, a separate result that comes from the same kind of sentence.

How to check your own pages for quotable facts

1. Pick the service page that matters most and list the five questions a customer asks before choosing you. For a lender that is closing time, down payment, credit score, area served and hours.
2. Open the page and, for each question, find the single sentence that answers it. Copy that sentence into a blank document by itself. If it does not make sense alone, or if you cannot find one, that fact is not quotable.
3. Look for the words quality, experienced, dedicated, pride and dream. Each one is standing where a number should be. Replace the sentence with the fact behind it.
4. Check that the business name and the town appear within the same paragraph as each key fact, not only in the header. An assistant reading a retrieved chunk of your page may not see the header.
5. Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity the five questions with your business name in them: How long does Portneuf Home Loans take to close an FHA loan? If the answer is vague or says the information is not available, the sentence on your page is not doing its job.

What we do about quotable facts

You will get a list of the questions customers ask about each of your services, taken from search data and from what the assistants are already being asked, with the sentence on your site that answers each one, or a note that none exists. The missing facts are gathered from you in one conversation and written into the pages as standalone sentences that name the business and the town. Each month you will see which of those sentences the assistants are now quoting. This is part of every site audit, which is where the work starts.

Questions people ask about GEO: how to write facts an assistant can quote