Four AI companies, nine robots, three different jobs. Which robots.txt lines protect your funeral home's website — and which erase it from AI answers.
A peer-reviewed experiment tested nine ways to get pages cited by AI. Quotes, statistics, and named sources won — up to 40% — and the biggest lift went to underdog pages.
A 28-year-old site hosting obituaries for 3 of every 4 US deaths beats your local page on the name query. The mechanism, and the 2 wins you control.
44.9 million Americans speak Spanish at home, and most funeral home websites speak only English. One honest Spanish page is cheap, first-party documented, and usually first in the county.
Four of six funeral home website vendors publish no customer agreement. The word "domain" appears zero times in the five we found. Four questions to ask.
Asking works — 83% of asked consumers leave a review. But the person you'd ask just buried someone. The decent answer has a who, a when, and a script.
Google is removing the public Q&A box from Business Profiles and handing the job to Gemini. The wrong-answer risk didn't end — it moved upstream, to sources you control.
Nearly 30% of families now complete all arrangements online. When a family types the first call into a 1am form, the research puts the answer window at minutes.
Copilot is powered by Bing — Microsoft's own words. DuckDuckGo and Yahoo run on it too. An hour of imports puts your funeral home in the index.
NFDA 2025: 40% of consumers used a funeral home they found on Facebook — up from 2.4% in 2018. The page that earns it is infrastructure, not a megaphone.
Accessibility suits topped 5,000 in 2025, mostly against small businesses. The widget won't save you. Five real fixes will — and the IRS covers half.
ChatGPT is down to 46% of AI usage — Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity run different plumbing. Four prompts tonight show where your funeral home stands.
In the last national count, 4 in 5 funeral home websites said nothing about price. The pre-need family compares whoever posted a number.
Google's AI Overviews barely touch "funeral home near me" — and blanket "how much does cremation cost." The two searches a family makes are now two different games, and most funeral homes are only defending one of them.
The industry's resentment of Yelp is earned. It is also beside the point: since 2024 Yelp has licensed its data into Perplexity, Apple's assistant and OpenAI.
Researchers can rebuild a family tree from ordinary obituaries at 93% accuracy. Search engines and AI assistants read your obituary pages the same way — and quote whichever copy they can parse. The on-page mechanics that make the quoted copy yours.
What can actually come down, why the cease-and-desist reflex is now a federal violation, and the reply that wins the family reading over the reviewer's shoulder.
A census of American funeral home websites, graded on the foundations AI answers are built from — method published, conflict disclosed, numbers reproducible. Of 924 attempted we could read 827; 35.6% of those score D or F, and the weakest dimension is also the easiest one to fix.
Most US phones are iPhones, and "Hey Siri, funeral homes near me" reads straight from Apple's place database. Claiming your card is free — and the name of the tool changed in April.
Scraper sites republish your families' obituaries and take commissions on the flowers. The one landmark ruling is Canadian, US law mostly can't reach the practice — and the working defense is owning the canonical copy.
Prior-relationship selection has fallen by a third since 2012. Facebook discovery went from 2.4% to 40% in seven years. The word-of-mouth era didn't end — it got typed.
Obituary pages draw five times more visits than all other pages. A ranked tour of the five pages families actually use — with the data behind each.
The FTC's review rule carries $53,088 per violation, and the first warning letters went out in December. What's banned, what's safe — translated for funeral homes.
The map card ChatGPT shows a family runs on Foursquare's places database. Your funeral home's listing exists whether you made it or not — claiming it is free and takes ten minutes.
Every number worth citing about funeral homes in AI answers, each with the method, the population and the date behind it. The gaps are named too.
Families ask no question more urgently, and most sites in your county do not answer it. The page, and the form that gets quoted.
A one-page quarterly scorecard: 5 questions, 3 assistants, 15 minutes. Enough for a director to steer by.
Families can tell a stock photo at a glance — and so, increasingly, can the systems deciding which funeral homes to show them. The building you actually have beats the lilies you don't.
Every family you meet searches your name within a day. That results page — and the AI summary above it — is your real first impression.
Ask both apps who to call in your town and you'll often get different names. The disagreement is a diagnosis — and the fix is two different to-do lists.
An at-need family asks one question and calls. A pre-need family asks 40 over 6 months and never says so. Different pages answer them.
You do not need a content calendar. You need the obituaries you already write, one honest page a month, and the discipline not to stop.
Local search is not dead. It grew a sibling. The 3-pin map box and the one-paragraph AI answer reward overlapping but different work.
The people loading your site are on a phone, in a parking lot, in the worst hour of their year. Every second of load time is a second of that hour.
A page of real questions with real answers is the format answer engines read most easily. Write the ones funeral homes avoid.
Families now ask ChatGPT which funeral home to call — and the biggest measurement yet found it recommends just 1.2% of local business locations. The five evidence-ranked moves that change who gets named.
"What do we do right now?" "What does cremation cost here?" "Can we still have a service?" Families ask in whole sentences. The funeral homes that answer in whole sentences get found.
A five-star average gets you named. What your reviews actually say decides the family who checks — and Google's rules limit what you can ask for.
ChatGPT already has a description of your funeral home. Reading it is the fastest audit in marketing — and correcting it is mostly within your control.
Before a model quotes your website, it checks whether the world agrees you exist. The profile — and the reviews on it — is where that agreement lives.
Schema markup is how you tell machines, unambiguously, who you are and where you serve. Most funeral home sites have none. The checklist is short.
Not the homepage. Not the about page. The page that changes every week is the one families, search engines, and AI assistants all read first.
The first call used to follow a search page. Now it often follows a single AI answer — and that answer is being written about your funeral home today, whether you have read it or not.
Families increasingly ask an AI, not a search page, who to call. AEO is the work that puts your funeral home in the answer it gives them.
At-need families compare in minutes. 68% will only use a business at 4 stars or better, and what the reviews say decides between the ones that clear it.
The calculator turns one month of services into what a commission-free website keeps in your building — the arithmetic takes thirty seconds.
See what your flowers are worth