Put the answer under the question, near the top

Almost half of what ChatGPT quotes comes from the top of a page

44.2% of what ChatGPT quotes off a page comes out of the top 30% of that page. Kevin Indig's team got that number by tracing 18,012 quoted sentences back to the exact place each one came from. The middle third gave up 31.1% and the last third gave up 24.7%, and the count fell off hard down near the footer. Search Engine Land reported the study in February, after a pass over 1.2 million ChatGPT answers.

Treat that as a map of your own page. Fold your services page in three. The top piece carries close to half the odds that something on it gets read back to a customer. The bottom piece is down around a quarter, and thinner still by the time you reach the phone number and the hours.

What surprised me is how lopsided it is. The top third of a page is 30% of the words and carries 44.2% of the quotes, and that top third is the part most service pages fill with photos and a welcome line.

The same study has a second number. When a quoted sentence answered a question, 78.4% of the time it came from a heading. ChatGPT reads a heading written as a question the way a customer would, then takes the words printed right after that heading as the answer.

Indig's team spotted a habit in the quoted sentences too. They were close to twice as likely to state plainly what a thing is, opening with something like "a root canal is" or "our weekend rate is." A sentence that names the thing and then gives the fact gets picked up more often than one that circles it.

The sentence under a heading written as a question does most of the work on a page. That is a small target, and you can move something into it this afternoon.

What the quoted sentence looks like

A separate audit at Search Engine Land went after the winning passages themselves. Adam Gnuse read through nearly 2 million sessions, looking at blog posts, and published what the quoted ones had in common in November 2025. 72.4% of the quoted posts had a short, complete answer printed right after a title or a heading written as a question.

Short means short. About 120 to 150 characters, or 20 to 25 words. Two plain sentences. The test is whether somebody could read those two sentences with the rest of the page torn away and still have their question answered.

Here is one for a dental practice. The heading reads "How much does a root canal cost?" and the words right underneath read: "A root canal on a back tooth runs $1,100 to $1,600, and the crown that goes on after it is $950 to $1,400." That's 23 words and it stands on its own.

An HVAC company can do the same on its contact page. Put "Do you fix AC units on weekends?" over two sentences like these: "Yes. We take Saturday and Sunday calls all year, and the weekend visit is $89 on top of the normal rate."

Padding is what usually ruins it. An owner writes the price, then adds a line about financing, then a line about how every mouth is different. By the fourth sentence the answer has turned back into a paragraph, and the clean quote a model was hunting for is buried in the middle of it. Answer the question, then stop.

Gnuse found one more thing worth the extra minute. 34.3% of the quoted posts paired that short answer with a number of their own, and that pairing was the strongest setup he measured. Your own price, or your own wait time. A number nobody else can print, because it belongs to your business.

What these two studies do not cover

Indig's sample was web content in general, and Gnuse worked from blog posts. Both teams drew from the open web, where a dental office or a heating company turns up only by chance. I won't sell you these numbers as a study of local business.

What travels is the reading behavior. Both teams were watching how a model picks one sentence out of a page and hands it to a person who asked a question. There is no reason a model would read a medspa's page differently, though neither team checked. What changes from one trade to the next is how many other businesses have already put a clean answer on their page, and in the audits we run, very few of them have.

Two teams, different data, three months apart, landed on the same instruction about where the answer goes and what it looks like when it gets there. That earns 15 minutes of your afternoon.

Fifteen minutes, one page

Pick the page you would send to a customer who is close to booking. For most operators that's the main service page.

1. Write down the question customers ask you on the phone before they book. Use the words they actually say, before anybody smooths them out. "How much is a crown?" beats "Our approach to pricing."
2. Put that question on the page as a heading, high enough that a visitor sees it without scrolling, above the photos and the paragraph about the team.
3. Under the heading, write two sentences that answer it all the way. Aim for 20 to 25 words. Somebody should be able to read only those two sentences and stop looking.
4. Work one number of your own into those two sentences. A price, a range, a response time, a wait.

Then leave the rest of the page alone. The story about the practice and the photos can stay exactly where they are. You're moving one answer up and putting a question above it. That's the whole edit.

An in-home care agency can run the same move on its rates page. The heading asks what overnight care costs, and the two sentences underneath give the hourly rate and the overnight minimum, in dollars, before anything about the caregivers or the intake call.

Across the service-business sites I went through this month, most pages do have the answer somewhere. It turns up in paragraph nine, under a heading that says "Our Services," after a stock photo of a smiling family. A customer who is determined will scroll down and find it there. The trouble is that a model reading the page for one clean line has usually stopped long before paragraph nine.

The words a customer needs are already written, and they are printed in the third of the page that gets read the least. Move them up and put the question above them.

Do it on one page this afternoon. If it holds up, do the next page next week. A medspa with 6 treatment pages can get through all of them in about 90 minutes, one question and two sentences at a time.