Architecture firms
Your portfolio is in pictures. The assistant that shortlists architects reads words.
A homeowner planning an addition, a developer with a forty-unit site, a town replacing its library: each now asks an assistant who has done this kind of work nearby. The assistant answers from the text it can retrieve. A gallery of photographs, however good, is not text.
An architecture firm can be named for what its site states in sentences: what it designs, for whom, where, at what scale and budget band, and how it handles permits and approvals, project by project. A client's question can be held against those sentences, by the client reading the page or by an assistant that fetched it. A captioned project gives it something to hold against; a photograph and a title give it nothing.
How your customers ask
How clients ask, depending on who they are
Three clients, one question: have you done this before
The homeowner wants an addition or a renovation, someone who will handle the permit, a fee they can understand, and a person who returns calls. The developer wants unit counts, zoning, entitlement and a schedule. The municipality wants the building type, a license in its state and a firm that has been through public procurement. Underneath, all three ask the AI assistant the same thing: who has done this kind of project, near here, at this size.
What an answer can say about a firm's work depends on what the pages about it state. 'Residential, commercial, institutional' answers no question in particular. 'A second-story addition to a 1920s bungalow in a historic district, permitted in four months' answers a homeowner's question almost word for word.
The budget question is the one firms tend to avoid, and the one that filters hardest. State the smallest project you take, the construction budget band you usually work in, and how you charge: a fixed fee, hourly, or a share of construction cost. Those are facts a client can match themselves. The number can wait for the first meeting; the shape of it cannot.
What an assistant needs to read on an architecture firm's site
Most of it is text you already write for proposals and award submissions. It has to be on the page, not in a PDF and not inside an image.
| The client wants to know | What your site states | Form |
|---|---|---|
| Have you done my kind of project | Each project with a caption in text: type, location, size, year, your role, the scope, what was hard about it | Sentences under each project, in HTML, not in alt text alone |
| Do you work at my scale and budget | The smallest project you take; the budget band you usually work in; how you charge | A plain paragraph on the services page |
| Will you handle the approvals | Permits, zoning, variances, historic review, entitlement: which you do and where you have done them | Named per project and summarized once |
| Are you licensed here | The states or provinces you hold a license in, the numbers, the principals by name | Text on the about page; a Person node per principal |
| Where do you work | The metros and counties you take work in | Text; areaServed in the markup |
| What is it like to work with you | Client reviews or references quoted as text, with the project type | Text, with the reviewer's first name, the date and the platform; no rating in the markup |
| Who are you | One firm name, one address, one number, identical on every page | LocalBusiness in JSON-LD |
schema.org has no architecture type among its LocalBusiness subtypes. ProfessionalService, which older guides suggest, is marked deprecated on schema.org, so use LocalBusiness itself, with areaServed, and a Person node for each licensed principal. Google's structured data introduction recommends JSON-LD and asks that structured data describe only what a visitor can see on the page: a project in the markup is a project on the page.
Portfolio pages are often built by a gallery script. Google's JavaScript documentation describes rendering as a separate, deferred step, and nothing in the assistants' crawler documentation promises a rendering step at all. If the captions appear only after the script runs, a fetcher without a script engine receives a page with no projects on it. View the page source: what you can read there is what an AI crawler can.
What the crawl found, and why it lands hardest on portfolio sites
In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros across the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, late August to early September 2026), our crawler executed no JavaScript. 3.0% of the sites rendered their content only in JavaScript, 2.1% kept their real substance in a PDF, and 7.2% sat behind bot protection that served a challenge page instead of the site. The median homepage across all trades ran to 880 words, so the usual problem is not too few words. A portfolio site is the exception where it can be exactly that: the words that exist are inside the images.
On 43.1% of the sites, the three main pages disagreed about who and where the business is. 17.8% had no schema.org markup at all, and most of what the other 82% carried described the website rather than the business.
61.5% had no question-and-answer content of any kind. The questions a firm hears in every first meeting (how long, how much, do you do permits, do you take small projects) are the questions the assistant is asked too, and a page that answers each in the first sentence under its heading is a page it can quote.
Of 9,240 businesses each asked about once, in one buyer question put to Claude with web retrieval on, 14.9% were named. The businesses named were, on inspection, the ones whose sites carried answer-shaped text and a consistent identity. One question, one assistant, one day: a direction, not a rate.
What to fix first, project by project
- Captions. For every project on the site, a paragraph in HTML: type, place, size, year, your role, the scope, the approvals. Start with the ten projects closest to the work you want more of.
- A services page that says who you work for, the smallest project you take, the budget band you work in and how you charge.
- One page on approvals: the permits, variances and reviews you have taken through, and where.
- One firm name, address and number on every page, then LocalBusiness markup with areaServed and a Person node per principal with the license states.
- Check what a fetcher receives: view the source of a project page with scripts off, and run the crawler access check on the domain.
- Measure the same client questions before and after, as our methodology describes, so the captions are judged by whether the firm gets named.
Go deeper
Articles for architecture firms
AI Engines
AI visibility for architects: the firm, the principal and the building
Technical & Structure
A portfolio a crawler can read: captions, alt text and a page per shoot
Local & Industries
Architect nearby: licensed where the site is, not the shortest drive
Content & Answer Pages
What building owners ask assistants about architects, stage by stage
What principals ask
Our work speaks for itself. Why write captions for a machine?
Because the machine cannot see the work, and neither can a client reading an assistant's answer. The caption is for both. A project page that says 'a 3,000-square-foot addition to a 1920s bungalow in a historic district, permitted in four months' is what an assistant can repeat when a homeowner asks for exactly that. The photograph is what convinces them once they arrive.
We do not publish fees. Do we have to?
No. State how you charge and the budget band you work in; those are facts a client can match without a number. A firm that says 'fixed fee for residential work; typical construction budgets in the mid six figures' has answered the question the way it is asked. A firm that says nothing leaves the answer to another firm's page.
We are a two-person studio. Can we compete with large firms in these answers?
The question 'architect for a second-story addition near me' names a kind of project, not a headcount. In our probe, the businesses named were, on inspection, the ones whose sites carried answer-shaped text and a consistent identity, which a two-person studio can write in a week. We cannot say what any assistant prefers; we can say what the named sites had in common.
Our portfolio is a PDF we send on request. Is that a problem?
For the assistant, yes: it cannot read what you send on request, and 2.1% of the sites in our audit kept their real content in a file rather than on a page. Put the project text on pages and keep the PDF as the thing you send after the meeting is booked. The page is what gets you the meeting.