From eye exam to repair: the questions of a glasses purchase, in order

What we know about buyers' questions, and what we do not

No one outside the companies that run the assistants can see the prompts their users type, and our own measurement does not record them. The probe in our audit of 9,483 small business websites put one question for each of 9,240 businesses, drawn from a panel we built per metro and trade, to Claude with web retrieval on, and recorded whether the business was named. It says nothing about which questions glasses buyers ask, and the audit publishes no optician-only cut of anything.

So every question on this page is an example written for it, placed at the step of a purchase where it comes up. Your own list comes from your counter, your phones and your inbox, and it can differ from one branch to the next. It holds the search intent behind a purchase in the words your buyers use, which no list written from outside can.

Collecting the questions without collecting the customers

1. Put a sheet by the counter and one by the phone for [four] weeks. Write each question the way the buyer put it, and add a mark each time it comes back.
2. Once a week, whoever answers email and the contact form adds that week's questions in general words; the messages themselves stay where they are.
3. Write down the question, never the person: no names, no phone numbers, no plan member numbers, no prescriptions, nothing about anyone's eyes.
4. Mark each question with the step of the purchase it belongs to, from the six in the table below.
5. Set aside every question about a person's own eyes. It goes to their eye doctor or your optometrist, never to a page.
6. Count the marks. The questions with the most marks at each step get a heading on the site; the rest go on a list you read again next quarter.

Check the collection with whoever is responsible for privacy at the store before it starts. The method needs nothing but questions in general words, counted by hand, and anything that only makes sense with a customer's details attached stays off the sheet.

Six steps of a purchase, and what the store's page states at each

The exam and the plan: your store's facts, and the rules left to others

The first two steps change from branch to branch and sit closest to rules that differ by place. Whether a buyer needs a new exam to buy glasses, how old a prescription can be, who may examine and what a plan must pay for are not things your page states. It states what your store does: "[Branch] makes glasses from prescriptions written elsewhere; bring the written prescription", or "we make glasses from our own exams only", whichever is true.

The plan step works the same way. The page lists what each branch bills, dated, and what a buyer with another plan can do at your store, in your policy's words. What a plan covers is between the buyer and the plan, and the page sends them there. Contact lenses follow the pattern too: whether the branch fits them and who does it, and what a buyer brings to order the lenses they already wear, as your policy puts it.

Frames, lenses and the wait, in your own figures

The questions at this step are about cost and time. Answer them with ranges and times the store sets, bracketed here: frames from [price] to [price] by line, single-vision lenses from [price], and [n] business days for single-vision lenses at [branch], each with the date it applies from. Put them in the page's text. In our audit, 2.1% of the sites kept real content, such as a price list, in a PDF, where a fetch of the page itself does not reach it; the figure covers all 40 trades.

Two questions at this step belong elsewhere. "Which lenses do I need?" is for the eye doctor or your optometrist, and the page lists what you sell rather than choosing for anyone. The questions a first-time progressive buyer brings have a page of their own, and so do children's and sports eyewear, so this page links to them rather than answering them twice.

After the sale: pickup, adjustment and repair

The last steps are the questions that bring a buyer back to the counter. State the pickup options (in person at the branch, or shipping, and where to), whether a fitting at pickup is included, and the adjustment terms: free or not, for how long, and at any branch or only the one that sold the pair.

For repairs, say what your counter fixes, such as screws, nose pads and hinges, what it sends out, what each costs as [price], how long it takes, and whether you repair frames bought elsewhere. A broken hinge on a Saturday turns into exactly that question, and the page that answers it should name the branches open that day and their hours.

From a question on the sheet to an answer on the page

1. Take the heading from the buyer's phrasing: "How long do glasses take?", not "Turnaround times".
2. Answer in the first sentence, with the store, the branch and the figure in it, and finish the answer within 40 to 80 words.
3. Give the conditions next: which branches, which lens types, which plans.
4. Say what the buyer does next: call, book, bring the prescription, come in.
5. Date the answer, name who checked it, and change it the week the fact changes.

How that first sentence is built is set out in the article on quotable passages, and the pages it produces are answer pages in the plain sense, built for citability: each answer still says who, where and how much when it is read alone. In our audit (40 trades, 90 metros, late August to early September 2026), 61.5% of the sites had no question-and-answer content of any kind, and 50.7% had a question as a heading with no answer beneath it that a machine could isolate; neither figure is cut by trade.

Once the pages are up, a panel built from the same six steps shows whether answers about your store changed, as measuring an optical store in AI answers describes. The facts each branch page carries are on the overview for opticians.