For most small businesses a website is three jobs that never meet. A designer makes it look right. Months later the owner hires someone else to make it rank. And a third audience has arrived that neither was briefed on, the AI systems that read a page and decide whether to quote it.
Adil Makhdoom, a website designer, developer and SEO specialist based in Lahore who works with clients in the United States and the United Kingdom, has spent several years treating web design and SEO, and now AI search, as one job. Earlier this year he stopped assuming what website builders deliver to search engines and read the code instead.
The industry’s conversation about structured data, he found, is almost entirely about which types to add. The more useful question was whether the types already on the page contained anything at all, and whether they were joined up. On two of the four major platforms in his sample the answer to both was no, and in every case the reason traced back to a decision made in the design.
Fifty-one websites, read the way Google reads them
He pulled 51 live small business websites from Google’s organic results across six industries: wedding photography, wedding planning, therapy, brand design, landscaping and plumbing. None was chosen for how it was built. From each he fetched the raw HTML, identified the platform from its code signature, and parsed every block of JSON-LD on the page. JSON-LD is the most common form of structured data, the machine-readable layer that tells Google what a page is and whose business it describes. Each block holds one or more nodes, and a node can carry an @id, a label that lets one node point to another.
Because Showit is heavily JavaScript-driven, he re-checked three Showit sites in a full browser after every script had run. The results were identical.
The sample broke down as WordPress 14, Squarespace 12, Showit 11, Wix 3, Webflow 3, Shopify 1 and seven custom builds. What came back was not a league table of platforms but a map of what each one leaves to the person building the site.
| Platform | Sites | JSON-LD nodes | Nodes with an @id | Sites using an @graph (nodes bundled together) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 14 | 268 | 91 | 12 |
| Squarespace | 12 | 26 | 0 | 0 |
| Showit | 11 | 10 | 5 | 1 |
| Webflow | 3 | 77 | 8 | 2 |
| Wix | 3 | 26 | 0 | 0 |
Structured data is not a ranking factor; it decides what a page is eligible for and how well Google understands who is behind it. WordPress sites in the sample were simply the only ones that told Google a complete story consistently.
What the code showed
Ten of the 11 Showit sites carried no JSON-LD. The one that did was running the Yoast plugin on its attached WordPress blog. Every Squarespace site emitted a node, but six of the 10 local business nodes lacked both a name and a street address, and none listed a telephone number. Google’s structured data policies require markup to be a true representation of the page, and a local business node needs a name and an address to validate. An empty one earns nothing.
The result he did not expect was smaller and, he argues, more consequential. Across all 12 Squarespace sites and the three Wix sites, not one node carried an @id.
“An @id is how a site tells Google explicitly that its pieces belong together,” Adil said. “Google can sometimes work it out from a matching name or URL. Without the label, a site publishing an organisation node with the phone number and a local business node with the logo is relying on Google to guess. WordPress with a free plugin produces four nodes that all point at each other. That is a different class of output, and it is rarely reported.”
Why every one of those gaps is a design decision
None of the missing pieces belongs to an SEO who arrives later. Each one is set, or not set, by the person laying out the page.
On Squarespace, the text-style menu is the heading tag. A designer who picks “Heading 1” for its size and uses it five times has given Google a page with five titles; one who sets the page title in a paragraph style because it looks better has given Google a page with none. On Showit each text box carries its own tag setting, independent of how the text looks, and it stays a paragraph unless the designer changes it. Either way, that dropdown is the outline search engines and AI systems read.
Alt text is a design field. On a portfolio page with 12 images and no copy, the alt attributes are the only words describing the work, filled in or skipped at upload.
Image sizing is a layout choice. An image uploaded far larger than the box it sits in, or a container drawn far larger than it needs to be, is the page experience problem Google names in its guidance, created the moment the image was dropped onto the canvas.
Showit’s separate mobile canvas is a design feature and an indexing decision at once. Google indexes the mobile version first and asks that mobile carry the same primary content as desktop, so a text block deleted from the mobile layout to keep it clean is one Google may never index.
And on Squarespace, the local business node that turned up empty six times out of 10 is generated from the Business Information panel in site settings. No one wrote broken markup. Someone skipped a settings screen.
“Every item on Google’s list is something a designer either builds in or leaves out,” he said. “That was the finding underneath the finding. I went looking for an SEO problem and found a design problem with an SEO cost.”
One page, three layers
He now treats a page as three layers built together: the design layer a visitor sees, the structure layer of headings, markup, image sizing and internal links that Google understands, and the answer layer of plain text an AI system can quote, because an answer engine cannot cite what is not written down.
Take a typical Showit portfolio page for a wedding photographer: a full-width hero, 12 gallery thumbnails, a contact button and no copy. The title is a paragraph style, the images are camera originals, the mobile canvas dropped the one line of text, and there is no business node. To a person it is beautiful. To Google it is an untitled page of unnamed images. To an AI asked for a wedding photographer in that city, it is close to empty.
Built with all three layers, the same page looks identical. The title is an H1 naming the service and the city. Each thumbnail carries alt text saying what and where it was shot. The images are exported at the container’s width. A local business node with name, address and service area sits in the custom code area. Two hundred words under the gallery say who the photographer is and where they work, on both canvases. Nothing about the design changed. Everything a machine can read did.
Google’s guidance on AI features in Search confirms there is no separate trick. It states there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary”, and lists the fundamentals: content in textual form, structured data that matches the visible text, internal links, page experience and crawl access. Since 31 August, Search Console has reported how often each verified site appears inside those AI features. “That report is the layer designers have never had to answer for,” Adil said. “Now the client can open it.”
Web designer SEO, built into the canvas
He handles web design and SEO as a single engagement on WordPress, Squarespace and Showit for photographers, therapists, wedding venues and service businesses, the clients for whom the second and third layers decide whether the phone rings, and works US hours from Lahore. On Showit he assigns every heading by hand, writes the business markup into the custom code area and runs the attached WordPress blog with a schema plugin, a process his Showit SEO guide documents.
He has written on the subject for Grit Daily and turned the audit’s checks into Showit Site Analyzer, a free tool that reports a Showit site’s structure, speed and AI visibility in under 30 seconds without a signup.
“The point of the audit was never to say one builder is better,” Adil Makhdoom said. “It was to show that the platform decides how much of the work is yours. Showit gives you everything and expects you to know what to put on it. Squarespace gives you the shape and expects you to fill it. WordPress gives you the plumbing and expects you to finish the profile. Once you know which one you are on, the combination is not mysterious. It is a checklist, and I would rather every business had it than only my clients.”
