We Found a Fake Phone Number on a Live Business Website
Most website themes ship with fake content so the demo looks full. A stock photo, a paragraph of lorem ipsum, an address in New York City, a phone number in the 555 range that doesn’t exist anywhere. You’re meant to replace all of it. Almost nobody replaces all of it. Going through the sites we host, we found a business publishing a phone number with an area code from a state it has never operated in. It had been there since the site was built. Anyone who dialled it got somebody else entirely. On another, the footer still carried the theme’s demo contact block — a street address in New York, a 1-800 number that belonged to the theme company, and an email address at a domain the business doesn’t own. That business is in Mississippi. Elsewhere we found published product pages full of lorem ipsum, testimonials from invented customers, and the “Hello world!” post WordPress creates on day one still sitting there years later. None of this is dramatic. All of it is the kind of thing a customer notices, and a competitor points at. Here’s how to check yours. Use your site’s search box, or Google with site:yourbusiness.com, and look for: example.com, lorem ipsum, Insert Tagline Here, Your Company, 555, North Main Street, Sample Page, Hello world. Then actually read your own footer, which is the part of a website nobody ever re-reads after launch. If you find something, it’s usually a five-minute fix. The hard part is knowing to look — which is why we now check for it on every site we host, as a standing item rather than a favour.
Is Your Website Invisible to ChatGPT and AI Search?
More and more people are asking an assistant instead of typing into a search box. “Who does vehicle wraps near Tupelo?” “Is there a place in Iuka open late that sells wine?” Whatever answer comes back was read off somebody’s website. If the crawlers those assistants use can’t read yours, you’re not in the running. Not ranked low — absent. We went through every site we host last week looking for exactly this, and we found sites quietly refusing the crawlers that feed ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers. Nobody chose that. It came in with a theme, or a plugin, or a file somebody pasted in years ago and forgot. Here’s how to check your own. Type your domain into a browser followed by /robots.txt — so yourbusiness.com/robots.txt. You’ll get a plain text file. Look for any line that says Disallow: / underneath a name like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended or CCBot. If you see one, that crawler has been told to go away. Two things worth knowing. A file that doesn’t exist at all is usually fine — it means nothing is being blocked. And a file that’s there but blocking ad networks and scrapers is often deliberate and harmless. It’s the AI and search crawlers you care about. The other trap is harder to spot: a physical robots.txt file sitting on the server overrides whatever your SEO plugin thinks it’s publishing. Your plugin shows one thing in the dashboard, visitors get another. We found that on twenty-six sites. If you’re not sure what you’re looking at, send us the address and we’ll look for free. It takes a minute and it’s the kind of thing that costs you customers silently for years.