- 17 of 200
- AI Search Visibility & GEO
- AI Engine Content Parsing & Extractability
- High
Short answer: check 17 asks whether your page opens with a real sentence that says what the page is about. It looks at the first paragraph and passes if it's at least 120 characters long. That threshold is Crawl Audit's own rule of thumb, not a number from Google or any AI company. The idea behind it holds up: an opening line that answers the obvious question is the line most likely to be read, shown and quoted.
What Crawl Audit checks
Crawl Audit finds the first <p> inside <main>, or inside <article>, or the first one on the page if neither exists.
- Pass: that paragraph is 120 characters or longer, about one full sentence.
- Warning: it's shorter, or there isn't one.
What usually sets it off: a short tagline in a <p> above the real content ("Welcome!"), a hero that's all heading and button, or opening text built with <div>s instead of paragraphs.
What Google and AI answers say about it
- Google on featured snippets: "Google systems determine whether a page would make a good featured snippet for a user's search request, and if so, elevates it." Asked whether you can mark a page up to become one, Google's answer is: "You can't."
- Google on snippets in general: "Snippets are primarily created from the page content itself."
- To limit what Google shows from a page, including in AI features, use "nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, or noindex controls".
- OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity don't publish what kind of text their answers prefer to quote. OpenAI says only that ChatGPT search ranks results "using multiple factors" and that "Placement is not guaranteed."
So there's no guarantee and no special markup. A clear first sentence is simply the cheapest way to make your page easy to summarise correctly.
How to write the opening line
- Answer the question the page exists for, in one or two sentences. Who it's for, what it does, and one concrete detail.
- Use the words your customer would use, not your internal product language.
- Keep it as text in a paragraph, not inside an image or a slider.
| Weak opening | Direct opening |
|---|---|
| Welcome to our website! | A stock and billing app for shops in Pakistan, priced in rupees, that counts cartons and loose pieces separately. |
| Innovative solutions for modern businesses. | A two-week, fixed-price sprint that ends with a written plan and a staging link. |
Every check explainer on this site, this one included, starts with a paragraph that begins "Short answer:". It forces us to say the point first.
How to fix it on your platform
- WordPress, Shopify, Wix and Squarespace: put a normal paragraph of text directly under the main heading, before any images or buttons.
- Next.js: make sure the opening text is a
<p>inside<main>, and that it's in the server-rendered HTML, not added by JavaScript.
Sources
- Google Search Central, Featured snippets and Control your snippets, checked 3 October 2026.
- Google Search Central, AI features and your website.
- OpenAI Help Center, ChatGPT search.
See how your site does on every check.
Crawl Audit runs this check and 199 others on your domain. The full report is $7.89, one time. The free check on this site covers 25.