Most writing about optimising for AI search is produced by people selling it, about work done for somebody else, with results nobody outside can check. This is an account of doing it to our own site, where the before and after are both public and we have no way to quietly drop the parts that did not work.
Over a week in October we rewrote the search title and description for every page on this site — sixty of them — along with the structured data underneath. Here is what that actually involved.
The starting point was worse than we thought
We began by fetching the live title and description for every URL in our own sitemap and reading them as a single list. The result was not flattering. Our industries page introduced itself to the world as "Industries — WMAD". Our India page said "WMAD in India — WMAD". Nineteen descriptions ran past the length Google will display, several by a wide margin, which means the sentence meant to do the persuading was cut off mid-clause.
None of this was visible from inside the site. Every page looked fine. The damage was confined entirely to the search result — the only part of your site a stranger meets before deciding whether to click.
Titles: lead with the words people actually type
The first rule we settled on was to open every title with the phrase a buyer would search for, rather than with our own brand or our internal naming. "Industries — WMAD" became "Software Engineering for FinTech, Health & Industry". "WMAD in India" became "Software & AI Engineering Company in Bengaluru, India".
The second rule mattered more than we expected: a title has to describe what the page's main heading is genuinely about. Google regularly rewrites titles it judges unrepresentative of the page, and when it rewrites yours, you have lost control of the sentence altogether. A clever title that does not match the content is worse than a plain one that does, because the clever one gets replaced by something you did not choose.
Descriptions: only the first 120 characters reliably survive
We wrote every description to land between 140 and 160 characters, with the actual offer inside the first 120. On a phone the remainder is frequently truncated, and a description whose point arrives in the final clause is a description nobody finishes.
We also stopped writing them as marketing copy and started writing them as factual summaries, naming specific regulations, specific services and specific countries. That change was made with one eye on the search result and one on something else entirely.