Good housekeeping

Tonight, a grieving family will choose a funeral director. There is every chance they will 'speak' to an AI assistant first, intentionally or otherwise. The trouble with this scenario isn't just that AI might get it all wrong about your funeral home, it's that it will do so with absolute confidence.

I ran a simple experiment across three towns to see which funeral director an AI model would recommend. In one instance I was directed to a firm in a completely different town because it ranked higher than the long-established one on the bereaved's doorstep. Some 90 years of service and an excellent reputation locally didn't result in a recommendation. In another case, I was given the number of a florist, presumably because the local funeral director had either neglected its online presence or let its website fall badly out of date.

There's a clear case for funeral directors to pay attention to how they appear online because AI is not as futuristic, or as mysterious, as you might think. Depending on what you ask it, it will quietly perform a web search, crawl the top few results, and basically hand back its findings with a little light rephrasing and a great deal of unwarranted authority.

Context is everything. If you ask a general question about death and dying, the AI engine is likely to lean on its training data (often a couple of years out of date). Occasionally it will ground itself in gov.uk or a blog from a charity or non-profit, but it won't put forward a local funeral director at this stage, although it may recommend you call one.

Ask it to recommend a funeral director in a particular town, and AI starts searching the internet exactly as a consumer would: funeral directors in [town]. That's where the trouble begins.

It isn't wizardry that decides whether an AI sends a grieving family to your door.

Directory and review sites often rank higher than local firms' websites, so whichever funeral director holds pole position on those sites will be the one AI is most likely to name first. If that's not you, you're not in the conversation.

The third scenario is where you ask it about a particular business. You'll be glad to hear most AIs are getting better at admitting when they can't find something, but sometimes they still guess – for example if two businesses have a similar or the same name.

The most likely query is people asking what a funeral with you might cost. Again, the AI will crawl your website, so you have to make it easy to find or run the risk of it putting off your prospective family. You need to apply more effort to presenting your pricing information and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) than you might think. Pricing info needs to be search engine optimised, well written and properly structured to make it easy for AI to read. Do that and your pricing is far more likely to be quoted accurately.

Look after your Google Business Profile, claim top-ranking directory opportunities and run your own tests to see what happens in your town. Run the scenarios prospective clients are most likely to ask, see what it replies and pay attention to the sources cited. If they belong to you, keep them up to date.

This isn't wizardry; it's housekeeping that decides whether an AI sends a grieving family to your door or, as it did for me, to a florist.