Do AI assistants read the PDFs on my website?

Many crawlers can extract text from a PDF, so a brochure, menu or spec sheet published as a PDF is not invisible — but it is a weaker container than a plain web page. PDFs render slower, carry their text in a format that is easy to garble, and often bury the very facts an assistant most wants to quote — hours, services, location, pricing — so anything load-bearing trapped only in a PDF risks being read partially or skipped under a tight fetch budget. The reliable move is to put the facts that decide a recommendation in real HTML: a readable page with headings, plain text and structured data, where a crawler finds them on the first pass. Treat PDFs as a supplement, not the home of anything that matters. A PDF is fine for the full catalog or the detailed datasheet; it is a poor place to keep the one sentence that tells an assistant what you do and where you do it.

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