SEO = how ready the site is for Google. AI Search = how likely ChatGPT, Perplexity & Google AI are to find and quote them.
The homepage title is still the factory default 'New Home' - the most important line Google and AI read, and it never says 'hair salon' or 'Houston Heights'.
They win their own name and show up for the broad 'hair salon houston heights' search, but they vanish on real money searches like 'balayage houston heights' where competitors with dedicated service pages take every spot.
weak - there is no structured data (no LocalBusiness or FAQ schema), no meta description, and the page title is the leftover placeholder 'New Home', so AI tools have almost nothing clean to quote and lean on Yelp and Booksy instead of the salon's own site.
Site loads fast and is secure (HTTPS) and mobile-friendly.
Name, address, and phone are on the page for both Heights locations (713-864-1977 and 346-335-8449, 1051 Heights Blvd).
Good amount of real copy on the homepage (about 1,000 words) telling the salon story.
Photos use modern responsive loading so the page stays quick.
Strong off-site reputation: 317 reviews on Yelp plus Booksy and Visit Houston listings feeding their name.
The homepage title still says 'New Home' - a leftover placeholder. This is the single biggest line Google and AI show, and it says nothing about a hair salon in Houston Heights.
No meta description, so Google writes its own random snippet under their listing.
No sitemap.xml (returns a 404) and the robots.txt is blank, so search engines get no map of the site.
No business schema (LocalBusiness, address, hours, services) anywhere on the page - this is what AI search and Google rich results read first.
Four H1 headings on one page (should be exactly one) confuses search engines about the main topic.
89 of 108 images have blank alt text, hurting accessibility and image search.
No service pages for money terms like balayage, color, or extensions, so they lose those searches to competitors.
No FAQ content and no llms.txt, so AI tools have nothing easy to lift and cite.