I spent the better part of last week looking at Richardson Bay Boatworks the way someone looking for a craftsman to restore a wooden boat would look at it. Not the yard — I haven't been by yet — but everything a person sees before they ever set foot on Marinship Way. The website, the map listing, the AI search results, the reviews, the way you show up when somebody types "wooden boat restoration Sausalito" into the thing on their phone. I wanted to see what they'd see.
This is a letter about what I found, what we did about some of it, and what I think is worth doing next. It's longer than an email and shorter than a meeting. You can put it down whenever you want.
The short version, since you're busy: the work in the yard is excellent and the work outside the yard isn't keeping up with it. If I had to grade the digital storefront the way a surveyor grades a hull, I'd put it at a D+ — sound underneath, but a lot of the small things that signal seriousness to a stranger are missing. Not broken, just absent. Which, in a way, is harder to spot than broken.
Here is what I mean by absent. There are no meta descriptions on any page, which is the one-line summary Google reads before it decides what to show somebody. There is no structured data — the hidden block of code that tells Google and ChatGPT and Perplexity what the business actually is. No Open Graph tags, so when someone shares a link to the site in iMessage or on Facebook, it shows up as a bare URL instead of a card with a photo. No canonical URLs, no robots file, no sitemap. The logo image has no alt text. Most pages have fewer than two hundred words on them. These are not things customers see, exactly — but they are the things that decide whether the site shows up to be seen at all.
One concrete thing: the phone number on your CMac.ws profile says (415) 331-0742. The number on your own site says (415) 497-6493. Google notices this kind of inconsistency and quietly stops trusting the listing. It's a fifteen-minute fix and you can do it yourself; I just want you to know it's costing you something every week it sits there. There are also thirteen photos on your Yelp that aren't on the website, which is the wrong way around — the website should be where the best photos live.
a paragraph about ai searchI'd skip this section a year ago. I can't skip it now. When somebody types "best boat restoration Sausalito" into ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overview — and roughly thirty to forty percent of commercial research is now happening this way — your business does not get cited. Bayside Boatworks, which is literally next door at 2360 Marinship Way, does. The AI models don't know to mention you because there isn't enough structured, citable information about you on the open web for them to pull from. They are not punishing you. They simply can't find you the way they've been taught to find businesses.
That is fixable. It's most of what we do.
I want to slow down and talk about Yankee for a minute, because this is the thing that surprised me most and it isn't anywhere on your website.
Ross is the lead boatwright on the Yankee restoration. That is — I don't have to tell you, but I'll say it out loud — one of the most significant historic wooden vessel projects on the West Coast right now. It's documented at yankee2026.org. You're managing the day-to-day. Three generations of Sommer craft are sitting inside one project, and the only place on the open web that names Richardson Bay Boatworks in connection with it is a paragraph someone else wrote.
In the entire business, this is the single largest piece of credibility that isn't doing any work for you. A page about Yankee — even a quiet one, with photographs and the dates of the milestones — would generate links from maritime publications and citations from AI search on its own, without anyone selling anything. — what I'd write Ross, if Ross asked
A "current projects" page is not marketing. It's a record. Boatwrights have been keeping records of restorations for a hundred and fifty years. The web is just the next place that record lives.
02 — the new siteWhile I was looking at all this, I went ahead and built a version of the site the way I'd build it for a yard I respected. Not to sell it to you — to show you what the floor actually looks like in 2026. It's live; you can look at it from your phone.
What's on it that wasn't on the old one: proper structured data so Google and the AI models can read the business correctly (LocalBusiness, WebSite, and FAQPage schemas — the last one is the most under-rated, because pages with FAQ schema get cited by AI search roughly 2.1 times more often than pages without it). Open Graph and Twitter Card tags, so shared links look like they should. A robots file that explicitly allows the AI crawlers — which, by default, many sites accidentally block. A sitemap. Real photographs from the yard, optimized so they load on a phone over a slow connection. A FAQ section answering the actual questions people ask. The site is fast, it works on a phone, and it gets out of the way of the photographs, which is what it should do.
It is not, I want to say plainly, a finished product. It's the floor.
Before I get to anything about the two of us working together, I want to give you the list of things that are genuinely free or cheap, that you can knock out in a weekend. I'd rather you fix these whether you ever hire us or not.
- Update the phone number on your CMac.ws listing to match the website.free · about 15 minutes
- Add a one-sentence meta description to each page of the current site.free if you have site access
- Submit a sitemap to Google Search Console.free · one afternoon to set up
- Reply to your existing Yelp reviews. Even a short thank-you helps the listing.free · half an hour
- Add alt text to the logo and every photograph.free · couple of hours
These are the easy ones. You can do them in a weekend, and you should. The hard part isn't doing them once — it's doing the next thing, and the next thing after that, every month, for as long as the business has a website. That's a different kind of job, and it's the one we do.
You know better than most people that you don't paint the bottom of a hull once and call it done. Salt water never stops. The web is the same way, only the salt water is Google changing its algorithm three to five times a year, Schema.org publishing updates two or three times a year, ChatGPT and Perplexity retraining their models on a weekly cycle, and your competitors — Bayside especially — quietly adding photographs and review responses and new pages in the background. None of these things announce themselves. They just slowly move the floor.
What that means in practice is this: we run a monthly plan at $597 called Get Found — no contract, leave whenever — that covers monthly Yankee Project updates as new photos and milestones come in, weekly AI citation checks across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, schema updates as the standard evolves, response to Google's major algorithm changes, help generating reviews on your Business Profile, a quarterly look at what Bayside and the others are doing, two new content pages a quarter (the natural ones — case studies of restorations you finish), and a monthly report written in plain English. There is also a lighter plan at $197 called Discovered that is monitoring and small fixes only. Most boatyards we work with sit on Get Found for the first year because of the content, then drop to Discovered once the library is built. That part is up to you.
If none of that is interesting, the website we built for you is still there and you can have it. We didn't build it to hold it hostage. We built it because looking at problems and not fixing them feels strange to me.