Summarize with AI
To explain a technical product simply, replace every term your buyer would have to look up with the result they would say out loud, and move the technical terms to your docs. Orphan page detection becomes finds the pages Google cannot reach. Core Web Vitals monitoring becomes shows which pages load too slowly to rank.
This matters most when the builders are technical and the buyer is not. Engineers name things by how they work. Buyers name them by what goes wrong in their week. Every word on your homepage that sits in the first list and not the second is a small exam the visitor has to pass, and most visitors do not sit exams. You know your product completely. The vocabulary on the page decides whether anyone else gets to.
The SEO tool homepage that needs three Google searches
Picture an SEO tool built by two engineers for marketing teams at small software companies. The headline reads Crawl budget optimisation, Core Web Vitals and orphan page detection, in one platform. The subhead reads Automated technical SEO powered by a proprietary crawler and LLM-based entity extraction. Two buttons sit under it, Start crawling and Book a demo.
Below the fold come three cards. JS rendering at scale. Canonical conflict resolution. Schema validation. The product screenshot shows a table with columns named Status, Indexability, Depth and Inlinks, and a red badge that says 412 issues.
Now picture the buyer. She runs marketing at a twenty-person startup. Her board asked why signups from Google have been flat for two quarters, and she wants more of the right people to find the site. She stops at crawl budget and opens a new tab to look it up. Then orphan page, then entity extraction. By the third tab she has stopped reading the homepage and started reading a glossary on someone else's site. That glossary links to a competitor whose headline says Find out why Google is not showing your pages. She clicks it.
Nothing on the first page is wrong. Every term is accurate. That is the trap. The page is accurate for the people who built it and opaque for the person who pays.
He explains it perfectly on calls and never on the page
On a demo the founder does not say crawl budget. He says something closer to this: we find the pages Google cannot see, and we tell you which ones to fix first. The marketer usually lights up at that point, because now she can picture her own blog posts that never showed up in search.
His cofounder wrote the homepage in a weekend. An advisor said it should sound more serious, so the next rewrite added proprietary crawler and entity extraction. The support inbox gets the same question every week, some version of what does orphan page mean. The trial signups come mostly from freelance developers and SEO consultants, who understand every word and rarely pay for a team plan. The marketing leads who would pay book demos, and each demo opens with ten minutes of translating the homepage.
Each time he reads the headline, his head fills crawl budget with everything he knows about how Google visits a site. The visitor brings none of that.
Simplify is the wrong instruction, translate is the right one
Most advice says simplify. Founders hear that and swap crawl budget optimisation for something like Smarter SEO for modern teams. That line has no jargon and no information either. It trades a page the buyer cannot read for a page that says nothing, and the buyer leaves both.
Translation is a different move. You keep the specific thing and change whose words it is in. Orphan page detection is specific in engineer language. Finds the pages no other page links to, so Google never reaches them, is just as specific in marketer language. Nothing got vaguer. The noun moved from the builder's side of the table to the buyer's.
Other advice says jargon signals depth. Nielsen Norman Group tested pages with experts in science, technology and medicine and found that even highly educated readers wanted short, scannable text, just like everyone else. If your buyer is a marketer, an operations lead or a clinic manager, jargon on the homepage does not signal depth. It signals that the page was not written for her.
Here is the claim we would defend: every term the buyer would have to look up is a visitor lost. Not most terms, and not hard terms. Every one. A homepage gets a few seconds of attention, and a lookup costs more than that.
What each looked-up term costs before the trial starts
Every visitor on that homepage was paid for, with ads or the founder's evenings on LinkedIn. The jargon raises the share of that bill that buys nothing, and more traffic only makes the waste bigger at the same rate.
The second cost hides in the signup data. A jargon homepage filters, just not in the direction you want. The people who understand every word are the developers and consultants who could almost build the tool themselves. The people who would pay for a team plan are the ones who left at the third tab. So the trial fills with the wrong users, and activation looks worse than the product deserves. Measured on SaaS and product-led companies, activation runs 20 to 40 percent for most products, and a ten point improvement typically drives a 15 to 25 percent increase in free-to-paid conversion. A trial full of people who were never the buyer drags that number down before onboarding gets a chance.
Then there is the raise. A partner who likes the company has to repeat what it does to the partnership, and crawl budget optimisation gets translated into another SEO tool. With the Series A bar for AI startups around 3.5 million in ARR, up from roughly one million three years earlier (Carta, Q1 2026), being understood quickly is not a style choice.
A jargon audit you can run this afternoon
You need your homepage, a highlighter, and one person who has never used the product.
- Paste the homepage into a doc. Keep only the first screen and the three sections under it, roughly what a stranger reads before deciding.
- Highlight every word or phrase your buyer would need to look up. Be strict. If your buyer is a marketer, then canonical, rendering and schema all count, even if you use them daily.
- Count the highlights in the first screen. One is a warning. Three or more means the page is written for the builder, whatever the headline says.
- For each highlight, write the result the buyer would say out loud. Ask yourself what she would tell her boss this feature did. Core Web Vitals becomes shows which pages load too slowly to rank. Schema validation becomes makes your pages show up with star ratings and prices in search results, if that is what it does.
- Check each translation is still specific. If it could sit on any competitor's page, such as better SEO performance, you have simplified instead of translated. Go back and name the result.
- Give the new first screen to your outsider for ten seconds. Then ask what the product does and who it is for. If she answers in your translated words, ship it. If she answers with a shrug or a buzzword, find the line she skipped.
The headline itself has a separate job, naming the input and the output, which our guide to explaining what your startup does in one line covers. The audit is for everything around it, the subhead, the cards, the screenshot labels and the button text. Start crawling is jargon too, for a marketer. Find my hidden pages is not.
Steal the buyer's words from your own sales calls
The translations already exist, in how buyers describe the problem before they know your product. Open the recordings or notes from your last ten first calls and listen only to the first five minutes, before you started explaining anything.
Write down every phrase the buyer used for the problem, word for word. For the SEO tool it might be new blog posts never show up, traffic dropped after the redesign, or Google seems to ignore half the site. None of those contain the word crawl. All of them describe what the crawler fixes. Those phrases are your headline, your cards and often the search terms your buyer types into Google and ChatGPT.
In closed deals, find the moment the prospect asked about price and note what you had just said. It is usually a plain sentence about the result that appears nowhere on the site. If you want to go further with the noun the buyer files you under, our post on naming your category on the homepage walks through testing it.
Where the technical depth goes instead
Translation does not mean deleting the engineering. The developer the marketer forwards the link to needs it. Put the depth where that reader looks, not in the first screen.
- The docs. Crawl budget, rendering and canonical rules belong here, explained fully, with examples. A technical evaluator expects to find them in docs and trusts them more there.
- A page for the technical reader. A short How it works or For developers page linked from the nav and the footer. The marketer can forward it, the engineer can check it, and neither has to read the other's page.
- Inside each card, as the second line. Lead with Finds the pages Google cannot reach, then add a small line underneath, Orphan page and crawl depth detection. The buyer reads the first line, the evaluator recognises the second.
The order is the whole rule. Outcome first, mechanism second, jargon last. Our post on features vs benefits on an AI product page argues for showing the mechanism, and it holds here too, as long as the mechanism is written in the buyer's nouns.
Dualite, an AI builder whose users are often not engineers, ran into a version of this. Its CTO could see in the usage data that first-time visitors from the non-technical crowd were not grasping who Dualite was fast enough, and that the site had to do that work before anyone opened the product. The Dualite case study shows the site we designed to lead with brand and imagery so a first-time visitor understood who Dualite was before the details. The platform now has over 100,000 users.
Why tooltips do not rescue a marketing page
The usual patch is a tooltip. Keep crawl budget in the headline, put a small question mark next to it, and let hover explain. It feels like a compromise that serves both readers. On a marketing page it serves neither.
A tooltip asks the visitor to admit she does not know the word, then stop and hover. Most will not, and on a phone there is no hover at all. Inside a product, where a user has already chosen to stay and needs a definition mid-task, a tooltip is fine. On a homepage the visitor has chosen nothing yet. If a word needs a tooltip, it needs a translation instead.
At Studio Maydit we design websites for AI founders whose product is deeper than their homepage lets on. We go through the page the way a stranger would, find the words that send buyers to a search tab, and rebuild the first screens in the language your buyers already use, with the technical depth moved to where evaluators look for it. Our website design work runs as a fixed scope in three to four weeks, and if you would rather compare studios first, this ranking of website design agencies for engineer-led startups is a fair place to start. If your homepage reads like your docs, book a 30-minute call and we will show you which words are costing you visitors.
