Source material
Five copies of your hours, and the one the assistant happens to find
There is no more answerable question than when are you open, and there is no question a business gets wrong more often, because the answer is published in five places, edited in one, sometimes drawn as a picture, and different for the kitchen than for the door. None of that is a retrieval problem. All of it is a publishing problem with a one afternoon fix.
Why this one is harder than it looks
Hours multiply. They end up in the site footer, on a contact page, on a location page, inside a map embed, in a booking widget, and in a seasonal banner somebody added last year. Two documents whose extracted text is identical are stored once, so five identical copies collapse harmlessly into one. The trouble is that they are never identical. One says the winter hours, one says the old Sunday time, and because they differ they are all stored, and any of them can be the passage that answers.
A significant share of hours are not text at all. A designed graphic on a homepage, a photograph of a sign, a map embed that draws its own information panel. Text in an image is not read, and a map embed's panel is not the page's text, so the hours a visitor can plainly see may be entirely absent from what was indexed.
Multiple sites make every passage ambiguous unless each one names itself. A block of hours under a heading that only says Opening Hours, on a page about one branch, is complete to a person looking at the page and anonymous once it becomes a passage. Retrieved against a question about the other branch, it answers with total confidence.
Then the two variations that generate the most annoyance: seasonal and holiday changes, which are usually made by editing the main hours and are therefore invisible and unreviewable, and service times that differ from door times. Last orders, kitchen close, counter close, last entry. Somebody arriving twenty minutes before the door shuts and being told the kitchen closed an hour ago had an accurate answer to the wrong question.
What it has to contain
Structure rather than wording. A passage pulled out of this document has to stand on its own, because that is the only form in which it will ever be read.
| One maintained page per site, and no other copy | A single page owning the hours for each location. Every other appearance of hours anywhere on the site either points at it or is deleted. If a footer must show them, accept that it is a second copy and keep it generated from the same source rather than typed again. |
|---|---|
| Hours as text, one line per day | Written out day by day, in words and figures, not as a graphic and not only inside a map panel. Days spelled out rather than abbreviated, and closed days stated as closed rather than left blank, because a blank is not a fact and cannot be retrieved as one. |
| The site named inside every block | The branch or venue name in the heading and again in the first line of the hours, so a passage carries its own identity. This costs one repetition and removes the entire category of the right hours for the wrong place. |
| Service times written separately from door times | Last orders, kitchen hours, counter close, last entry, each on its own line with its own label. Not as a note under the main hours, because a note attached to a table is the first thing to be separated from it. |
| A dated exceptions section for holidays and seasons | Under its own heading, with actual dates and actual times, added rather than substituted. A dated exception can be reviewed and can be seen to be stale. An edited main table cannot, because nothing about it says what it used to be. |
The rewrite, in order
Find every copy and delete all but one
Search your own site for the hours. You will find more than you expect, and at least one will be wrong. Pick the page that will own them, make sure it is the page a visitor would land on, and remove the rest or make them point at it.
This is the whole fix for most businesses and it is unglamorous work. The reason it matters more than any wording change is that a second copy is not a duplicate, it is a competing answer, and there is nothing in the material to say which of two contradictory blocks is current.
If a copy has to stay, such as a footer, make it a copy in the mechanical sense: one source, shown in two places, edited once. Two blocks typed by two people in two years is exactly how a business ends up publishing two sets of Sunday hours.
Take the hours out of the picture
Anything drawn as a graphic has to be typed out as well. A file is read page by page as text and text inside an image is not read at all, so a beautifully set graphic of your hours contributes nothing. The same applies to a photograph of the sign on the door, which is a surprisingly common way to publish this.
Map embeds are the other blind spot. The panel a visitor sees is not part of your page's text, so hours that appear only there are invisible. Write them on the page as well, immediately beside the map, where they also help everybody using a screen reader.
While you are at it, check the address and the phone number for the same problem. They are frequently set in the same graphic and lost for the same reason.
Write the service times as their own lines
Kitchen open and kitchen close. Last orders at the bar. Last entry. Last appointment. Counter close. Every business has at least one of these and most publish none of them, on the reasonable assumption that regulars know.
Give each one its own labelled line under the hours, with the day pattern if it differs at weekends. These lines answer a question that is asked constantly, is currently answered by a phone call, and would otherwise produce either a refusal or, worse, the door time offered confidently in its place.
Give exceptions a dated section and a review habit
Add a heading for holiday and seasonal hours and write the exceptions under it with their dates: the date, the site, and the times, or the word closed. Leave the normal hours untouched above.
Add the dates to a calendar somewhere real so somebody removes them when they pass. A dated exception that has gone by is obviously stale to a reader and is still perfectly retrievable, so the review is the other half of the fix rather than an optional extra.
The reason to add rather than to substitute is recoverability. Businesses that edit their main hours for the summer routinely forget to edit them back, and nothing in the document remembers what they were.
What happens if you skip it
Correct hours, confidently given, for the wrong site or the wrong season
Somebody asks whether you are open on Sunday. The passage that matches is a block of hours, and it is a genuine block of your hours: from the other branch, or from the seasonal banner that was accurate in August. It is precise, it is cited, and there is nothing in it that would have told anybody it was the wrong one.
The cost is somebody standing outside a closed door, and it is worse than most wrong answers because it is unambiguous and it wasted a journey. It is also the cheapest failure in this entire set to eliminate, because it is caused by copies and by pictures rather than by anything difficult.
Check it against this
Before you index it
- Exactly one page owns the hours for each site
- No hours exist only in a graphic, a photograph or a map panel
- Every hours block names its site in the text
- Days are written out and closed days say closed
- Kitchen, last orders and last entry times have their own labelled lines
- Holiday and seasonal changes are dated exceptions, not edits
- Somebody owns the job of removing exceptions once they have passed
Questions
- Should we index the hours as a separate small document?
- A short focused document works well, because a small block of text about one subject matches strongly and carries no competing material. The condition is the same as ever: it has to be the only copy, or the fix has recreated the problem it solved.
- Our hours differ per department. How do we write that?
- One labelled line per department, on the same page, with the department named on the line. Departments are the same problem as sites and take the same solution: the name has to be inside the block rather than above it.
- Can the assistant say whether we are open right now?
- It answers from documents, and a document holds a schedule rather than a clock. Publish the schedule clearly and expect the answer to be the schedule. Asking it to reason about the current time from a page of hours is a different thing and not what it is doing.
Keep reading
- The question this document answersWhat the visitor is really asking, and where an answer becomes a handover.
- How to write a pricing page an AI assistant can quote fromPrices that only exist in an interactive component are not in the text at all. How to publish pricing an assistant can quote without inventing.
- How to structure a shipping and delivery table an assistant can readA zone by service grid loses its meaning one row at a time. How to write delivery information that survives being split into passages.
- How to write a product spec sheet an assistant can answer fromEvery value on a spec sheet depends on the model name at the top. What to repeat, what to spell out, and why a downloadable sheet is never read.
- Every kind of source materialWhat to feed an assistant, and the surgery each document needs first.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.