5 minute read
What 18 Denver funeral home websites tell AI assistants (and what they leave out)
We read 18 Denver-area funeral home websites the way an AI assistant would. Most promote pre-planning; far fewer give the prices and hours families ask about.
When a family asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about funeral homes, the assistant builds its answer from what it can read on the web. So we read 18 Denver-area funeral home websites the same way, looking for the facts families ask about most: pre-planning, prices and hours. This is a small, first look, not a census, and we name no businesses here.
What we found
| Finding | Sites |
|---|---|
| Mention pre-planning | 16 of 18 |
| Show prices or link a price list | 9 of 18 |
| Same, excluding 4 pages on one national chain's site | 5 of 14 |
| List specific business hours on the page we read | 3 of 18 |
| Run on the same website platform | 5 of 18 |
| Show a phone number | 18 of 18 |
What it means
Pre-planning is promoted everywhere, but rarely explained. Nearly every site invites families to pre-plan. Far fewer answer the next question a family asks: what does it cost? Among the 14 independent and local sites, only 5 showed a price or linked a price list on the page we read. An assistant asked "how much does cremation cost in Aurora?" can only quote providers that publish something.
"Available 24/7" isn't an answer to "when are you open?" Most sites say they are reachable around the clock by phone, which is true and important. But only 3 listed office or arrangement hours. Assistants answering a scheduling question need specific hours, ideally the same on the website and on every listing.
Platform defaults matter. Five of the 18 sites run on the same funeral website platform. When that many sites share one vendor, that vendor's default settings, such as page structure and structured data, shape how a big share of the market reads to AI assistants.
The most answer-ready approach we saw was simple. One independent provider put a starting price for direct cremation on its homepage and linked its full price list. That's exactly the kind of specific, quotable fact assistants look for.
Template leftovers happen. Two sites still showed placeholder text from their website templates. It's a small thing for a person to skip past, and a confusing signal for a machine.
What a funeral provider can do this month
- Publish a short pricing page that summarizes starting prices and links your General Price List.
- List arrangement and office hours alongside "available 24/7," and match them on every listing.
- Give each location its own page with its address, hours, services and traditions served.
- Ask your website vendor what structured data they add, and whether it describes each location separately.
- Read your own site top to bottom for template text and outdated names.
How we did this
On October 30, 2026 we built a list of 25 Denver-metro funeral and cremation providers from web searches by city, excluding directories and lead-generation sites. We could read usable page content for 18. For several, the page we read was an inner page rather than the homepage, and four were location pages on one national chain's shared website. A fact not on the page we read may still exist elsewhere on a site, so treat these as lower bounds. We did not check robots.txt or AI crawler settings in this round. We plan to repeat this with live AI assistant answers and a larger sample.
Want to see how assistants answer for your own homes? Run the free live check or see how we help funeral and memorial providers.