A homepage headline that says what you do

Half of recently funded startups open their homepage with a slogan. A headline that names what you sell and who it's for works better for buyers, investors and answer engines. How we write one, with a test you can run in a minute.

By Ketan Pandey Published October 18, 2026 3 min read Writing

Your homepage headline has one job: tell a stranger what you sell and, ideally, who it’s for. Most don’t. When we read the homepages of 161 startups that raised money in the last year, 51% of the headlines were slogans, and only 19% opened with a sentence that named the company and said what it does. The fix is rarely clever writing. It’s usually moving a sentence you already have to the top of the page.

Why the slogan feels right and isn’t

Slogans feel like branding. “Security at the speed of development” sounds confident, fits on a billboard, and offends nobody in the pitch meeting. The trouble is that it fits a hundred companies equally well, so it tells the reader nothing about yours.

The people reading your headline don’t have the context you have. A buyer clicked through from a search result or a link in a group chat. An investor has thirty tabs open. An answer engine is deciding, from the first lines of your page, what to say when someone asks what you do. All three need a plain description first. The mood can come second.

The shape that works

The headlines that read well in our sample follow a short pattern: the kind of product, then who it’s for.

“AIOps agents for ML teams.”
“AI Associates for Private Equity.”
“The agentic OS for medical labs.”

Four to six words. A stranger could repeat it to a friend. None of them is dull, because specificity is more interesting than adjectives.

When we write one with a founder, we work from three blanks:

What kind of thing is it? A noun a buyer would use. “Payroll software”, “a clinic”, “an API”. Not “platform” or “solution”, which are nouns nobody searches for.
Who is it for? A group someone could point at. “Hotel groups”, “loan officers”, “Series A founders”. “Teams” and “businesses” don’t count, because everyone is one.
What’s different? Only if it fits. This often belongs in the line underneath rather than the headline.

Fill in the first two and you have a headline. The third is the subtitle.

Keep the line you love, just lower down

Founders often resist this because the slogan carries the brand’s voice. Fine: keep it. Put it in the subtitle, the section below the fold, the deck, the footer. What matters is the order. Description first, voice second. The visitor who understands what you do in the first line will happily read the clever one next.

You’ve probably already written it

The quickest source is your own meta description. In the same study, 42% of startups opened their meta description with the company doing something concrete, against 19% on the page itself. Plenty of teams write the plain sentence for Google and leave it off the homepage.

So, before you brainstorm:

Open your homepage’s source and find the meta description.
If its first sentence names what you sell, move it into the headline or the paragraph right under it.
If it doesn’t, that’s the sentence to write first, and it fixes both places.

A one-minute test

Show your headline, and only your headline, to someone outside the company for five seconds. Then ask: what does this company sell, and who buys it? If they can’t answer both, the headline is a slogan. Our homepage clarity checker runs a similar check on any homepage URL.

Then check that the machines can see it. Many AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript, and 16% of the homepages in our sample had no headline at all in the HTML the server sent. Our AI visibility checker reads your page the way those crawlers do and tells you whether there is one clear main heading.

Where this sits

This is the first sentence of the copywriting approach we use on every site, and the one that does the most work for answer engines. It only works when the positioning underneath is settled: you can’t say who you’re for in six words until you’ve decided.