The instinct makes sense.
You’ve already got the document. A casket and urn catalogue, laid out properly in InDesign. A restaurant menu that’s going to the printer anyway. An information booklet that took weeks to write. It looks good, you can update it yourself, and uploading it as a PDF feels like the obvious move.
We see this most often with two types of clients: funeral homes and hospitality businesses. Different industries, same logic. The document already exists for print, so why not just put it on the website?
We’ve heard this reasoning dozens of times. And we get it. The appeal of control is real.
We spend a lot of time helping funeral homes and service businesses move key content out of PDFs and into pages that are easier for customers to use and easier for teams to manage. It’s one of the most consistent improvements we make, and one clients often resist until they see the difference for themselves.
But here’s what we’ve noticed: the “easy” part only feels easy from the inside. For your customers, a PDF on your website creates friction at almost every step. And in 2026, it’s creating a problem most businesses haven’t caught up with yet.
Key Takeaways
- Updating a PDF takes 7 steps and can break existing links. Updating a web page takes 2.
- Over 62% of web traffic is now on mobile, and PDFs on phones often open in a clunky viewer or a separate app with no click-to-call and no easy way back.
- Google AI Overviews now appear in roughly half of all searches, and structured web pages are far better placed to appear in those answers than PDFs.
- Analytics can show you exactly how someone moves through a web page. A PDF download tells you nothing after the click.
The “easier to update” argument has a flaw
We’ve done this exercise in client meetings: write out every step it actually takes to update a PDF on your website.
Updating a PDF usually means opening the source file, editing it, exporting it again, logging into the site, replacing the old file, and checking nothing broke. If the link breaks, which happens more than it should, anyone who bookmarked the page or shared the URL hits a dead end. Google may still show the old version for weeks.
Updating a web page is usually just logging in, changing the content, and hitting publish. Two minutes, and the change is live.
We cover those updates for clients as part of our monthly work anyway. But for business owners who want to manage content themselves, the PDF workflow is genuinely more work, not less. The perception of control is there. The actual ease isn’t.
Updating a PDF hosted on a website requires a minimum of seven steps (editing the source file, re-exporting, uploading the new version, and verifying the URL still works) compared to two steps for editing a web page directly in a CMS. Broken links after PDF replacements are common and may not be noticed until a customer reports them.
PDFs on mobile are a poor experience
Mobile devices now account for 62.54% of all global web traffic (Statista, Q2 2025). Most of your customers aren’t sitting at a desk when they find you. They’re on their phones.
Pick up your phone. Find a PDF link on a website. Watch what happens.
On many phones, a PDF opens in a clunky browser viewer, prompts a download, or kicks the user into a separate app. Once you’re in the PDF viewer, you’re stuck. There’s no button to call the business. There’s no way to navigate back to the website. You have to close the app, find your browser again, and try to remember where you were.
Think about who that affects most: a family who has just lost someone, searching on their phone for a funeral home and trying to find pricing, services, and what to do next. Or someone standing outside a restaurant deciding whether to go in, pulling up the menu. In both cases, a PDF that won’t load properly, or opens in a clunky viewer with no way to book or call, is a reason to try somewhere else. Nielsen Norman Group, after 20 years of user research on PDF behaviour, found that users actively avoid and abandon PDF content online, describing it as “unfit for digital-content display.” The stakes vary by industry. The friction is the same either way.
A web page works as designed on every device. The phone number is a tappable link. The contact form is right there. There’s nowhere to get lost.
PDFs break the journey
When someone opens your catalogue PDF, they disappear.
There’s no “get in touch” button inside the file. There’s no link to your pricing page or your contact form. There’s no suggested next step. Whether they went on to call you, read more, or just closed the tab, you’ll never know.
We work with one funeral home client whose caskets and urns page gets 661 visitors a month and 337 clicks per month from Google alone. What makes it genuinely valuable isn’t just the traffic. It’s what happens after. Sixteen percent of visitors who land on that page immediately go on to visit another page. That’s families moving through the site, building trust, finding their way toward a decision.
That entire journey breaks if the content lives in a PDF instead.
The same pattern plays out with restaurant menus. A browsable online menu, properly built for mobile and with a reservation button at the bottom, keeps a potential diner engaged. A PDF menu download ends the conversation. A web page keeps it going. There’s no clear next step from a file, no booking prompt, no link to specials, and no easy path back into the rest of the site.
A web page keeps visitors in your environment and gives them a natural next step. A PDF download does neither.
Web pages guide visitors through a natural journey, from product information to pricing to contact, via internal links and calls to action. A PDF download removes that path entirely. Once a visitor has the file, there is no mechanism to direct them back to making an enquiry, regardless of how well the PDF content itself is written.
AI search tools can’t see your PDF
This is the argument that lands differently from the usual SEO conversation.
Most people have heard that Google prefers web pages over PDFs. That’s been true for years. What’s changed, and what most businesses haven’t caught up with yet, is how people are now searching.
Google AI Overviews now appear in approximately 50% of all Google searches (BrightEdge, May 2025), up from near zero in mid-2024. ChatGPT reached 400 million weekly active users in early 2025. Perplexity processes hundreds of millions of queries a month. These tools are not a niche experiment. They’re where a significant portion of your customers are starting their research.
And those AI-generated answers are built from web pages. Google’s own documentation confirms that AI features rely on indexed HTML content. In practice, PDFs are far less useful to these systems than structured web pages. A PDF doesn’t have headings in the way HTML does. It doesn’t have links AI systems can follow. It’s a much weaker format for citation and summarisation than a well-structured web page.
For businesses in sensitive, high-consideration services, that matters more than most. If families are researching funeral homes through AI-assisted search, or diners are asking an AI assistant what a restaurant has on its menu, you want your content in a format those systems can actually understand.
We’re still in the early stages of AI-assisted search. But the direction is clear. If your key content is locked in PDFs, it’s already at a disadvantage for a growing portion of how people find services. That gap is only going to widen as AI-assisted search becomes a more normal part of how people research services.
Google AI Overviews, which now appear in approximately half of all Google searches, rely on indexed HTML content to generate answers (Google Search Central, 2025). PDFs are a far weaker format for AI-generated discovery than structured web pages. Businesses storing key content in PDFs are significantly less likely to appear in AI-generated search results, regardless of how their PDF performs in traditional search.
Google still ranks web pages higher
Even setting AI search aside, traditional search still favours HTML over PDF.
Google can read some PDF text, but it handles PDFs less effectively than equivalent HTML pages. It can’t use internal linking in the same way, and it doesn’t understand page structure as well as it does on a proper web page. If a site has both a web page and a PDF with similar content, Google treats the HTML page as the lead version and is more likely to rank it (Ahrefs, 2024).
We’ve seen this in practice. One client has a PDF of funeral poems that ranks at position five for its target search term. That sounds reasonable until you consider: the same content as a proper web page, with headings, internal links, a structured layout, would likely rank meaningfully higher. Google can read the words, but it can’t see the structure.
The difference between position two and position five isn’t pride. It’s a real, measurable difference in who finds you.
You can’t measure anything inside a PDF
Here’s what a good analytics setup tells us about a web page: how many people visited, where they came from, how long they stayed, how far they scrolled, and where they went next.
For one client’s product page, we can see visitors spend an average of 21 seconds on it and scroll to 64% depth. We can tell whether they arrived from Google or from a social media post. We can see the exact search term they typed before landing.
None of that visibility exists with a PDF download.
A PDF download tells you someone clicked a link. That’s it. You don’t know what they looked at, what made them interested, or why they didn’t get in touch. You’re making decisions about your content in the dark.
Web pages give you real information to work with. They let you see what’s connecting with people and change what isn’t.
Website analytics tools track visitor behaviour at the page level: time on page, scroll depth, traffic source, and click-through patterns. None of this data is available for PDF downloads, which record only that a file was accessed. Businesses relying on PDFs for key content are making decisions without the behavioural data needed to improve them.
What to do instead
The answer isn’t complicated.
A well-structured web page with clear sections can be updated in two minutes. If you need to change a price, add a product, or update an address, you log in, find the section, make the change, publish. No InDesign. No exporting. No checking if a link still works.
Everything businesses have been putting in PDFs (casket catalogues, pricing guides, restaurant menus, information booklets) works better as a web page. It’s readable on mobile. Search engines can index it properly. AI tools can cite it. It keeps visitors moving through your site. And it shows you what people are actually engaging with.
We’ve done this for funeral home clients with casket and urn catalogues that now rank in search and drive measurable enquiries. We’ve done it for hospitality clients whose menus are browsable on any device, updated in minutes, and compatible across every browser. In both cases, the clients who were most resistant to moving away from PDFs are now the ones who’d never go back.
When PDFs do make sense
To be clear: we’re not anti-PDF. There are situations where they’re the right tool.
- Printable documents. Forms, legal paperwork, consent documents people need to sign and return.
- Long publications and reports. Annual reports, research documents, anything designed to be read offline or in print.
- Offline use. Guides or reference material people genuinely need to access without an internet connection.
The key is this: PDFs should support your website, not replace it. When a PDF is a download option alongside proper web content, it works well. When it’s doing the job a web page should be doing, it’s working against you. The PDF can be the optional extra.
If you’ve got catalogues, pricing, or service information sitting in PDFs, we can turn them into pages your customers can actually use.
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Transforming technical complexity into business clarity is what Gareth does best.
Gareth has been building for the web since the mid-90s, from the early mono screen hand-coded days to leading large ISPs and telcos, and now as co-founder and technical lead at Weave Digital Studio with his wife, Liz.
At Weave, he helps professional services, science organisations, and agritech teams turn complex, data-heavy information into clear, compelling digital solutions that engage the right audiences and support informed decision-making.
Through HumanKind Funeral Websites, Gareth brings more than a decade of specialist experience in the funeral and death-care sector. Having built over 70 funeral, cremation, and embalming websites, he understands the unique compliance requirements, audience sensitivities, and industry best practices needed to create dignified, reliable platforms for families and communities.
An advocate for open source, online privacy, and high-performance hosting, Gareth also manages a custom WordPress hosting stack powering hundreds of sites across New Zealand and Australia.
He’s fuelled by single origin coffee, vinyl records, calisthenics for fitness, and a steady supply of bad dad jokes – plus the occasional game of netball to keep him honest.