With the rise of AI, many people no longer just use Google. Instead, they now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI tools and receive answers immediately. As a website owner, you need to make sure that your website is capable of providing the information AI needs. It’s not just humans that should understand your website content, but AI should too. One very important thing you can do, which still works, is to follow SEO’s best practices when building your website.
Good HTML Structure Helps Everyone
One basic SEO standard is to follow a good HTML structure. A good HTML structure uses the correct HTML tags, such as using the proper headings for specific parts of a web page. Another is using HTML tags for specific things like the header, footer, video, or audio. Try to avoid using generic HTML tags like `div` for everything because they don’t give AI as much context.
A well-structured page is not just easy for humans to read, but also for search engines and AI to interpret.
Don’t Hide Important Information
If something is essential to your website visitors, that information should be accessible right away. Adding accordions, tabs, or “read more” buttons may aesthetically look nice, but people nowadays prefer information to be readily available instead of being buried behind multiple clicks.
This also makes it easier for AI to find and understand the information instead of having to go through different pages and try to stitch the context together, which may result in it interpreting the information incorrectly.
Collapsible content is not necessarily bad, but it needs to be used with purpose. If the information is important, don’t make your visitors work to find it.
Speed Matters More Than Ever
It’s been a known fact that fast pages create a better user experience, but this has become even more important because AI is fast. People are now used to getting answers almost instantly, and they expect websites to load quickly as well.
A website that is slow to load can create a poor experience for both visitors and the systems trying to access it. And this is relatively simple to improve. Optimising your website images, using efficient and lean code, and choosing good hosting are some of the things you can do to improve your website’s performance.
Make Your Content Easy to Understand
This goes without saying, but it is one of the most important things you need to do on your website. Using jargon and big words might look good at first pass, but they often make it harder for everyday customers to understand.. Your website is not there to impress people (well, partly), but to help them get what they need. Most industries have industry terms and jargon, but often the customers and AI won’t know them. Using them in your content often just increases confusion.
The content should clearly explain the purpose of your website. The language should be unambiguous, straightforward, and natural. Basically, it should answer the questions users are looking for without giving them a challenge.
If someone has to read your paragraph three times to understand what you are trying to say, there is a good chance a machine will have trouble understanding it too.
Accessibility Benefits AI Too
The core purpose of accessibility compliance on websites is to allow people with disabilities to still interact with websites using the aids available to them. These aids can rely on information provided by the website that may not be immediately obvious to a normal website visitor.
This can include a description of an image through alternative text or a label for an icon using `aria-label`. These help assistive technologies understand what is on the page.
AI is basically a machine. If your website is structured in a way that helps assistive technologies understand it, there is a good chance that the same clear structure will also help other machines understand your website.
What About llms.txt?
You may have heard about `llms.txt`. Although it provides an overview of what the website is about, most of the time it doesn’t provide the actual answers to the questions that people are searching for.
An organised, fast, and well-structured website will deliver more value than relying on a single file. `llms.txt` can be something you add to your website, but it shouldn’t be treated as a replacement for having a properly built website in the first place.
AI is changing how information is discovered. The traditional practices that make websites easier for people also do the same for AI. If you focus on the page structure, fast performance, accessibility, and high-quality content of your website, then you are already prepared for humans, search engines, and AI tools.
Not sure how your website stacks up for AI crawlability? Anomalys experts continue to proactively keep up to date with AI and the rapidly changing landscape around it. Contact Anomaly today either through our contact form, or email us directly, to find out how your website is viewed by AI.
