Plain-English website guide

How to make your website easier for AI to understand

Start with clear business facts—not technical tricks. Then make those same facts consistent across the page, metadata, and structured data.

You do not need to learn a new language to improve the evidence on your website. Begin with the questions a customer—and any system summarizing your business—must answer.

1. Say exactly who you are

Use the public business name consistently. Explain the type of organization in ordinary language. Avoid making the logo, navigation, or copyright notice do all the work.

2. Make services and locations explicit

State what you offer and where you offer it. “Serving Southwest Florida” is more useful than a collection of unlabeled city names. Do not claim locations or services the business cannot substantiate.

3. Align the page signals

The page title, meta description, main heading, canonical URL, and social preview should describe the same page. In the BoostGeo study, 24.6% of assessable homepages had incomplete Open Graph metadata, 13.0% had no detected meta description, and 11.5% had no detected H1.

4. Add accurate structured identity

Organization and WebSite structured data can express approved facts in machine-readable form. In the study, 63.0% lacked the specific Organization schema signal checked. That does not mean those businesses were invisible, and adding markup does not guarantee rankings or AI citations.

5. Make trust evidence concrete

Use verifiable facts: credentials, service areas, policies, contact information, authorship, and dates where appropriate. Avoid unsupported superlatives written only for search engines or AI systems.

6. Review crawler access intentionally

Only 3.5% of assessable sites triggered the study’s major-crawler block finding. Access matters, but an open door does not help if the evidence behind it is vague. Decide which automated agents to allow based on publishing goals.

7. Recheck after publishing

Confirm that the live page contains the intended change, remains internally consistent, and can still be retrieved. Improvement is a loop: measure, improve, publish, verify, and compare the evidence over time.

Do not create a second, machine-only version of the truth. Make the real business clearer, then express the same facts consistently.

See the study’s evidence-based action list →