How to make your website AI-Ready: A practical guide
We spent the last 15 years building websites for Google’s algorithm. Now, we are building them for AI engines that read, summarise, and recommend our work.
Making your site AI-ready isn’t some complicated futuristic thing. It just means going back to the absolute basics of clean code, accessible design, and honest, plain-English writing. It is simply about making your site incredibly easy for both a human and a computer to understand.
Here are the five practical things you need to focus on to make your website AI-ready.
1. Speak like a normal person
Humans can read between the lines when you use jargon. AI engines like Perplexity, Gemini, or ChatGPT Search (sometimes) cannot. They look for literal, clear matches.
If someone asks an AI search engine, “Where can I find support for a teenager dealing with anxiety?” the AI is not going to recommend a website that describes itself as “facilitating peer-led holistic youth wellbeing interventions and psychosocial frameworks.”
Instead, it will recommend the site that clearly says: “We offer free, confidential mental health support and counseling for young people.”
To be AI-ready, you have to write the way your audiences actually talk and search. If your content is buried in flowery marketing-speak or heavy jargon, you will become invisible to AI search.
2. Focus on quality content
If your website copy looks exactly like everyone else’s, AI search engines have absolutely no reason to cite you as a trusted source.
When an AI compiles an answer for a user, it looks for unique insights, firsthand research, original data, or a distinct point of view. It wants to cite the source that adds real value to the conversation, not the one that rehashes standard industry bullet points.
To be AI-ready, your content can’t be a commodity. You need to share your real-world experience, your unique methodology, and your actual opinions. If your content is generic, the AI will just absorb the basic facts, summarise them in its own words, and leave your website completely out of the footnotes.
3. Pay attention to accessibility
An AI crawler reads your website in almost the exact same way a screen reader does for a visually impaired user. If your website is designed and built properly for accessibility, it is automatically built for AI.
This means using proper semantic code, writing descriptive image descriptions (alt text) that explain what is actually in the picture (rather than stuffing them with keywords), and making sure your form fields have clear labels.
If a screen reader gets confused by your site layout, an AI model will too. And if the AI gets confused, it will just move on to a competitor.
4. Use structured data (Schema markup) and llms.txt files
When we design a website, humans look at the layouts, colours, and branding. AI, on the other hand, looks mostly at the code.
You can help the bots out by using Schema markup. This is the technical side of things, and it helps provide explicit context for your content.
Instead of letting an AI guess if a block of text is a client testimonial, the schema code explicitly tells it: “This is a 5-star review from a verified client.” Instead of letting it guess what type of organisation you are, the schema says: “We’re a charity and we provide medical information.”
Additionally, including an llms.txt file on your website tells AI exactly where your best, most citeable information is so they don’t have to hunt for it.
While schemas and llms.txt files don’t necessarily help you rank higher in traditional search, they make you far more visible and easy to credit where you do rank.
5. Prove you’re real
AI models want to know the information they are referencing is correct and trustworthy. They are looking for signals across the web that show you are a legitimate, real-world organisation before they risk recommending you to a user.
To build that trust, your site needs clear, scrapable evidence:
- Real case studies: First-hand expertise with actual results, names, and project scopes, not vague, anonymous bullet points. If you’re a charity, impact stories of people with lived experiences can help build trust with AI bots and humans alike.
- Author bios: If you write expert advice, the AI wants to know exactly who wrote it and why they are qualified to talk about it.
- Direct FAQs: Short, clear question-and-answer blocks that the AI can easily grab and show directly to a user in a search result.
The bottom line
For any organisation, not appearing in AI Overviews or conversational bots could lead to lost conversions. For a charity, it can prevent a vulnerable person from getting urgent help.
By focusing on the foundations of providing trusted, quality, jargon-free content, clean accessible code, and data that’s easy to find, you can make your website AI-ready so that it stands the test of time (and the rise of the bots).
Book a call with us and we’ll review your content and show you where you can improve your site to help you stand out in AI Search.
Photo by Steve A Johnson on Unsplash