More and more buying decisions now skip the search results page entirely. Someone asks an assistant — "who should detail my truck near Denham Springs?" or "find a furnished rental in Nashville for two months" — and gets back two or three business names. The brutal part: if your website isn't readable to those systems, you're not in the running, no matter how good you are.
The encouraging part: AI readability is concrete, technical work — not magic, not a subscription. Here's what actually moves the needle.
1. Structured data on every page
Schema.org markup is the difference between an AI system guessing what your business does and knowing it. At minimum, every business site should ship Organization or LocalBusiness schema (name, address, phone, hours), Service schema for each service you offer, and FAQPage schema for real questions you get asked. Reviews with AggregateRating markup matter too — AI assistants repeat reputation signals.
2. An llms.txt file
llms.txt is a plain-markdown file at the root of your site that gives AI systems a clean summary of who you are, what you do, and where the important pages live. Think of it as robots.txt's younger sibling: instead of telling crawlers what to skip, it tells language models what matters. A fuller llms-full.txt can carry your complete service and portfolio content in one machine-readable page.
3. Semantic HTML, not div soup
AI systems parse your markup the way screen readers do. Real headings in a logical order, nav and main and footer landmarks, descriptive link text, and alt text that says what's in the image. Page-builder sites with fifteen nested divs per paragraph consistently extract worse than clean semantic pages.
4. Don't block the crawlers
Check your robots.txt. Many sites accidentally block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended — which means opting out of every AI answer those systems produce. Unless you have a specific reason, let them in and give them clean content to read.
5. Answer real questions in plain language
AI assistants quote pages that answer questions directly. A services page that says "most business sites launch in four to eight weeks" gets cited; a page that says "timelines vary based on your unique needs" does not. Write the answers you'd want repeated.
What this looks like in practice
After twenty years of building for search engines, we treat AI systems as the newest audience every site has to serve. Every build here ships with automated schema on every page, llms.txt and llms-full.txt generated from the site's real content, semantic markup, and a crawler-friendly robots policy. Not as an add-on — as the baseline a website needs to do its job in 2026.