Making Websites AI-Ready

Increasingly, users are getting answers to questions directly from AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini, rather than searching for and visiting websites. That means that your website may get fewer visitors, unless the AI systems link to it.

Although the field is still evolving, there are a number of things that you can do to get links from AI systems. Fortunately, most of the steps are the same things that you wold do as part of a Search Eingin Optimization (SEO) campaign: create high-quality content that answers the questions users ask, and demonstrating your website’s importance by getting other sites to link to yours.

SEO is still important, and will be for years to come, because most people are still using search engines. But now SEO efforts are even more important, because they can help get your site listed in AI results.

In addition to these efforts, website owners need to be aware of a new standard in the AI world: the llms.txt file. The proposed standard is designed to help Large Language Models (AI systems) understand and process website content more effectively.

The standard also allows you to tell AI systems what they can and cannot index on your website. Not all AI systems support and honor the llms.txt standard, but some of the major systems do, and more will in the future.

For WordPress websites, there are several plugins available that will generate the llms.txt file. We’ve evaluated these new plugins, and found that only one currently works correctly and meets the requirements of the proposed standard.

If you’d like help making your website “AI friendly,” contact us today.

AI Results

The figure below shows a response from Google Gemini, featuring a link to the California Mission Guide, a client website.