Making your website legible for humans and machines - what happens when visitors arrive from AI summaries and answers

I don't wade into writing about AI too much, but it feels like there are now a few areas of operation where its impact needs engaging with, and websites seems like an obvious one.

I’m going to focus in this article on content and interpretation, it's worth recognising that AI is also affecting how you could think about functionality and site administration.

You are perhaps thinking about your next institutional website project. You might already be in scoping mode, or know that you will need to address an ageing CMS, fragile templates, tempramental integrations, or sprawling content libraries within the next year or two.

The conversation around a new site usually starts with a focus on familiar places like design, structure, user journeys, navigation, maybe a new booking path.

What is less visible, but feels increasingly important, is the shift in how people reach and interpret your information. A growing share of visitors will arrive at your site (directly or indirectly) having already been given a summary or response from what I'm going to call 'an answer engine' - tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Google's AI Overview, or Copilot.

These platforms draw heavily on publicly available web content when forming their responses (I'm not going to get into the discussion about copyright here but the fact is they'll probably do this whether you want them to or not).

This doesn't mean websites are disappearing or we have arrived at complete 'Google Zero' (not yet anyway) but it does mean that the entry point(s) to your site, and to information about your organisation, has changed, and that automated systems are now genuine and increasingly powerful intermediaries in how audiences understand your organisation.

Content strategist Lauren Pope also raised a useful point about the emerging split between what people are likely to be comfortable learning from an answer engine and what they will still expect to confirm or explore on your website, which is another reason the quality of the underlying content layer matters.

This all changes the work around websites, and particularly content, in some practical ways. Most obviously it places (or should place) more weight on clarity, consistency, and structured content - because it turns the content layer into an important part of your digital infrastructure.

Most organisations will probably only be able to begin with small steps around this stuff, which is fine, because early improvements will compound quickly.

If you improve the way your information is stored, described, and maintained, then your website becomes more useful to real audiences and more legible to the automated agents that many people are already relying on. You do not need a strategy for 'AI' and another one for everyone else - you need a clearer approach to the core information your organisation depends on people being able to access.

From there you can start asking practical questions like what do you want these answer engines to 'know' about you, which handful of pages matter most if people bypass the homepage, where is essential information currently scattered, duplicated, or buried, and who (internally) is responsible for keeping the canonical version of the organisation's information up to date.

Addressing (or at least starting to think about) these questions doesn't require a full redesign or rebuild. It is also the a practical and useful way to start to prepare for whatever the next few years bring.

This isn't really about GEO, or any other search trend shorthand, it's about seriously engaging with the types of questions that content practitioners have been asking for years now (I've written before about the value of content thinking).

Even if AI tools disappeared tomorrow, properly considering the types of questions I've outlined below is going to make your website more useful for all your users.

You may not yet be seeing significant referral traffic from answer engines in your analytics (realistically you're probably not, yet), but giving the questions below some consideration will put you in a better position when this does become a more visible issue. It will also have the added benefit of improving how your content works right now for both the people using search engines and the colleagues trying to maintain your site.

I think there are probably three main areas of consideration, if you think of others - let me know.