Can AI read your website? A designer’s guide to web design for AI search

The same guide notes that browser agents read a page in three layers: the visual rendering, which is what a person sees; the DOM, which is the code behind the page; and the accessibility tree, which is the version a screen reader hears. Google's engineers have also published practical guidance on building pages agents can use. In plain terms, an AI reads your page partly as a person sees it and partly as a screen reader hears it.

Those two readers are well understood. Eye-tracking research going back to 1997 shows that people scan web pages rather than read them. On an average visit they read only 20 to 28 per cent of the words, moving between headings in what Nielsen Norman Group calls the layer-cake pattern.

Screen reader users work the same way. Seven in ten navigate a long page by its headings first, which is why the W3C treats headings as the page’s table of contents. Design well for those two readers, and the third is already taken care of.

Why is my website not showing up in ChatGPT or AI Overviews?

Usually because the page cannot be quoted. An AI answer is a paragraph, and parts of pages now compete to be inside it. If your answer only makes sense after three other paragraphs, sits inside an image, or appears on hover, the assistant moves on to a competitor whose page made it easy.

Google adds a mechanism it calls query fan-out: the model runs several related searches at once to build a fuller answer. A page with distinct, well-labelled sections can satisfy more than one of them. A page that is one long, unbroken argument usually satisfies none. And because the pages it draws from are the pages that rank, the ordinary SEO work of getting indexed and trusted still comes first.

Position matters too. Language models handle information near the start of a passage far better than information buried in the middle, which is a good technical reason to put the answer first and the explanation after it. People reward the same habit. Content that is easier to process is judged more favourably, before anyone has weighed what it says.

Two problems account for most of what we see on Dubai websites. The first is text inside images: headlines rendered as graphics, service descriptions baked into banners. It photographs beautifully and reads as silence, and Google's image guidance is direct that text in images cannot be read or indexed. The second is headings that are styled but not tagged. The page looks organised, but the outline underneath is empty, so the person scans happily while the screen reader and the assistant see one undifferentiated block.

How do I make my website AI friendly?

Treat structure as a design decision rather than a technical layer added afterwards. It is how we approach every website we design, and the table below shows why: every row helps a person first, and the machine benefit follows from it.

If you only do three things, do these: set every headline and service description as real text, tag every heading as a heading, and put a two-sentence answer at the top of each important page.

Does my website need an llms.txt file?

Not for Google. Its guidance states that Google Search ignores llms.txt files and does not require any AI-specific markup or Markdown. Some other services may read them, so keeping one does no harm, but it will not fix a page that cannot be read. Structured data such as Article and FAQPage remains worthwhile for rich results. The gains that matter come from the page itself.

Will designing for AI make my website boring?

No. Think of two layers. Structure is the stage: the outline, the hierarchy, the labelled sections, the real text. Your brand is the performance on it: typography with character, a confident colour system, photography with a point of view, motion that rewards attention. The stage is invisible when it works. The performance is what people remember. The most ambitious work comes from a system, which is the case we made in our guide to brand guidelines, and it is why our content team writes to the structure before anyone opens a design file.

My own research at Syracuse University, designing a board game system for social wellness, taught me the same thing from another angle. When the structure of an experience carries the load, people stop working to understand it and start taking part. A web page is no different.

How do I check whether AI can read my website?

You do not need a specialist tool. An afternoon and a browser will tell you most of it.

1. 01

   Read the heading outline. Use a browser extension or the W3C Easy Checks to list a page’s headings. If it reads like a sensible table of contents, you are in good shape.

2. 02

   Switch to reader mode. It strips the design and shows what a machine sees. If your key messages vanish, they were in images or hidden states.

3. 03

   Check every image has alt text that says what it shows, in plain language. Decorative images can be marked as such.

4. 04

   Test contrast and type size on a phone, outdoors. Pale grey on white passes on a studio monitor and fails in the car park.

5. 05

   Confirm the main content stands apart from navigation, banners and promotions, visually and in the code.

6. 06

   Open the Generative AI performance report in Search Console. Google now reports how your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode and lets you confirm your site is included.

7. 07

   Ask the assistants directly. Put the questions your customers ask to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and note who gets named. That is your baseline.

Does good design still matter?

More than before. AI assistants are not a reason to redesign a website around machines. They are a reason to finish the job good design always set out to do: make the page clear enough that anyone, or anything, can read it. The businesses that do this now will be the ones assistants quote for years, because the work does not go out of date.

Questions we get asked