Machines are reading your website now

For twenty years, a website had two audiences: the person reading it and the search engine ranking it. Now there's a third. Language models read the page, and their answers cite either you or somebody else.

That's no small difference. If a potential buyer asks an assistant who to hire for a particular job, the answer either includes your company or it doesn't. There's no click, and there's no second place.

What helps, and what you can do in a week

Write plain facts, not atmosphere. A model can't work out what you offer from a metaphor. "We deliver solutions" never gets quoted. What you do, for whom and in which markets does.

Add structured data to the page. Marking up the organisation, the service and the author isn't an SEO trick. It's the layer where a machine can read, without any doubt, who you are.

Publish an llms.txt. It's a simple text file that sums up what the site is and lists the important pages, each with a short description. It's not much work, and it says exactly what you want to be known for.

Use a question-and-answer format. It gets quoted well, and there's no trick to it. A short answer that stands on its own is easier to lift into a summary than a paragraph from the middle of an essay.

Don't hide the substance in an image. Anything that only appears in the picture doesn't get read.

What not to expect from this

It won't bring immediate traffic, and there's no metric you can show on Monday. What you get is this: when someone asks a machine about you, the answer is built from your own words instead of guesswork.

It's the lowest-cost investment you can make in a website today. An afternoon of work, and you don't need a new system.