People increasingly do not search for "restaurant in Shoreditch". They ask: "where should I eat in Shoreditch with a decent vegetarian menu and outdoor seating". The answer comes back as a paragraph with two or three links, not a list of ten.
That is a different game. A search engine ranks sources; an assistant writes an answer and then decides whom to credit. If it has not read you, it cannot mention you.
What an AI crawler actually reads
Briefly: HTML. That is all.
Googlebot executes JavaScript — late, but it does. The crawlers behind most AI assistants do not. They request the URL, take the response, and move on. If your site paints its content in the browser, what they saw was an empty page.
So the first question is not which keywords to use. It is whether the words are in the server's response at all.
Why short sentences win
An assistant assembles an answer out of fragments. A fragment that is true on its own is safe to quote. A fragment that depends on the paragraph above it is not.
Compare:
- "As we saw above, this applies to the lunch menu too."
- "The lunch menu at [the restaurant] is served from noon to 4pm on weekdays."
The second can be lifted with nothing around it. The first cannot.
In practice: phrase the heading as a question, and answer it in the first sentence underneath. Everything after that is detail for the people who want it.
The three files that cost an afternoon
- A
robots.txtthat lets the right crawlers in. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended. A blocked agent does not stop answering questions about your neighbourhood — it just answers them without you. llms.txt. A short markdown map written for an agent: what this place is, which pages matter, how to cite it. The convention is new; the file is fifteen lines.FAQPageandRestaurantmarkup. The questions and answers you already wrote for humans become machine-readable without writing anything new.
And the dullest thing, which works
Put an author's name and a last-updated date on the page. Visible, in the body, not only in a meta tag.
A person and a model, each facing two equally good sources, both take the more recent one with a name under it. That is not a trick — it is the same judgement you would make.
We write about this regularly. The rest of the posts are here.
If you are still assembling the foundations, start with your menu — it is the page an assistant will quote first.