Your website has a second audience now

For a long time, a business website had two primary audiences: the people visiting it and the search engines trying to understand it.

Now there's another one.

AI systems are increasingly being asked questions about businesses: Who does this? Who serves this area? Which company would you recommend? What does this business specialize in?

To answer those questions, these systems need to understand what a business actually does.

That makes some fairly basic things increasingly important: clear descriptions of services, consistent business information, useful content, customer reviews, FAQs, and straightforward explanations of who the business helps.

There's a temptation whenever technology changes to look for a new trick or shortcut.

I'm not sure that's the right response here.

Maybe the best way to optimize a website for AI is to make the business easier to understand in the first place.