5 tips to make your website AI-ready

AI is rapidly becoming the go-to tool for finding information online.

But the real question is, can AI properly understand your website so it directs users straight to you? Here are our top tips to make sure it does.

Need for speed

AI favours fast-loading websites, the quicker it can access your content, the quicker it can deliver results to users. If your site is slow, there’s a real risk that AI will simply move on and pull information from elsewhere. That’s why page speed (or your Core Web Vitals and Edge Delivery) is now just as critical for AI as it has long been for SEO.

Several factors influence page speed, including the CMS you use, the type of server used, the number of scripts loaded on each page and the size of the images and videos. All of these areas can be refined and optimised to significantly improve your website’s performance.

We recommend enhancing your website’s performance by regularly monitoring and improving page speed using Google PageSpeed Insights. This is the same trusted API we rely on within our own Neural Web Optimisation (NWO) tool to assess site speed, ensuring consistently high performance. We set the bar high, every website we build is required to achieve a performance score of 95% or higher. Anything below this benchmark is considered not fully optimised.

Being data driven

AI thrives on data, it’s the fuel that allows it to deliver information to users. If your content isn’t easily scannable, AI won’t be able to extract and use that data effectively.

APIs are designed specifically to deliver data in its purest form, without any styling or presentation, just clean structured information. This separation of data from design not only makes websites more flexible and scalable, but also ensures that AI can easily access and interpret the information it needs.

We recommend transitioning your website to an API-driven (MACH Architecture) model. However, this isn’t a feature that can simply be switched on. While CMS platforms do support API functionality, it must be thoughtfully integrated and deliver content seamlessly to the website’s front end. Websites we build are API driven using Wagtail headless with a web components front end.

Meta Matters

Meta data is the behind-the-scenes information that helps AI and search engines understand what your pages are about. Think of it as your website’s elevator pitch; short, sharp, and informative. If your meta titles and descriptions aren’t clear, concise and relevant, AI tools may struggle to categorise your content correctly or choose to summarise it in their own way (which rarely sounds as good as you’d like).

We recommend crafting meta titles and descriptions across your website, making sure they accurately describe your offering, and include the search terms your audience actually uses. It’s not just about SEO anymore, it’s about giving AI the right cues to understand and promote your content.

Structured to succeed

Schema is one of the most important, and most overlooked elements of making your website AI-ready. It’s the structured data that tells AI exactly what’s on your page: from your products and prices to reviews, events, or FAQs. Without it, AI has to guess... and when it guesses, you lose control over how your brand is represented.

Adding schema markup (or the Knowledge Graph & Semantic Data Layer) to your website, helps AI quickly identify and display key information in search results, voice answers, and AI summaries. It bridges the gap between your site and the systems interpreting it.

We recommend implementing structured schema data across all relevant areas of your site, especially where rich snippets could appear. It’s a small technical step that can make a big difference to how visible and credible your brand appears in the world of AI-driven search.

Content is key

AI cannot generate insights, provide accurate answers, or create value for users without rich, meaningful content. At its core, an AI is only as good as the material it has been trained on.

Like traditional search, content is key to a website because it provides the information, context, and value that users and now AI systems are actively looking for. Without relevant, well-structured content, AI would have nothing meaningful to read, understand, or serve back to users.

We recommend creating a website that’s rich in high-quality content. Keep your site fresh with regular articles, an FAQ section about your business, and reviews from happy customers.

It’s the content itself that gives AI something to index, interpret, and present, making it the bridge between user intent and useful answers.

Find out how ready for AI search your website is

Head over the NWO tool from Dodgems and Floss and find out how your site is fairing in the new AI search world. It's free, takes just minutes, and could be very helpful in knowing how your business is going to show up in the AI search.