We know how your website will perform for AI bots - but how?

Lifting the hood on Neural Web Optimisation

We here at Dodgems and Floss have been discussing the rising importance of AI-search for businesses for a while now. We have been sharing our Neural Web Optimisation tool as a more comprehensive way of assessing how the back end of your site will fare in the AI-search revolution.

What we haven’t done is share the details of how we do this… Yet!

So, buckle up, because in this article we’re going to do just that..

Getting to the heart of NWO

The basis of the NWO tool assesses 4 key components:

• Speed
• API end point
• Schema
• Content

Let’s dig into each area to find out which elements are playing what part in NWO.

Speed

First up, speed. We all know that a faster site is best, you have around 1-2 seconds before a human gets bored and clicks to another page. In terms of AI bots, it's much the same. The bots love speed, and they’re not going to wait around, making their user wait, while your website slowly chugs along.

When a website takes a long time to load the AI bots can ‘give-up’ and in effect not find the site. Not good. If the site is set up correctly, the site is faster, pages convert better, rank higher, and keep users happy.

What the NWO tool does - Runs a “speed audit” using Google’s PageSpeed API for both phone and desktop.

API Driven / AI Readable

A site's ability to ‘talk’ to and serve information to an AI bot depends on the set up on the back end. A site prefers to collect this information via an API to ensure quick, reliable and accurate results.

API Endpoint

An API endpoint is a digital location where an API receives API calls, also known as API requests, for resources on its server - imagine the digital door to your site’s data!

If the site has structured JSON feeds, AI bots can hook into them and consume data in the way they’re designed to, structured, semantic, and always current, making them faster, more reliable, and far easier to build upon.

What the NWO tool does - Checks the site for JSON/XHR endpoints through a headless browser, watching its calls. It then pings those endpoints to see if it returns a “data-like” JSON and checks for lists of items or objects with names, IDs, and descriptions.

AI Readable

In order for the AI bot to be able to read, summarise, or act on page content, having machine-friendly markers means it can reliably find the right text, images, and data without having to do guesswork, which results in more accurate and faster results.

What the NWO tool does - Examines the page that's being searched and renders it like a browser would. It will check for a variety of “hints” that make it easy for an AI-bot to know what’s what and it weighs each signal and computes it into a single AI-readability score.

Response Time

A slow TTFB (time to first byte - that is, how long it takes to receive data from the website) often flags backend issues - overloaded servers, inefficient routing, or network bottlenecks. Keeping this under the threshold ensures users don't get a blank screen or a timeout.

What the NWO tool does - The NWO tool uses Google Page Speed for this one. It visits the page three separate times and measures how long the server takes to start sending data each time, then picks the median value to give an average.

Schema

Schema markup, also known as structured data, is a code (specifically, a vocabulary of tags) that you add to your website's HTML to help search engines understand your content better.

Structured data is like signposts for AI bots - they tell the bot exactly ‘this page is an article,’ ‘this data is company information.’ Without them, an AI bot has to guess at semantics by parsing raw HTML, which is error-prone and fragile. With a schema markup, AI bots can route, summarise, or act on content far more accurately.

What the NWO tool does - Visits your page and looks for any “structured data” markers (the JSON-LD scripts and HTML microdata tags), it pulls out all the @type values (like “WebPage”, “Organization”, “Person”, or “BreadcrumbList”) and sends them back.

Content

Finally content. Like in traditional search, content is a crucial part of the puzzle. Without relevant content AI-bots would have nothing to read and serve.

When you add content to your site you need to factor in these cues so that AI bots can reliably find, extract, and reason over the right parts of a page without missing crucial context. This makes the summarisation, Q&A format, chat responses, or content recommendations far more accurate and robust.

What the NWO tool does - Looks for essential building blocks that AI needs to get information to use as content.

Is your website talking to AI?

There you have it. The list to go through to get you started with priming your website for AI search bots. If you want to find out how your website is doing now, before you go and fix anything, visit nwo.dodgemsandfoss.com and you will be given a rating on the four main areas we look at to assess your AI Search readiness.

If you run the test and want to know more, get in touch with us, we can provide a detailed report (£250+vat) that you can take away to do the fixes yourself in-house, and if you need a hand we can help get your site to 90% as a one off project.

Contact us if you want to explore more!