How to Design Your Website for AI

Today's internet is far different than yesterday's – yet in many ways, it's becoming what Sir Tim Berners-Lee always envisioned. For a long time, we've created websites for humans and left the machine functions to SEO teams. But with roughly 42% of web traffic coming from bots (not humans), and about 22% of human traffic is searching for something, your website needs to serve more than one purpose, and that purpose needs to be for the machine and then for the human. I like to detail this as "a tale of three webs, " each filling an important need in our ability to use and consume the vast resource of the internet.

Building for the "Three Internets" and tailoring your site for AI crawlers, you'll make sure that every bit of information about your business or brand is accurately discovered, interpreted, and presented—no matter who (or what) is on the other end.

• The Internet of Robots — Machine-to-machine communication where structured data reigns. In this realm, search engines, recommendation engines, voice assistants, and AI agents consume data directly. Your content needs a clear structure — think JSON‑LD, schema.org markups, and well‑defined API endpoints — to flow seamlessly into knowledge graphs and power everything from smart home devices to enterprise analytics.

• The Utilitarian & Chat Internet — Task‑oriented interactions. Here, users expect instant answers and streamlined workflows. This is the land of purchasing plane tickets or online banking tasks. AI and Agentic tools are quickly consuming this space via chatbots, voice assistants, and in‑app messaging. Your site should expose FAQs and transactional data in machine‑readable formats (e.g., FAQPage schema), enabling AI helpers to fetch inventory counts, appointment slots, or product specs without missing a beat.

• The Human Internet — Narrative‑driven spaces for creativity and community. Blogs, social feeds, multimedia, and forums live here. While structured data still matters for discovery, this realm is where tone, storytelling, and design carry weight. Your content must balance rich human experiences with the underlying metadata that keeps AI crawlers informed.

AI crawlers and conversational agents rely on well‑structured signals to understand what your business does, where you're located, and how you serve customers. Without these, models make best guesses — and often get it wrong. By designing your site for the Internet of Robots, you unlock new channels of visibility and make sure that:

• Your data feeds knowledge graphs. A robust JSON‑LD implementation — covering everything from "Person" (your leadership team) to "Event" (upcoming webinars) — makes you part of the semantic backbone that powers rich search results and AI‑driven summaries.

• Your brand appears accurately in AI answers. Proper schema markup help ensure that search and voice assistants surface the right name, address, hours, and offerings when users ask "Where's the nearest…?" or "What's the price of…?"

• Your content powers chat‑driven transactions. Adding schema to FAQs and "how to" pages lets AI helpers pull exact instructions, saving users from endless clicks and boosting conversion rates on booking, ordering, or subscribing.

Below are some quick wins you can do to make your website AI‑ready:

• Adopt JSON‑LD for all key entities. Embedding clear, linked data snippets for Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, Event, and more gives machines a single source of truth for your brand's details.

• Use semantic HTML & ARIA roles. Proper use of `header`, `nav`, `main`, `article`, and ARIA roles improves both accessibility and machine parsing, making sure AI crawlers don't miss critical content.

• Expose an up‑to‑date XML sitemap. Regularly generate and reference your sitemap in robots.txt so that crawlers discover new or updated pages immediately, keeping AI‑powered services in sync with your latest offerings.

• Implement FAQ page schema. For conversational interfaces and chatbots, structured FAQs provide bite‑sized answers that machines can deliver verbatim, reducing user friction.

• Maintain a clean, crawl‑friendly robots.txt. Explicitly allow access to your structured data endpoints and prevent crawling of low‑value pages (e.g., admin dashboards) to focus AI attention on your customer‑facing content.

• Optimize page speed & mobile responsiveness. Fast-loading, mobile‑first pages not only improve human UX but also reflect positively in AI algorithmic rankings, making sure your data is fetched and rendered quickly by bots.

• Leverage canonical tags for duplicate content. When similar content exists across multiple URLs (e.g., printer‑friendly pages), canonical tags guide AI crawlers to the preferred version, preserving your SEO equity.

Each "Internet" serves a different function. Segmentation of these realms risks fragmentation, where robots see one version of you, chat assistants another, and your customers yet another. But your brand experience should stay unified. Here's how:

1. Audit your structured data quarterly. Make sure all schema types remain accurate as your business evolves — new products, new locations, new leadership.

2. Unify content with a single source of truth. Drive both human‑readable pages and machine APIs from the same CMS or headless backend to prevent data drift.

3. Monitor AI‑driven channels separately. Track how chatbots, voice assistants, and search engines consume your data — and adjust your markup to fill any gaps.

4. Foster interconnectivity. Use "View on site" links in chat flows, embed social widgets in data feeds, and surface dynamic chat transcripts on human‑focused pages to knit the three internets together.

As the internet continues to splinter into specialized channels, your website must evolve from a static brochure into a semantically rich, API‑friendly hub of information that serves machines and people alike.

By prioritizing structured data, clear site architecture, and crawl‑first design, you'll assist AI crawlers — from search bots to chat assistants — to accurately discover and disseminate your business information. Meanwhile, thoughtful human‑centered UX preserves the warmth and authenticity that your brand deserves. Embrace the Tale of Three Internets, and build a site that speaks fluently to robots, serves pragmatic chat flows, and still delights real people. That's how you win in the era of AI-powered discovery.