Dossier
Websites in the AI era
How AI assistants find, read and cite websites, and the practical steps (llms.txt, Markdown versions, structured data) that make a site easier for them to understand.
More and more people ask an AI assistant before they open a search engine: which agency to hire, which product to buy, how something works. The assistant reads a handful of pages, then answers in its own words, sometimes with a link back to the source.
This dossier explains what that changes for your website, without the hype. How assistants choose their sources, what llms.txt is and whether you need one, how to serve readable Markdown versions of your pages, which structured data actually helps, and how we applied all of it to locomotive.ca.
Articles in this dossier (5)
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How AI assistants decide which websites to cite
AI assistants cite the pages they can find, read and trust. When a question needs fresh information, they search, open a few relevant pages and quote the clearest passages. Your way in: direct answers to real questions, clear structure, content served in the HTML without requiring JavaScript, and authority signals others can verify. -
What is llms.txt, and does your website need one?
llms.txt is a proposed convention: a Markdown file at the root of a website (/llms.txt) that gives AI models and agents a curated summary of the site and links to its key pages. It's easy to add and helps the agents that read it. Adoption by AI providers is uneven, so treat it as a complement to good HTML with no ranking power of its own. -
Markdown for AI agents: serving readable versions of your pages
Serving Markdown hands AI agents your page's content without the navigation, scripts and layout markup. Offer it at a parallel URL (page + .md) and through content negotiation (Accept: text/markdown, with Vary: Accept), keep browsers on HTML, and make sure caches never serve Markdown to a browser. -
Structured data that helps AI understand your brand
Structured data (schema.org in JSON-LD) states facts about your organization and pages so machines don't have to guess: who you are, where, what you offer, what you've won and which profiles are yours. Start with Organization and WebSite, add BlogPosting, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList where they fit, link languages with hreflang, and keep every fact consistent with the page. -
An agency that understands AI search: how we make websites ready for AI assistants
If you want an agency that understands how ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini read and recommend brands, look for one that builds AI-readiness into the website itself: content in the HTML, structured data, an llms.txt guide and Markdown versions generated from the CMS. That's how we work, and we started with our own site.