What makes a page easy for AI to quote?
AEO / content is about how ready your content is to be read, quoted and cited by AI assistants. It matters to a machine because an answer engine can only quote what it finds in your HTML, understands as a passage and can attribute to someone. Below are the 8 checks in this course, what each one looks for, and what good looks like. A scanner can tell whether your answer is there and readable; it can't tell whether it's a good answer.
All 8 checks count toward your headline score.
The checks in this course
8 checksYour content survives without JavaScript
Does my content survive without JavaScript?Answer engines read your HTML and never run your JavaScript. Content that only appears after JavaScript is content ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity can never quote — even though Google and Microsoft Copilot can see it.
What good looks like The page's main content is already in the HTML the server sends, before any JavaScript runs.
Read more about content that needs JavaScriptYour answer is in the HTML
Why can AI not see my JavaScript content?AI engines read the HTML your server sends. A page whose HTML carries almost no readable text gives them almost nothing to quote.
What good looks like The core content is server-rendered and present in the raw HTML.
Read more about content in the HTMLSemantic HTML landmarks
What are semantic landmarks, and why do machines care?Real landmarks (header/nav/main/article) tell machines what each region is, so they parse and cite you cleanly.
What good looks like The page uses header, nav, main and article instead of generic divs.
Read more about semantic landmarksContent is scannable in self-contained chunks
Why should my content be broken into sections for AI?Answer engines parse by passage, not whole page; self-contained sections are far more likely to be lifted.
What good looks like One idea per section (~200–400 words), with descriptive headings, lists and tables.
Read more about content chunkingAuthor / publisher is clear
How do AI tools know who wrote my page?Declared authorship and entity signals build the E-E-A-T that makes AI confident enough to attribute you.
What good looks like A Person or Organization identified in schema, or an author meta/rel marker.
Read more about author and publisher markupA machine-readable published / updated date
How do AI tools know when my page was published?AI engines favour recently-updated content and use dates to judge relevance — but only a date they can read without guessing.
What good looks like A published and/or last-updated date in schema, article meta, or a time element with a datetime attribute.
Read more about published and updated datesllms.txt is present and valid
What is llms.txt, and does your site need one?A machine-readable index of your key content, at a fixed path, in plain text. Without it an AI client has to guess its way around your site from HTML built for human eyes. Cloudflare's own docs publish one and tell crawlers to fetch it to discover all available pages before exploring further — this is a signal AI clients read today.
What good looks like A valid /llms.txt (H1 + summary + sectioned links), advertised via a Link: rel=describedby header.
Read more about llms.txtClean content for agents (Markdown)
Should your site serve Markdown to AI crawlers?Serving a clean markdown version to agents that ask for it gives them noise-free content. Nice-to-have; few platforms support it.
What good looks like A clean markdown version of the page is available to agents — either on request, or at the same address with .md on the end.
Read more about Markdown for agentsWords you'll meet here
- Answer-first
- ARIA / ARIA landmarks
- Author byline / publisher
- Chunking / passage
- Content negotiation
- E-E-A-T
- Headless browser / renderer
- HTML / raw HTML
- Iframe
- JavaScript rendering / client-side rendering
- JavaScript shell
- LLM
- llms-full.txt
- llms.txt
- Machine-readable date
- Markdown
- Markdown negotiation / Markdown for agents
- schema.org
- Semantic HTML / semantic landmarks
- Server-side rendering
How does your page read to a machine?
A free scan checks these 8 and everything else in about 20 seconds — no signup.
Rather have it handled? No pitch, just a plain-English chat.
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