Yesterday’s checklist could be today’s risk. To build an AI-ready presence, teams need flexibility and steady experimentation as search and answer engines quickly refining how they collect and organize data. Sticking to what worked last year can cost visibility and trust. Keep the basics like Core Web Vitals, but win on freshness, clear semantics, and tightly chunked ideas that models can quote. Original work travels farther. Models reward salience, not sameness.
Be original. The pace of answer engines changing crawl and ranking behavior is becoming near weekly. AI agents are not an appendix to search, they are an entirely new method of discovering data. Today, Users are spending 2x the time in answer engines than traditional search, and these AI models are adapting quickly. They compress low salient sources into a single citation. If your content looks like everything else, they have little reason to select yours. If it adds new data, real examples, or a distinct angle, your odds rise.
The winners today and in the future will think holistically. Technical hygiene still matters for users and for crawl efficiency, but the larger gains come from how you structure the “meaning”. Headings should signal ideas, not decoration. Internal links should clarify relationships between pages, not just chase backlinks. Captions, alt text, and tables must convey facts that can be lifted cleanly into summaries. Write so that a person can skim and a model can extract.
Freshness is more than a timestamp. Revised content, updated benchmarks, quick product demos, and named sources give systems a reason to treat your page as current. Several experts point to a rising emphasis on salience in relevance and re-ranking sequences, especially in AI systems. Translation: If your take is derivative, the model already has it. If your take is original and well supported, it becomes useful.
The web is semantic, and so should your website. Early research from Braden Bird at Page One Power indicates a sweet spot near 150 words per idea. Treat each block as a self-contained unit that answers one question on its own. Give it a clear subhead, a fact or two, and a citation hook. This makes your page easier to quote without confusion and reduces the likelihood that a model misinterprets the context.
The new rule set is plain yet can be complex to implement. Be fast. Be clear. Be fresh. Make every block quotable. Create unique and meaningful createive that human will engage with and trust, and most likely the AI will follow. That is how you build for answers, not just links. As Amanda Jordan from Owner put it, “LLMs correlate, they don’t understand.”