How to prepare a website for search engines and AI assistants
An editorial and technical checklist for making a site easy to crawl, understand, verify and maintain in multiple languages.
Short answer
Prepare a site for search engines and AI assistants by allowing search crawlers, serving indexable HTML, organizing information clearly, answering real questions and keeping facts reliable. Translate complete pages and connect versions with accurate canonical and hreflang tags.
1. Make sure pages are accessible
Check robots.txt, HTTP responses, redirects and possible CDN or firewall blocks. Important pages should work without authentication, be linked with crawlable HTML and include their main content in the document a search engine receives.
Robots.txt controls crawling; it is not access control and does not automatically remove a URL from an index. Decide which search and training crawlers your company permits.
2. Organize the information
Use a simple hierarchy: a page for each important service, case studies with scope and decisions, signed articles and FAQs that answer real questions. Put the main answer near the beginning, then add context, criteria, exceptions and sources.
When facts change — availability, team, products or location — update the source page. Consistent information across the site, business profiles and public references makes verification easier.
3. Treat each language as its own edition
If an English page declares the Portuguese page as canonical, it may not appear as a separate result. Each language version should be a useful, coherent page.
- Give each language a stable URL, such as /en/ and /es/.
- Write for readers of each language instead of relying on unreviewed machine translation.
- Set each version’s canonical to itself and add reciprocal hreflang links between equivalent pages.
- Translate titles, descriptions, navigation, links and structured data — not only the first paragraph.
- Include every version intended for search in the XML sitemap.
4. Use schema accurately and measure
Organization, WebSite, Article, Service and BreadcrumbList can describe real parts of a site, as long as the fields match visible content. Markup does not turn a claim into a fact or guarantee a rich result.
Validate HTML and structured data, monitor indexing in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and see which pages earn impressions or citations. An llms.txt file can serve as a readable content map; Google does not require it for generative search.