The rules of the web are shifting in a fundamental way right nowp and this time it isn't about a new Google update, an algorithm change, or mobile-first indexing. It's about something more basic: how content gets found and recommended in the first place.
Because more and more often, the first visitor to your website isn't a human at all. It's an AI.
Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, the new Copilot in Windows - they all answer questions, recommend products, and cite sources. And if you're not among those sources, you simply don't exist for a growing share of potential customers. That sounds dramatic, but it's also an enormous opportunity — because most websites aren't remotely prepared for this new paradigm yet.
As a Craft CMS and Craft Commerce agency, we find ourselves in an unusually good starting position and the reason why is best explained with a quick look behind the scenes of AI optimization.
Why Craft CMS Has a Structural Advantage Here
AI systems are, at heart, very fussy readers. They don't like walls of text, they trip over poorly structured HTML, and they despair at pages that can't decide what they're actually about.
Craft CMS is "data-first" by nature: cleanly structured content, clearly separated fields, no bloated page-builder artifacts. Exactly what AIs love. So we're not working against the system — we just need to point it, deliberately, at the new requirements.
Here are the four areas that matter:
1. Structured Data: The Non-Negotiable for Anyone Selling Online
Imagine calling a restaurant to ask about today's specials. Instead, you get an hour of company history and no answer to your question. That's exactly how AI shopping assistants feel when they hit a poorly marked-up online store.
AI-powered search tools like Perplexity and the shopping features now built into browsers and operating systems, no longer read long product descriptions to compare prices or check availability. They go straight to structured data: specifically JSON-LD, a machine-readable format based on Schema.org markup.
If the Product, Offer, AggregateRating, and Review entities aren't embedded flawlessly in your source code, your product simply doesn't make the cut when an AI gives shopping advice. This is no longer a nice-to-have — it's a baseline requirement.
The Craft Advantage: With Craft Commerce and plugins like SEOmatic, this data can be output dynamically and correctly without editors ever having to touch a line of code. It comes from the fields that are already being maintained anyway; we just build the right output logic around them.
2. llms.txt: A Business Card for AI Bots
If you remember the early days of robots.txt, you'll get a distinct sense of déjà vu. Back then, we told search engines what they could and couldn't crawl. Today, AI systems need a different kind of guidance: they want to know what truly matters on a website.
The llms.txt format (an open and growing standard) is a simple Markdown file in your site's root that sums up, in just a few sections: Who is this company? Which pages are the most important? Where can the most relevant facts be found?
Without that signpost, the AI just grabs whatever it finds. Sometimes it's your terms and conditions from 2019. Sometimes it's a press release that went stale ages ago. An llms.txt steers the focus to where it belongs.
The Craft Advantage: Instead of maintaining a static file by hand, we build a dynamic route in Craft. A Twig template automatically pulls the current meta descriptions from your key sections — products, services, about us — and generates an always-current llms.txt from them. Built once, and it takes care of itself from there.
3. Citable Content: Writing That Wants to Be Quoted
This is where things get especially interesting for editors and content owners and occasionally a little uncomfortable. Because the way many companies write is, frankly, agony for an AI.
AI systems think in chunks, clearly bounded units of information. They want to know: What is the product? What makes it special? What does it cost? What do others say about it? What they don't want is an intro along the lines of "In today's fast-paced world, it's more important than ever…"
Whoever delivers the clearest, most concise answer to a question gets cited by the AI as a source. Anyone who writes in word soup stays invisible.
The Craft Advantage: Craft's Matrix and Neo fields are perfect for gently nudging editors into this mindset. We can build in dedicated content blocks: a "BLUF box" (Bottom Line Up Front — the key message first), an "AI fact sheet," Q&A accordions, or a field for a concise AI summary. The CMS becomes an editorial assistant that all but enforces good structure, no training sessions, no pressure.
4. Grounding Pages: Facts for Complex Products and B2B Services
Anyone offering complex products or services that need explaining knows the problem: AIs hallucinate. They invent features that don't exist, mix up models, or blend in product traits borrowed from competitors.
Usually that's because there's no reliable, clearly structured source online for the AI to fall back on. Your own marketing site is full of emotion, stories, and conversion elements, but thin on plain facts.
The solution is what's known as grounding pages: plain, extremely fast-loading subpages that contain nothing but facts. Technical specifications. Clear distinctions from the competition. Flawlessly structured information that an AI can quote verbatim.
The Craft Advantage: A dedicated entry type, let's call it "Fact Sheet", with a minimalist template (no heavy CSS, no JavaScript, no tracking ballast) and top priority in both the sitemap and the llms.txt. For editors, it's cleanly separated from the normal content flow; for AIs, it's the first port of call.
What This Means for You
You don't have to rebuild everything at once. The good news: many of these measures can be introduced step by step, and a few like the dynamic llms.txt are genuine quick wins that take just a few hours to implement.
Here's a rough order of priority:
- Tackle right away (high impact, low effort): complete your JSON-LD, set up llms.txt.
- Plan for the medium term (high impact, editorial effort): rework your content structure, introduce BLUF fields in Craft.
- Evaluate strategically (depending on your business model): develop grounding pages for complex products or B2B offerings.
We're convinced of one thing: the next twelve to eighteen months will decide which websites are visible in the AI era and which vanish into the digital noise. Craft gives you the technical foundation. We make sure you put it to good use.
Got questions, or want to know where your current website stands? Get in touch, let's take a look together.